Roundup: Talking About History

Bob Deans: Pocahontas and John Smith ... The first American love story?

[A national correspondent for Cox Newspapers, Deans is author of The River Where America Began: A Journey Along the James.] It was the first great American love story. Or was it? Neither John Smith nor Pocahontas ever claimed to be an item. There's not a shred of evidence to affirm they were. But the real story of their relationship is more interesting than what the rich canon of American romance literature, or even Hollywood, has made of it. Pocahontas and Smith shared a deep

Helen C. Rountree: Jamestown, from the Powhatan's perspective

[Rountree, an anthropologist, is the author of Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown.] The view of the people who met the ships was very different from that of the newcomers aboard them--and that of most historical writings since. The native people (collectively called the Powhatan) did not write it because their society was nonliterate, but it can be reconstructed from their actions, recorded by the English. The task is not an easy one, for t

Dan Bar-On: Palestinians, Israelis should avow Holocaust, Nakba

[Dan Bar-On was born in Haifa and is Professor of Psychology at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev. He is also Co-Director of the Peace Research Institute in the Middle East (PRIME) and presently a Fulbright Scholar-In-Residence at Monmouth University. Saliba Sarsar was born in Jerusalem and is the Associate Vice-President for Academic Program Initiatives as well as Professor of Political Science at Monmouth University. Bar-On and Sarsar submitted this commentary to the Middle East Ti

Mark D. Tooley: The Not Entirely Forgotten War ... Marking the 250th anniversary of the French and Indian War

[ark D. Tooley directs the United Methodist committee at the Institute on Religion and Democracy.] NOT MANY AMERICANS are commemorating the 250th anniversary of the French and Indian War. Outside Washington, D.C., over 100 West Virginians recently assembled for their annual commemoration of their own community's role in the "war that made America." Creditably, PBS aired a documentary with that very title last year. And the Smithsonian Institution currently has an equally c

G. Jeffrey MacDonald: Did Brigham Young Order a Massacre?

One hundred fifty years ago, a glorious September morning in the Utah mountains morphed into Mormonism's darkest hour when a militia opened fire on a wagon train, leaving more than 120 men, women and children dead in a flowery field. Now the "Mountain Meadows Massacre" is becoming more than a subject of somber reflection within tight-knit Mormon circles. Two new films and a forthcoming book aim to tell the nation what happened, why and -- perhaps most important -- whether the revered Mormon prophet Brigham Young ordered the killing.... "The important thing is to place the massacre in context," Helen Whitney, director of the PBS documentary, said in an interview. "They believed they were at war. The president was arriving with his troops. . . . All of this was swirling around -- years of persecution, a kind of paranoia -- it really was sort of an explosive mixture in which the brakes just didn't hold." On the high-stakes issue of Young's role, the official view from the Mormon Church is simple: He had none. Young sent a messenger to tell militiamen to let the travelers pass without interference, said church spokesman Michael Otterson. The full case for vindicating Young will appear later this year in an Oxford University Press book written by three church historians.

Simon Schama: The lost art of great speechmaking

It was well after midnight on February 7 1787 when Richard Brinsley Sheridan MP got up in the House of Commons to flay the hide off Warren Hastings, the impeached Governor of Bengal. The chamber was packed to the rafters, notwithstanding the 50-guinea price for tickets. By the time Sheridan was done it was six in the morning and no one had moved. But virtuoso marathons of oratory weren't at all unusual in that distant golden age of eloquence (and they were a lot more fu

Nicholas Lemann: The making of broadcast television

Television swept across American society as rapidly as the Internet is sweeping across it now—and with even greater immediate effects. At the midpoint of the twentieth century, radio was the dominant broadcast medium, newspapers were the dominant news medium, and movies were the most popular form of visual entertainment. Within ten years, television had taken over. Vast wasteland though it may have been (Newton Minow, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, called it that in 1961)

Michael Beschloss ... Jamestown, Virginia: How To Make History Cool

[Mr. Beschloss's next book, Presidential Courage, comes out in May.] In April 1994, at Jamestown, an archeologist named Bill Kelso looked into the hole he had just dug and cried, "Holy Moses!" What inspired Kelso's outburst was a fragment of pottery—evidence that he had discovered the exact site of the first English-speaking settlement in North America. The British fort known to Capt. John Smith and the Indian princess Pocahontas was built in 1607, 13 years before the Pilg

Bryan Coll: Montmartre resisting city plans to replace old cobblestones in pursuit of the goal of Greening Paris

Auguste Renoir painted them, Edith Piaf sang about them and, most recently, Am?lie did her shopping on them. But icon of Paris though the centuries-old cobblestones of Montmartre may be, they are being removed as part of a council project aimed at turn this historic quarter of Paris into the city's largest "Green Village." To make way for wider sidewalks, cycle lanes and new scooter parks, diggers have torn up chunks of some of Montmartre's most famous thoroughfares, unsentimentally re

David McNeill: Japan's History War ... On the anniversary of a major war crime, revisionist academics fuel a revival of nationalism

Bunyu Ko's comic book Introduction to China is not for the fainthearted. In 300 graphic pages, it claims that the Chinese are incapable of democracy, practice cannibalism, and have the world's leading sex economy. In one sequence, famous political figures say the country is the source of most of Asia's contagious diseases. In another, illustrated with naked, spread-eagled women, China is said to have exported 600,000 "AIDS-infested" prostitutes. Mr. Ko spends much of the q

Jeffrey Laurenti: Yeltsin and an American Myth

[Jeffrey Laurenti, senior fellow at The Century Foundation.] Among the more durable articles of faith on the American right is the conviction that the Reagan administration's renewal of 1950s-style confrontation with the Soviet Union felled the Communist regime. Boris Yeltsin, who died Monday in Moscow, gave the lie to this myth. Yeltsin was, without a doubt, the political figure most responsible for uncoiling the Communist Party tentacles that gripped every aspe

Sasha Abramsky: At last, Philip Zimbardo writes a book about the famous Stanford Prison Experiment

[Sasha Abramsky is a senior fellow at Demos, a nonpartisan, New York-based think tank. His latest book American Furies: Crime, Punishment, and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment was published this month by Beacon Press.] ... Now, the world knows who Deep Throat was. And, with the publication of The Lucifer Effect, it also has Zimbardo's behind-the-scenes account of his experiment, a venture that, in many ways, could serve as a precursor to today's omnipresent reality TV sho

Laura Miller: How an ancient epic (Gilgamesh) full of sex, violence and a pre-biblical flood got lost and found, and how its legacy lives on in "Lethal Weapon."

There's no better illustration of the fragility and the power of literature than the history of "The Epic of Gilgamesh," the oldest known literary work, composed in Babylonia more than 3,000 years ago. About 400 years later, after one of the ruthless, bloody sieges typical of that time, the epic was buried in the ruins of a Mesopotamian palace. There it lay, utterly forgotten along with the name of the king who once reigned in that palace, until a British archaeologist and his Iraqi as

Zygmunt Dzieciolowski: Boris Yeltsin, history man

[Zygmunt Dzieciolowski is a Polish journalist and writer who has reported on Russia for leading German, Swiss and Polish newspapers since 1989. He is the author of Planet Russia, published in Poland in 2005.] ... At first everything seemed easy. Yeltsin and his closest advisors expected that their radical-reform programme - including expunging the power of the Communist Party, liberating prices, privatising the economy, and securing freedom of speech - would be enough to bring immed

David Satter: Yeltsin's rule was marked by lost opportunities and fearsome political corruption

[Mr. Satter is affiliated with the Hoover Institution and the Johns Hopkins University. His latest book is "Darkness at Dawn: the Rise of the Russian Criminal State" (Yale, 2003).] The era of Boris Yeltsin, who died yesterday, was a time of lost opportunity. Yeltsin led the revolution that overthrew the Soviet Union. But his attempt to build democracy in Russia was a failure, in no small measure because, mesmerized by the success of the West, he was determined to create de

Darrell Laurant: Is it historic, or history?

NEW LONDON, Va. -- Union troops marched through here back in 1864, on their way to capture Lynchburg. Two days later, they came through again, a little faster this time. That capturing thing didn’t quite work out, and David Hunter’s troops were in full retreat. These days, so is New London itself. And the enemy at the gates isn’t a blue-clad regiment, but progress. “It’s something we think about a lot,” said Randy Lichtenberg of Friends of New London, reflecting

Craig Whitlock: Two Hours in a Nazi Death Camp ( Sachsenhausen)

At the end of the peaceful neighborhood street, past the tidy prewar cottages and just beyond the snack bar offering ice cream on a cool spring day, looms what's left of the Nazi concentration camp. It's 10:07 a.m. and birds are trilling in the treetops, the voices of happy schoolchildren echo from a nearby playground at recess. But that's outside the gates of the Sachsenhausen camp. Inside, except for the sound of the rushing wind, it's as quiet as a tomb. The Nazis bu

Rachel Donadio: The closing of the Russian archives

Since the end of the cold war, historians have mined the Russian archives for insights into the nature of the Soviet empire and its global reach. New documents have shed light on such matters as the Alger Hiss and Rosenberg spy cases and also illuminated the relationships between Moscow and revolutionary movements in other countries — sometimes fueling old debates more than settling them. But after a golden age in the early 1990s, archival access eroded. Today, conversations with nearly two doze

Mark Kramer Vs. Victor Navasky: Hiss & History

Mark Kramer 4/17/07 Mark Kramer is Director of Cold War Studies at Harvard University and a Senior Fellow at Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. In his commentary on the Alger Hiss case, “Hiss in History” (Apr. 16), Victor Navasky refers to General Dmitrii Volkogonov, a long-time Soviet military-political officer and military historian, who became a senior military adviser to Russian pres

Christopher Hitchens: Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates

[Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. His most recent collection of essays is titled Love, Poverty, and War.] When I first began to plan my short biography of Thomas Jefferson, I found it difficult to research the chapter concerning the so-called Barbary Wars: an event or series of events that had seemingly receded over the lost horizon of American history. Henry Adams, in his discussion of our third presid