Historians/History

This Veterans Day, Let's Reflect on the D.C. War Memorial

by Jeffrey S. Reznick

We should celebrate the newly-restored District of Columbia War Memorial.

Before Lincoln, Slavery Helped *Expand* the Power of the Federal Government

by David F. Ericson

In 1861, Southern slaveholders fulfilled president-elect Abraham Lincoln’s “house divided” prophecy.  The story of how slaveholders attempted to emasculate the powers of the federal government in the seven decades prior to 1861 is well-known.  Less well-known is the story of how they attempted to bolster the powers of the federal government and helped build the very house they divided.  This process was, of course, literally true in the case of the District of Columbia, which was largely built with slave labor.  It was also true in terms of the development of the capacities, authority, legitimacy, and institutional autonomy of the federal government. This contravenes conventional wisdom.  The oft-repeated argument is that slavery depressed the development of the federal government because a dominant coalition of Southern slaveholders and Northern “doughfaces” depressed state development for fear that a strong federal government would use its powers to abolish the institution.

History is Worth Fighting For, But Where is the AHA?

by Jesse Lemisch

Liberals in the Obama era are accommodating to the unacceptable and turning their backs on traditional liberal values.  Once again, the job of defending those values is left to radicals.  Now history itself needs defense.Anthony T. Grafton and Jim Grossman, respectively president and executive director of the American Historical Association, offer “No More Plan B: A Very Modest Proposal for Graduate Programs in History” in the October 2011 issue of Perspectives on History.  What they propose is indeed too modest, almost tragically so.  What we need is not cutbacks and accommodations but rather vastly expanded funding for higher education, plus a program for historians like the New Deal Federal Writers’ Project, which produced so much of value, including the the slave narrative collection and the 48 volumes of the American Guide Series to the states.  But listen to Grafton and Grossman.  They outline the continuing grim employment situation for historians, and present it as almost God-given, beyond human control:

Medal of Honor Upgrades Are Rare—And They Ought to Be

by Ed Hooper

U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., has sent a letter to Department of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta pressuring him—as he did former secretary Robert Gates—to review the War on Terror's combat decoration recipients and upgrade some to the Medal of Honor.The DOD has consistently responded that the majority of U.S. casualties in the War on Terror have been caused by improvised explosive devices, landmines or snipers.  The strict battlefield criteria for the Medal of Honor have simply not been met, and the awards presented are appropriate.After the so-called "Purge of 1917," which stripped 911 Medals of Honor from past recipients, the DOD established policies requiring thorough battlefield investigations and direct eyewitness testimony.  Only 178 Distinguished Service Crosses out of more than 13,000 issued since 1917 have been upgraded to Medals of Honor.  Upgrades have been rare because policy dictates that the first decoration be reexamined, rejustified, and then reevaluated with new evidence.

The New-York Historical Society Sinks to a New Low with a Black-Tie Gala for Henry Kissinger

by Jesse Lemisch

The Right’s "Long March Through the Institutions" now includes a takeover of the New-York Historical Society.  Richard Gilder, who is founder of the reactionary Manhattan Institute think tank (it’s time that we eschewed the legitimizing term “conservative”), is now chair of N-YHS’s board of trustees, and for good measure the city has renamed the stretch of 77th Street at the north end of the building “Richard Gilder Way.”  It almost requires a Charles Beard, or an E.L. Doctorow, to convey the nakedness of all this:  along with fellow Yalie Lewis Lehrman (chair of a Greenwich investment partnership), Gilder (head of a New York brokerage firm),  is founder and co-chair of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, a successful front group with an advisory board which includes some liberals (and even one famous leftist) who function as what is known in the gay world as “beards,” i.e. respectable covers.

The King Memorial Fails to Capture the Spirit of the Man and the Movement

by Jeffrey Aaron Snyder

After being delayed by Hurricane Irene, the official dedication of the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial finally took place on Sunday, October 16.  It was a grand occasion with performances by Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder, speeches by civil rights luminaries such as John Lewis and a keynote address delivered by the president himself.  While the spoken tributes to King rang true, the memorial itself fails to capture his spirit.  And that is a loss for all of us.The memorial sheds very little light on King, the man, and even less, on the freedom struggle that he led.  Visitors unfamiliar with King are unlikely to walk away with an understanding of who he was, what he stood for and why he is so important. 

A Tribute to John M. Blum

by Allan M. Winkler

Editor’s Note: John M. Blum passed away on October 17 at the age of ninety. This speech was given ten years ago at the Literary Club in Cincinnati by Allan M. Winkler, a student of Mr. Blum’s at Yale University. Special thanks to Mr. Winkler, Lewis Gould, and Laura Kalman for making the publication of this piece possible.

On Witnessing Atrocity: Prof. Susie Linfield on Photography and Political Violence

by Robin Lindley

I think it would be fine if the ones who order the bombing and the ones who do the bombing would walk on the ground sometime and see what it is like. Martha Gellhorn, The Face of War

Time for Another Warren Harding?

by Ronald and Allis Radosh

The presidential campaign was heating up, and the progressives in office were nervous about their chances of holding the White House.  It was unclear at first which contender for the Republican nomination would get the nod, but when the candidate eventually was chosen they denounced him as “a confirmed and hopeless reactionary.” The year was 1920, and they were talking about Warren G. Harding.  The editor of the New Republic foresaw dark days:  Though no fan of the Democratic candidate (James Cox), Herbert Croly expected Harding’s Republicans to concede nothing to the progressives.  The United States, he wrote shortly before the election, was about to enter eight years of “reaction, prolonged and untempered.” 

Exposing Rashid Khalidi's Bogus Claim about Leon Uris's Exodus as Israeli Propaganda

by Martin Kramer

Exodus by Leon Uris must rank high on any list of the most influential books about the Middle East.  The novel, published in 1958, popularized the story of Israel’s birth among millions of American readers.  The 1960 film based on the book, and starring Paul Newman as Ari Ben Canaan, reached many more millions.  Exodus is still of interest, not for what it says about the creation of Israel (the commander of the ship Exodus said Uris “wrote a very good novel, but it had nothing to do with reality.  Exodus, shmexodus”), but for what it reveals about mid-twentieth-century America.  So more inquiry into the American context of Exodus is welcome—provided you get the facts right.Last fall, Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University, offered his audiences an account of how Leon Uris came to write the book.  In a speech at Brooklyn Law School, Khalidi made this claim:

Welcome Home, General Grant

by Charles Bracelen Flood

Ulysses S. Grant as president. Credit: Wiki Commons.IThis year of 2011, marking the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War, gives us an opportunity to see the difference between history as fact and history as perception.No better example of this exists than the life of Ulysses S. Grant.  He died in 1885; to the end of the nineteenth century, there was one Ulysses S. Grant, based on fact and seen in that light.  During almost all of the twentieth century, he was the subject of various forms of "revisionism."  In recent years he is being restored to his rightful place in our history.

Virginia's History Textbooks Still Aren't Accurate—The Publishers Need to Get Historians Involved

by Zachary M. Schrag

On September 22, the Virginia Board of Education added two history textbooks to its list of texts approved for use in the state’s public schools.  That doesn’t sound very exciting, but the two books were revised editions of titles that last year gained national notoriety for their factual errors.  The new action raises the question of whether the state’s system for textbook adoption has been sufficiently reformed.At this time last year, many Virginia fourth-graders could read that “Thousands of Southern blacks fought in the Confederate ranks, including two black battalions under the command of Stonewall Jackson.”  This baseless claim appeared in a new textbook, Our Virginia: Past and Present, written by author Joy Masoff, and published by Five Ponds Press.  Masoff is not a trained historian, and she had been too trusting in her use of material she found on non-scholarly websites.  Nor did Virginia's process guarantee that any historian would review the text before it was distributed to thousands of schoolchildren.

Who Knew that Armageddon Actually Matters in American Politics? Matthew Sutton Explains.

by David Austin Walsh

Matthew Avery Sutton is associate professor of history at Washington State University, the author of Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America and the forthcoming American Evangelicals and the Politics of Apocalypse. He recently wrote an op-ed for the New York Times outlining apocalyptic strains in American politics and was a guest on the Lawrence O'Donnell Show.I spoke to Mr. Sutton last week via. telephone.Your op-ed in the New York Times last week stirred up quite a bit of media controversy. What’s your reaction to it all?

Michael Kazin on the Left's Past Victories and How It Can Reinvent Itself Again

by David Austin Walsh

Michael Kazin is a professor of history at Georgetown University, co-editor of Dissent magazine, columnist and blogger for The New Republic, and author of the recently published American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation. Mr. Kazin wrote an extended essay related to the book for the New York Times that was published on Sunday, September 25. I spoke to him via telephone.I wanted to thank you for taking the time to talk to us.Sure. I just actually read Jack Ross’s book review of American Dreamers on HNN.Oh, yes. I’m curious what you thought of it.

How to Link the Distant Past and the Present (It Involves Good Writing)

by Craig Harline

“You people who study the past…” said the corporate executive to me, baffled and shaking his head, after I told him what I was doing in graduate school.It turned out that he wasn’t completely against the past—the parts of the past that had to do with his family, religion, and country quite interested him, he admitted.  What didn’t interest him were those parts of the past that “obviously” weren’t relevant.  The distant past.  The faraway past.  Such as the past I preferred: the Reformation.

Dorothy Day Should be an Inspiration to Present-Day Protesters

by Walter E. Moss

In March 2000, New York’s Catholic Cardinal John O’Conner announced that the Vatican had approved his request to consider Dorothy Day for sainthood. A year later in a commencement speech at Notre Dame President George W. Bush said, “Any effective war on poverty must deploy what Dorothy Day called ‘the weapons of spirit.’” In his Audacity of Hope (2006), future President Barack Obama wrote of her as one of five “great reformers in American history” who “were motivated by faith.” In an important speech before religious leaders in June 2006, he again mentioned her, the only woman, as one of same five “great reformers.”In this era of political name-calling and seemingly unbridgeable political gaps, it is appropriate to consider the views of this woman who could merit such favorable mention from such divergent sources. And indeed depending on which of her writings you read, you might be puzzled and ask, “Is she on the Right or Left?”

We've Come a Long Way from the Effort to Memorialize the Slave Mammy

by Mark Auslander

As Washington D.C. prepares for the rescheduled October 16 unveiling of the memorial to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., it is worth reflecting that nine decades ago a very different national monument depicting a person of color was contemplated for the nation’s capital.  In 1923, backed by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Senator John Sharp Williams (D-Mississippi) introduced a bill mandating  a monument to the southern “Negro Mammy” in the District of Columbia.  Numerous designs from hopeful sculptors and architects were submitted.  One proposal depicts a large black woman holding a white baby near her bosom.  A white boy and girl clutch her skirts.  Many expected the monument would grace the grounds of the U.S. Capitol.

The Moral Crucible of the Bloodiest War: Historian Michael Burleigh on Good and Evil in the Second World War

by Robin Lindley

The human cost of the Second World War was staggering:  over 55 million dead and many more left injured, homeless, displaced and impoverished.  In the United States we are still haunted and deeply affected by about 300,000 American combat deaths.  Our toll was significant, yet pales in the face of civilian and military losses in other countries:  25 million Soviet dead, 15 million Chinese dead, seven million German dead, four million Indonesian dead, three million Japanese dead, and on and on.

John Mearsheimer's Disturbing Connection to a Notorious Anti-Semite

by Adam Holland

"We have heard the comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany. I don't like this comparison because I really think that Israel is far worse than Nazi Germany."Those are the words of Gilad Atzmon, a little known expatriate Israeli who divides his time between working as a jazz musician and campaigning against the Jewish community in all its manifestations. He has written that he not only opposes Israel and Zionism, but any Jewish collective enterprise, including even "Jewish ‘anti’ Zionist networks". In fact, he describes himself as someone who is proud of being a "self-hating Jew".History teaches us that the most universally inspiring Jews, I mean, those who contributed something to humanity rather than merely to their own people or even just themselves, were motivated by some form of self hate. The first names that come to mind are Christ, Spinoza and Marx.

Historians Need to Take the Long View when it Comes to Civil Rights

by Clay Risen

On a blistering July day in 1919, five black teenagers went down to a South Side Chicago beach, tied a few logs together into a raft, and began to drift out into Lake Michigan.  Slowly the raft bobbed south, past the invisible border that separated the black waterfront from the white.  Even in Chicago, to which so many African Americans had fled to escape Jim Crow, an informal but powerful color line persisted.  A white man on the shore caught sight of them and began pelting their raft with rocks.  One of his projectiles hit 17-year-old Eugene Williams in the head.  He tumbled off the raft and drowned.