Roundup: Talking About History

Anna K. Nelson: Testimony on presidential records

My name is Anna K. Nelson. I am the Distinguished Historian in Residence at American University in Washington, D.C. I have done research in five presidential libraries, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson and in the Nixon Presidential Papers. I have also done extensive research in the National Archives in Washington. I was a staff member of the Public Documents Commission, 1976-77 which was partly responsible for the passage of the Presidential Records Act. From 1994-1998 I was

Jackson Diehl: The House's Ottoman Agenda

Can a nonbinding congressional resolution really matter? Most are ignored by everyone except the special interests they are usually directed at. Even the House's recent resolution on Iraq was dismissed by both President Bush and Democratic antiwar leader John Murtha. Yet a vote expected next month on a nonbinding House resolution describing a "genocide" in the Ottoman Empire beginning in 1915 has the potential to explode U.S. relations with Turkey, sway the outcome of upcoming Turkish

David Glenn: Controversy over the Bush library is only the latest in a delicate dance between U.S. presidents and the universities that house their papers

In 1937, Franklin D. Roosevelt hatched the idea of donating his presidential papers to the National Archives. As a bonus, he would give the archives part of his Hyde Park estate, where the papers could be housed. Before presenting the scheme to Congress, however, Roosevelt was anxious to secure "the sanction of scholars," as he put it in a letter to the Harvard University historian Samuel Eliot Morison. In 1938, Roosevelt brought together a distinguished group of academics and asked th

Armando Valladares: Castro's Gulag

[Mr. Valladares, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, is chairman of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation and author of "Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag" (National Book Network, 2001).] Like thousands of other Cubans, I was arrested in the middle of the night. Fidel Castro's police raided my parents' home, stuck a machine gun in my face and took me away. It was 1960 and I was 22 years old. The news that the

Mark R. Parris: Now is not the time for an Armenian genocide resolution

[Mr. Parris, who was U.S. ambassador to Turkey from 1997 to 2000, is a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution.] Once again, a resolution has been introduced in the House of Representatives asserting that the forcible deportation and massacre of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in 1915 was "genocide." But this time around the resolution, sponsored by Reps. Frank Pallone, Adam Schiff, George Radanovich and Joe Knollenberg (and over 170 co-sponsors), appears likely to pa

Mary Dudziak: Are There No More Schlesingers?

[Ms. Dudziak is Judge Edward J. and Ruey L. Guirado Professor of Law, History and Political Science, University of Southern California Law School.] Sam Tanenhaus, Editor of the New York Times Book Review section, remembers Arthur Schlesinger today as the nation's"last great public historian," and laments that the present generation lacks the same ability to engage the public. He writes in today's

Allen Weinstein: Testimony on Presidential Records Act

[Allen Weinstein is the Archivist of the United States.] Chairman Clay, Congressman Turner, members of the Subcommittee, and Subcommittee staff, I am Allen Weinstein, Archivist of the United States, and I want to thank you for the opportunity to appear before you this morning on the implementation of the Presidential Records Act of 1978 (PRA) under Executive Order 13233. Mr. Chairman, I particularly want to thank you for holding this hearing and for your continued interest in the programs

Robert Dallek: Testimony on presidential records

March 1, 2007Chairman Clay and members of the subcommittee on Information Policy, Census, and National Archives:Thank you for inviting me to testify about the Presidential Records Act and President Bush’s Executive Order 13233.I testified at earlier hearings in 2002 before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform about the impact of the President’s E

Allen Weinstein: Testimony on Presidential Records Act

Thomas Blanton: The Presidential Records Act in Crisis

Statement by Thomas S. Blanton, National Security Archive, George Washington University, (www.nsarchive.org) [Thomas S. Blanton is the Director (since 1992) of the independent non-governmental National Security Archive at George Washington University, Washington D.C., and series editor of the Archive’s award-winning Web, CD, book, and microform publications totaling more than 500,000 pages of declassified documents.] Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee, thank you for inv

Keelin McDonell: The overpaid hack who is bleeding the Smithsonian dry

In 2000, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service received an anonymous tip that a luxury apartment near the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C., housed a private and possibly illegal collection of tribal art. People who had visited the apartment whispered that its walls showcased hundreds of artifacts, including many containing what appeared to be plumage from rare or endangered birds. There was no way to know for sure, since the collection's owner had forgone plaques and scholarly labels

Peter Monaghan: Scholars re-examining the violent legacy of the party and the black-power movement find greater nuance

Forty years ago, about two dozen members of the Black Panthers did something now unthinkable in our era of terrorism and heightened security. They paraded into the California State Capitol on May 2, 1967, brandishing rifles and pistols and wearing uniforms — black berets, leather jackets, and turtlenecks. Ostensibly, they were demanding their right to bear unloaded arms, but their presence was intended to signal something much larger: a sea change in race relations. That demonstrati

Melanie Kirkpatrick: A new eyewitness to history, circa August 1945.

[Melanie Kirkpatrick is a deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.] The atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki on the morning of Aug. 9, 1945. On Sept. 6, George Weller of the Chicago Daily News, fresh from covering the formal surrender of Japan aboard the USS Missouri, arrived in the city. He got there by impersonating an American colonel and forcing his way onto Japanese trains. He was the first Westerner to enter Nagasaki after the bomb. By heading for Nagasaki, Weller

Eugene Robinson: Al Sharpton's Stunning Reminder

If you think about it, there should be nothing particularly surprising about the discovery that one of Strom Thurmond's relatives once owned the Rev. Al Sharpton's great-grandfather. That's how slavery worked -- human beings owning other human beings, buying them and selling them, often passing them down to the next generation like sentient family heirlooms. Haven't we already hashed and rehashed that whole sad story? Actually, no. What makes the story that broke over t

Paul Evans: Scripting history ... Culture Wars Challenge Historical Museums

"You’ll be touring Colonial Williamsburg," says Richard Handler, a U.Va. anthropology professor and associate dean for academic programs, "and stopping at, say, Raleigh Tavern. The guide is completely candid: ‘You’re looking at a reconstruction. The building burned in 1816 and was rebuilt in the 1930s the way it was thought to be, but we now know there are details that just aren’t right.’ Yet by the end of the tour, you’re in a meeting room in the tavern when [the guide] will say,

Earl Ofari Hutchinson: Virginia Apologizes For Slavery, Now It’s Congress' Turn

[Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a political analyst and social issues commentator, and the author of the book, The Emerging Black GOP Majority (Middle Passage Press, September 2006), a hard-hitting look at Bush and the GOP's court of black voters.] When Ohio Congressman Tony Hall introduced two resolutions in 1997 and 2000 asking Congress to officially apologize for slavery, he was blasted from pillar to post. Irate whites called the resolution wasteful and racist. Many blacks ridiculed i

Bob Herbert: Slavery Is Not Dead. It’s Not Even Past.

The Rev. Al Sharpton seemed subdued, quiet, reflective — which was unusual. Just when we thought the news couldn’t get any weirder, we learned this week, via The Daily News, that Mr. Sharpton’s great-grandfather was a slave who was owned by relatives of Senator Strom Thurmond, the longtime archsegregationist who ran for president as a Dixiecrat in 1948. “There’s not enough troops in the Army,” Mr. Thurmond told a screaming crowd during that campaign, “to force the South

James Shannon: How a 1947 Greenville nightmare changed South Carolina

It’s been sixty years now since a young man named Willie Earle was killed by a lynch mob comprised mostly of Greenville cab drivers on a lonely stretch of road near the Pickens County line. That event, and the mass trial that ensued a couple of months later, left scars on this community. Time has salved the wounds to a large degree, though the question of whether there was actual healing to be found remains largely subjective. The key participants are long dead. Of course, Willie Earle and Thoma

Bob Braun: What we need is a White History Month

It's the shortest month, Black History Month, so, in a few days, pictures of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Frederick Douglass and other heroes of February will be taken down from classrooms and school hallway bulletin boards. It's time both for more-spring-related décor, and recognition of a different ethnic group. In like a lion, out like a lamb. Leprechauns and shamrocks. That sort of thing. That's just the way of things, but what is troublesome about

Ian Williams: History ... the legalised version

[Ian Williams is a journalist and writer.] "What is truth" is not a question for politicians - they are the worst equipped to recognise it. Armenian genocides, the Holocaust, do not need politicians to sort out what happened. Politicians just need to make sure it does not happen again. In 1897, the Indiana legislature passed a remarkably incoherent bill establishing that pi was equal to 3.2 or 4 or even 3.23. But not 3.142, etc, ad infinitum. It was stalled in the st