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: WSJ (7-30-12)
Stephen Moore is a member of the Journal's editorial board.
SOURCE: Guardian (UK) (7-31-12)
Priyamvada Gopal teaches in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge.
SOURCE: Guardian (UK) (7-31-12)
Clayton Swisher is a head of al-Jazeera's transparency unit, and author of two books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
SOURCE: The Atlantic (7-24-12)
Chris Beneke is associate professor of history at Bentley University and the author of Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism. Randall Stephens is reader in American Studies and history at Northumbria University and the author (with Karl Giberson) of The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age.
Earlier this month, George Mason University's History News Network asked readers to vote for the least credible history book in print. The top pick was David Barton's right-wing reimagining of our third president, Jefferson's Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed about Thomas Jefferson...
SOURCE: Special to HNN (7-27-12)
Historian at the Kennedy Library from 1977 to 2000, Dr. Sheldon M. Stern is the author of "Averting ‘the Final Failure’: John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings" (2003) and "The Week the World Stood Still: Inside the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis" (2005), both in the Stanford University Press Nuclear Age Series.
Editor's Note: This article is an addendum to Sheldon Stern's earlier essay "Robert Caro and the Mythical Cuban Missile Crisis"
Near the end of The Years of...
SOURCE: TomDispatch (7-22-12)
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. A TomDispatch regular, he is the author of numerous best-selling political works, most recently, Hopes and Prospects, Making the Future, and Occupy. This is the full text of a speech he gave recently at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
Down the road only a few generations, the millennium of Magna Carta, one of the great events in the establishment of civil and human rights, will arrive. Whether it will be celebrated, mourned...
SOURCE: Foreign Policy (7-23-12)
Michael A. Cohen is a columnist for Foreign Policy's Election 2012 channel and a fellow at the Century Foundation.
SOURCE: LA Times (7-22-12)
Douglas Foster, associate professor of journalism at Northwestern University, is the author of After Mandela: The Struggle for Freedom in Post-Apartheid South Africa, which will be released in September.
SOURCE: London Review of Books (7-19-12)
Perry Anderson teaches history at UCLA.
SOURCE: Stamford Advocate (7-19-12)
Steven S. Berizzi is a professor of history and political science at Norwalk Community College.
One hundred fifty years ago Sunday, during the Civil War's generally discouraging second year, President Abraham Lincoln held what might have been the most important cabinet meeting in history.
The fighting had begun in April 1861, and what had been expected to be a short conflict was now 15 months old. By the summer of 1862, the Union had enjoyed some success in the western theater of the war, but, in the eastern theater that was centered in Virginia, General...
SOURCE: National Review (7-20-12)
Allen C. Guelzo is the author of Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction (Oxford University Press, 2012).
Do not look for a great celebration to break out on July 22.
Granted, the 22nd of July has never been much of a red-letter day. No great battles to commemorate, no horrifying cataclysms, no lily-gilding birthdays. The one event that does hang a laurel around July 22 will still go largely unnoticed — despite being at the heart of great battles, a national cataclysm, and a new birth of freedom — and that is Abraham Lincoln’s unveiling of the Emancipation Proclamation to the startled members of his cabinet, exactly 150 years ago this Sunday.
The Emancipation Proclamation did more, and for more Americans, than any other...
SOURCE: NYT (7-21-12)
SOURCE: LA Times (7-13-12)
Robert Zaretsky teaches French history at the University of Houston and is coauthor of France and its Empire Since 1870.
SOURCE: BBC (7-15-12)
Ali Ansari is a professor at the Institute of Iranian Studies, St Andrews University.
SOURCE: American Conservative (7-10-12)
Robert P. Murphy is author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism. His blog is Free Advice.
When pressed for a "success story" of their policies, Keynesians point with pride to World War II. They claim that it is the perfect illustration of the ability of massive government spending to lift an economy out of the doldrums.
In the effort to battle this myth, Steve Horwitz and Michael J. McPhillips offer an ...
SOURCE: WSJ (7-11-12)
Mr. Turner, a professor at the University of Virginia, is editor of The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy: Report of the Scholars Commission (Carolina Academic Press, 2011).
Thomas Jefferson has long been celebrated in America as the principal author of the Declaration of Independence. But his iconic status has diminished in recent years thanks to a widespread belief that he fathered a child by Sally Hemings, his enslaved servant.
In reality, the 1998 DNA tests alleged to prove this did not involve genetic material from Thomas Jefferson. All they established was that one of more than two dozen Jefferson males probably fathered Sally Hemings's youngest son, Eston. And there is good reason to believe that at least seven Jefferson men (including the president) were at Monticello when Eston was conceived in the summer of 1807.
Allegations that the "oral history" of Sally's descendants identified the president as the father of all of Sally's children are...
SOURCE: LA Times (7-11-12)
Sarah Kenyon Lischer, an associate professor in the Department of Politics and International Affairs at Wake Forest University, is the author of Dangerous Sanctuaries: Refugee Camps, Civil War, and the Dilemmas of Humanitarian Aid.
"We give this town to the Serb nation.… The time has come to take revenge on the Turks." Seventeen years later, the words still hang in the air like poison gas over Srebrenica. With that speech, Bosnian Serb Gen. Ratko Mladic pronounced the death sentence on more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys. On July 11, 1995, the slaughter began. Bosnian Serb soldiers loyal to Mladic hunted down, tortured and killed the male inhabitants of Srebrenica in...
SOURCE: Foreign Policy (7-10-12)
Aaron David Miller is a distinguished scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. His forthcoming book is titled Can America Have Another Great President? "Reality Check," his column for ForeignPolicy.com, runs weekly.
SOURCE: Daily Beast (7-10-12)
Tom Sykes is a writer and journalist whose family has long-standing connections to the British Royal Family. Tom previously worked as a nightlife reporter and gossip columnist for the New York Post. He is currently working with John Taylor of Duran Duran, helping him write and edit his autobiography, to be published later this year by Penguin. Tom lives in London and Ireland.
SOURCE: LA Times (7-4-12)
Stephen Prothero is a professor of religion at Boston University and the author of, most recently, The American Bible: How Our Words Unite, Divide, and Define a Nation.
