Roundup: Talking About History

Rachel Kaprielian and Alan Dershowitz: The painful truth about the Armenian Genocide

[Rachel Kaprielian is a state representative from Watertown. Alan Dershowitz is a professor at Harvard Law School.] THE CONTROVERSY in Watertown over the Anti-Defamation's League's anti-bigotry program, "No Place for Hate," has struck an important chord in the historical and global struggle for human rights. Moreover, it reopened a deep wound for the Armenian people, whose nation was devastated, half their population murdered, and the remainder deported in what was the fir

House of Representatives: Committee Debate About the Armenian Resolution

REP. TOM LANTOS, D-CALIF. CHAIRMAN: Today we are not considering whether the Armenian people were persecuted and died in huge numbers at the hands of Ottoman troops in the early 20th century. There is unanimity in the Congress and across the country that these atrocities took place. If the resolution before us stated that fact alone, it would pass unanimously. The controversy lies in whether to make it United States policy at this moment in history to apply a single w

Sheldon M. Stern: The Cuban Missile Crisis 45 Years Later ... A Personal and Professional Remembrance

[Sheldon M. Stern, a member of the editorial board of Washington DeCoded, served as historian at the John F. Kennedy Library from 1977 through 1999. He 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.] For those who lived through it, the 1962 missile crisis was surely the most terrifying event of the Cold War. After President Kennedy’s sober revelation on the evening of October 22, I was so unsettled that I took a long walk through the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts. I thought it might be my last, or at least my last with the city’s infrastructure intact. All the while I glanced skyward, believing—incorrectly—that I would be able to see incoming, nuclear-tipped Soviet missiles before they detonated.

Damien Murphy: Attempting to decide what our past is (Australia)

When Emeritus Professor W.E.H. "Bill" Stanner coined the phrase the "Great Australian Silence" in his 1968 Boyer Lectures, his reference to the concealment of the place of Aborigines in Australian history after European settlement startled many. This was hardly surprising. After all, Stanner's Boyer lectures took place only a year after Australians voted in a referendum to end constitutional discrimination against Aborigines. One fifth of West Australians voted a

Brooks Boliek: Ken Burns's 'War' docu blurs lines of history, today's news

Once again, this city is divided into two camps:. those of us who watched "The War" and those of us who didn't. I found myself among the hardworking, patriotic, loyal Americans who watched "The War." I wouldn't want to be "those other people." President Bush once said that those other people cut and run. I don't want to do that. I've been accused of being too subtle a voice, so I don't want to put too fine a point on it. I'll just call them

Robert Fisk: A reign of terror (Armenian Genocide)

The story of the last century's first Holocaust – Winston Churchill used this very word about the Armenian genocide years before the Nazi murder of six million Jews – is well known, despite the refusal of modern-day Turkey to acknowledge the facts. Nor are the parallels with Nazi Germany's persecution of the Jews idle ones. Turkey's reign of terror against the Armenian people was an attempt to destroy the Armenian race. While the Turks spoke publicly of the need to "resettle&qu

Huffington Post: An All-Star Panel of Pundits Weighs in on America's Most Comical Presidents

Mark Twain wrote that exposure to good satire -- that is, savage wit at the service of passionate conviction -- makes citizens less likely to be "shriveled into sheep." So there will be considerably less bleating coming from the American people during the campaign ahead. Because six years after 9/11, six years after Ari Fleischer warned Americans they "need to watch what they say, watch what they do," six years after Graydon Carter declared the death of the age o

Dmitry Shlapentokh: The Russian remodeling of Genghis Khan

[Dmitry Shlapentokh, PhD, is associate professor of history, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Indiana University South Bend. He is author of East Against West: The First Encounter - The Life of Themistocles (2005). ] Genghis Khan and his successors - the great conquerors who built the greatest continental empire in the world - have fascinated historians and writers for centuries. Still, in practically all countries that encountered Mongolian armies, Genghis Khan has almost neve

Eric Alterman: Burns's War ... What Is It Good For?

[Eric Alterman is a Distinguished Professor of English, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and Professor of Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He is also"The Liberal Media" columnist for The Nation, a senior fellow and"Altercation" weblogger for Media Matters for America, (formerly at MSNBC.com) in Washington, DC, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC, where he writes and edits the"Think Again" column, a senior fellow (since 1985) at

Michael Medved: Six inconvenient truths about the U.S. and slavery

Those who want to discredit the United States and to deny our role as history’s most powerful and pre-eminent force for freedom, goodness and human dignity invariably focus on America’s bloody past as a slave-holding nation. Along with the displacement and mistreatment of Native Americans, the enslavement of literally millions of Africans counts as one of our two founding crimes—and an obvious rebuttal to any claims that this Republic truly represents “the land of the free and the home of the br

Elizabeth Blasius: Should a historic church be turned into condos to "save" it?

[Elizabeth Blasius studies historic preservation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is an archivist at the Chicago Cultural Center.] In a contest sponsored by The National Trust for Historic Preservation, the public will determine via online voting (which ended October 10th) how one million dollars is to be distributed among twenty-five historic Chicagoland sites. The demarcations between "sacred" and "secular" sites are not always clear—Holy Tri

Max Boot: The debate over Armenian genocide

[Mr. Boot is the author of The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power.] The Turkish government is furious about a vote in the House International Relations Committee condemning as “genocide” the killing of some 1.5 million Armenians by the Turks in 1915. The issue is an old and vexing one, and I confess to not being entirely in sympathy with either side. The Turks, for a start, are absurdly worked up about a mere piece of paper condemning actions taken

Max Boot: Another reason not to trust Wikipedia

[Mr. Boot is the author of The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power.] Are there people out there who take Wikipedia seriously as a source of objective information? There shouldn’t be, but unfortunately there are. In fact, lots of students use it a source of first resort. It’s so popular, that whenever you type almost any subject into Google, the first hit is usually for a Wikipedia entry. Yet disinformation abounds, often motivated by animus o

Oliver Kamm: Famine? What famine?

[ABOUT KAMM: I am an author, columnist and banker. I write regularly for The Times, and have written also for The Guardian, Prospect, The New Republic, Index on Censorship and The Jewish Chronicle. I am an advisory editor of Democratiya. My book Anti-Totalitarianism: The Left-wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy was published in 2005. I was a contributor to Britain's Bomb: What Next?, edited by Brian Wicker and General Sir Hugh Beach, in 2006. I have worked at the Bank of England, HSB

Rory Stewart: Gertrude Bell ... The Queen of the Quagmire

When the British needed a senior political officer in Basra during World War I, they appointed a forty-six-year-old woman who, apart from a few months as a Red Cross volunteer in France, had never been employed. She was a wealthy Oxford-educated amateur with no academic training in international affairs and no experience of government, policy, or management. Yet from 1916 to 1926, Gertrude Bell won the affection of Arab statesmen and the admiration of her superiors, founded a national museum, de

E.J. Hobsbawm: History and nationalism

[Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm (born 1917) is a British historian and author. This is an excerpt from a paper given as a lecture opening the academic year 1993-4 at the Central European University in Budapest. It was addressed to a body of students essentially drawn from the formerly communist countries in Europe and the former USSR.] History is the raw material for nationalist or ethnic or fundamentalist ideologies, as poppies are the raw material for heroin addiction. The past is an e

Dan Hurley: How to do oral history

[Dan Hurley is assistant vice president for history and research at the Cincinnati Museum Center. He also serves as the staff historian for Channel 12 News and is executive producer of Local 12 Newsmakers. Reach him at dhurley@cincymuseum.org.] ... The power of Ken Burns' "The War" on PBS is that it is filled with voices of ordinary people. In Burns' documentary, those voices come from two primary sources, oral history intervie

Michael Burke: My brother died in 9-11 ... his memory is ill-served by the planned memorial

On 9/11, my brother, FDNY Capt. William F. Burke, Jr. of Eng. Co. 21 gave his life. I served on the advisory committee to the memorial and the advisory committee to the museum and memorial center. I have had several op-eds published on the memorial at the WTC site; in the Wall Street Journal (06/26/03, “On Heroes and Victims”) and in the NY Daily News, Westchester Journal, etc. Currently the “National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center” foundatio

Dmitry Shlapentokh: Remaking History in a Kiev Museum

[Dmitry Shlapentokh is a professor of history at Indiana University South Bend] Constructing a new national identity often requires a new vision of the past. In Ukraine, this phenomenon can be seen in several of Kiev's museums. Exhibits at the Museum of the Army of Ukraine show the Ukrainians as European people who enjoyed monolithic unity while busily liberating themselves from the"Asiatic" Russians. Ukrainian history has emerged differently in the other majo

Paul Kengor: Reagan is not to blame for the Taliban

[Paul Kengor is author of The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (HarperCollins, 2006) and executive director of the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania.] It has become a truism in liberal circles that Ronald Reagan brought us Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. The accusation could already be heard mere weeks after 9/11. Articles developing the "blowback" thesis metastasized around the Internet. Given the staying po