Roundup: Talking About History
This is where we excerpt articles about history that appear in the media. Among the subjects included on this page are: anniversaries of historical events, legacies of presidents, cutting-edge research, and historical disputes.
SOURCE: NYT (4-29-11)
The latest effort to explain this deep commitment to the nation’s survival comes from Gary W. Gallagher, the author of several highly regarded works on Civil War military history. In “The Union War,” Gallagher offers not so much a history of wartime patriotism as a series of meditations on the meaning of the Union to Northerners, the role of slavery in the conflict and how historians have interpreted (and in his view misinterpreted) these matters.
The Civil War, Gallagher...
SOURCE: American Conservative (4-28-11)
Elena Maria Vidal is the author of the historical novels Trianon, Madame Royale, and The Night’s Dark Shade. A version of this interview appeared in The National Observer.
I went to high school with the grandchildren of Whittaker Chambers. At the time, I only knew the Chambers boys to be pleasant young gentlemen who were great at chess and foreign languages. Twenty years later I read Witness and then Sam Tanenhaus’s Whittaker Chambers: A Biography. Chambers quickly became one of my heroes, right up there with William Wallace, El Cid, and John Paul Jones. One time when I was exuberantly discussing Chambers with a close friend, she said to me: “Well, you know, you went to school with his grandchildren.” It was quite a revelation; I had never made the connection.
I was delighted when I ran into David Chambers again on Facebook. He has meticulously compiled an online archive about his grandfather—www.whittakerchambers.org—and is...
SOURCE: History & Policy (UK) (4-27-11)
Ann Lyon is a lecturer in law at the Plymouth Law School and author of Constitutional History of the United Kingdom (Cavendish, 2003). ann.lyon@plymouth.ac.uk
There has been much discussion in recent years of amending the Act of Settlement 1701 so that the first child will succeed to the throne rather than the first son - though at the time it was passed it was a pragmatic piece of legislation, and quite advanced, in that it provided for female succession at all. Less attention has been given to how the heir to the throne is supported - but if we want to change the succession, we will need to look at a Royal Patent of 1337 as well as an Act of Parliament of 1701.
The dukedom of Cornwall and the extensive properties of the Duchy - not to mention the profits from Duchy Originals - provide for the heir apparent and his family and have been entailed on the eldest living son of the...
SOURCE: openDemocracy (4-22-11)
Barys Piatrovich is a Belarusian writer and journalist
The dust has gone already...
There's no dust -- it's been blown away... Great gusts of wind pick up tiny grains of sand and slash you with them, in your face, on your legs and chest: it hurts like you're pushing your way through thorny bushes of raspberries or blackberries. And meanwhile there I am, walking round the town, Homel, amazed by the wind: where has it come from today, this wind -- biting, strong, insistent, nasty... Why has it suddenly got up, blowing the sand from Ukraine into Belarus and from Belarus towards Moscow?
I didn't know anything yet, didn't have the slightest idea of what had happened, but I well remember that day and that evening in Homel, 26 April 1986, I remember that I was unable to do anything because of the silent scream that, as it seemed to me, filled all the space around me. The silent scream uttered by all things...
SOURCE: The Atlantic (5-1-11)
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor at The Atlantic.
In his lifetime, Malcolm X covered so much ground that now, 46 years after his murder, cross-sections of this country—well beyond the conscious advocates of my youth—still fight over his footprints. What shall we make of a man who went from thoughtless criminal to militant ascetic; from indignant racist to insurgent humanist; who could be dogmatically religious one moment, and then broadly open-minded the next; who in the last year of his life espoused capitalism and socialism, leaving both conservatives and communists struggling to lay their claims?
Gripping and inconsistent myths swirl about him. In one telling, Malcolm is a hate-filled bigot, who through religion came to see the kinship of all. In another he is the self-redeemer, a lowly pimp become an exemplar of black chivalry. In still another he is an avatar of...
SOURCE: The Atlantic (4-26-11)
Lionel Beehner is a fellow with the Truman National Security Project and PhD candidate in political science at Yale University. He is a term member and former senior writer at the Council on Foreign Relations.
CHERNOBYL, Ukraine -- "Did you drink last night?" Yuri, my chain-smoking guide, asks me as we head north out of Kiev to the world's most notorious nuclear plant. "If you have alcohol in your blood, you'll survive longer than other tourists."My stomach growls, a mixture of motion sickness and dread as Kiev's dreary concrete flats give way to snowy fields and forests. I am visiting Chernobyl a few weeks in advance of today's 25th anniversary of the reactor's nuclear meltdown. The plant and its surroundings -- the ghost town of Pripyat, the Red Forest, all cordoned off in a 30-kilometer area dubbed the "death zone" -- have become a bizarre tourist attraction in recent years. After being deemed safe a half-decade back, thousands now make the...
SOURCE: NYT (4-23-11)
THE House Budget Committee chairman, Paul D. Ryan, a Republican from Wisconsin, announced his party’s new economic plan this month. It’s called “The Path to Prosperity,” a nod to an essay Benjamin Franklin once wrote, called “The Way to Wealth.”
Franklin, who’s on the $100 bill, was the youngest of 10 sons. Nowhere on any legal tender is his sister Jane, the youngest of seven daughters; she never traveled the way to wealth. He was born in 1706, she in 1712. Their father was a Boston candle-maker, scraping by. Massachusetts’ Poor Law required teaching boys to write; the mandate for girls ended at reading. Benny went to school for just two years; Jenny never went at all.
...SOURCE: Harvard Magazine (5-1-11)
SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed (4-19-11)
SOURCE: National Interest (4/18/11)
Marvin Kalb, a distinguished journalist and longtime director of the Shorenstein Center at Harvard, is currently a visiting fellow at the Center for the National Interest. He is co-author of "Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama," to be published by Brookings in late May, 2011.
“No event in American history,” Richard Nixon once wrote, “is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.”
With a generous heart, one could say pretty much the same thing about Richard Nixon himself. He was misunderstood, misreported and misremembered. He was, in fact, a great president, many of his friends—and a few others—still believe. Who better in foreign affairs, for example? A mistake or two, yes, but who hasn’t made one? Moreover, Watergate was a contrived conspiracy, according to some of his supporters, a concoction of the liberal media, which “accused and vilified” the president and his “pals...
SOURCE: The Nation (4-18-11)
Jon Wiener teaches US history at UC Irvine. His most recent book is Historians in Trouble.
It’s the fiftieth anniversary of the Bay of Pigs, April 17-18, 1961, when a CIA-trained army of Cuban exiles were sent by President Kennedy to overthrow Fidel Castro. Their humiliating defeat showed the world that Cubans would fight to defend their revolution, especially against an invasion sponsored by the United States. But that’s not the lesson Kennedy learned from his first great defeat as president.
Kennedy had campaigned in 1960 promising to remove Castro from power. The defeat at the Bay of Pigs did not change his mind about that. Instead, he ordered the CIA to find other ways to get rid of Fidel—ranging from sabotage of the Cuban economy to assassination. And planning began for another invasion, one that wouldn’t make the mistakes of the Bay of Pigs.
As the 1962 mid-term elections approached, Republicans denounced what they called Kennedy’s “do-nothing...
SOURCE: Guardian (UK) (4/17/11)
[Guardian columnist and associate editor, she writes on a wide range of subjects including politics, work, Islam, science and ethics, development, women's issues and social change.]
SOURCE: openDemocracy (UK) (4-11-11)
Fifty years ago, in 1961, a young Martinican psychiatrist by the name of Frantz Fanon published The Wretched of the Earth, a political tract that, in the years to follow, would become the handbook of revolutionaries everywhere, from Ché Guevara in South America to Steve Biko in South Africa. At the time of writing the book, Fanon was stationed as a psychiatrist in Algeria, a country that was then in the grip of a protracted and bloody revolution. In 1954 the Algerian people had risen en masse against French colonizers who had ruled them brutally for more than a century. The Algerian War for Independence lasted eight years, ending with the expulsion of the...
SOURCE: WSJ (4-11-11)
The first shot of the Civil War is said to have been fired by a newspaper editor. In the early-morning dark of April 12, 1861, Edmund Ruffin, a self-declared hater of the "Yankee race," volunteered for the symbolic task; the round he fired, wrote historian Shelby Foote, "drew a red parabola against the sky and burst with a glare, outlining the dark pentagon of Fort Sumter." Four thousand more rounds were needed to induce the Fort's surrender; 620,000 Americans would die in the war that was there begun.
Hence the first lesson of Fort Sumter: War is too important to be left to the journalists.
But that isn't the only lesson, and Fort Sumter is worth remembering for reasons other than today's sesquicentennial. The crisis over the Charleston harbor fort had been brewing since South Carolina's secession the previous December, which included the...
SOURCE: American Heritage (4-8-11)
Loewen is still trying to identify every sundown town in the U.S. at his website.] At 7 p.m. on Thursday, December 20, 1860, some 170 men marched through the streets of Charleston, South Carolina, walking from St. Andrews Hall to a new meetinghouse amid the cheers of onlookers. Half of them were more than 50 years old, most well-known. More than 60 percent were planters who owned at least 20 slaves. Five had been state governors, four U.S. senators. Meeting in secret earlier...
SOURCE: openDemocracy (4-11-11)
Fifty years ago, in 1961, a young Martinican psychiatrist by the name of Frantz Fanon published The Wretched of the Earth, a political tract that, in the years to follow, would become the handbook of revolutionaries everywhere, from Ché Guevara in South America to Steve Biko in South Africa. At the time of writing the book, Fanon was stationed as a psychiatrist in Algeria, a country that was then in the grip of a protracted and bloody revolution. In 1954 the Algerian people had risen en masse against French colonizers who had ruled them brutally for more than a century. The Algerian War for Independence lasted eight years, ending with the expulsion of the...
SOURCE: Tablet Magazine (4-11-11)
On April 15, 1962, Hannah Arendt sent a brief personal note to William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker, thanking him for some flowers he had sent. It had been a rough winter for the political philosopher: Her husband, Heinrich Blücher, was suffering from a brain aneurysm, and Arendt had developed a severe allergic reaction to antibiotics she was given to treat a cold. Then, in March, a truck had plowed into a taxi she was taking through Central Park, resulting in a concussion, hemorrhages in both eyes, broken teeth, and fractured ribs. Nevertheless, in her note three weeks later to Shawn—who had assigned her to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem a year before, and was still awaiting her copy—Arendt sounded almost chirpy. “I am much better,” she wrote, in her blue-ballpoint cursive, spidery and cramped on cream-colored stationery, “and on the point of going back to work.”
Five months later,...
SOURCE: openDemocracy (UK) (4-11-10)
There are remarkable continuities in the United States’s wartime policies since the 1960s. The context of the conflicts in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq have been very different, but successive leaders in Washington seem to operate on similar ideological assumptions and to repeat their mistakes. The costly wars of the post-9/11 decade have exposed both the United States’s loss of legitimacy as a superpower and the limits of its military might and economic prosperity.
Some lessons of this history are revealed in a reading of four recent books They provide an opportunity to reflect on the state of American power in 2011 - when it is engaged in another military campaign in the Arab world, in Libya, albeit with far less complete exertion than before.
The consensus
The research in three of...
SOURCE: NYT (4-9-11)
Oakland, Calif.
SOVIET sculpture renders all its subjects larger than life, but few more so than Yuri Gagarin, who became the first man in space on April 12, 1961, nearly 50 years ago. A gleaming, 125-foot-tall titanium statue of the world’s most famous cosmonaut stands at the nexus of three freeways in Moscow, arms outstretched like a cold war superhero.
Gagarin’s achievement, and the Soviet playbook that shaped it, made him the most celebrated Soviet hero since Lenin, a triumph of nationalist glory, a role model for the young, a hypermasculine sex symbol. His deification set the “right stuff” tone that NASA would follow with its own astronauts: the lumbering icons in their puffy, complicated suits, incapable of error or weakness or even, it sometimes seemed, emotion.
In reality, Gagarin was 5 feet 2 inches tall and nice as heck. He was chosen...
