Roundup: Talking About History

Jon Wiener: UCLA's Dirty Thirty

A right-wing alumni group at UCLA recently came up with a tactic that even Joe McCarthy and HUAC never tried: paying students to rat on their professors. The Bruin Alumni Association offered students up to $100 for tapes of lectures that show how "radicals" on the faculty are "actively proselytizing their extreme views in the classroom." The group has posted a list of thirty professors--the Dirty Thirty--on its website as its first targets. Other groups have sou

Seth Perry: Why Is It So Hard to Talk about Mormons?

[Seth Perry is a Ph.D. student in the History of Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School.] It seems nearly impossible for those in the public discourse to talk evenly about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Commentators are given to hyperbole (the growth of Mormonism is "one of the great events in the history of religion," says intrepid sociologist Rodney Stark in a new book); fawning (according to a Newsweek cover story written by a Mormon, the faith is "optimistic, vigorous, a source of continuing personal growth for all who accept its blessings -- [it] in many ways echoes the American Dream"); snide joviality (Larry McMurtry writes of Joseph Smith's "prattle about an angel" in the New York Review of Books); or outright ridicule (in a New York Times book review, Walter Kirn, himself a lapsed Mormon, uses an analogy to belief in Santa Claus to explain how the growth of Mormonism may have nothing to do with its content).

How Cuba Presents Its Own History

HAVANA - If you sign up for a tour of Cuba, chances are one of the first places you'll visit is the Museum of the Revolution. Just a stone's throw from the gray waters of Havana Bay and beyond it the Florida Strait, the museum is housed in an old presidential palace whose baroque facade and towering cupola conjure the feel of a cathedral. Visitors get Cuban Revolutionary History 101, a barrage of information about what happened before Fidel Castro seized power in 1959 a

Scott McLemee: On Stolen Words

... the topic of plagiarism itself keeps returning. One professor after another gets caught in the act. The journalists and popular writers are just as prolific with other people’s words. And as for the topic of student plagiarism, forget it — who has time to keep up? It was not that surprising, last fall, to come across the call for papers for a new scholarly journal called Plagiary: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism, Fabrication, and Falsification. I made a mental note to

David Greenberg: When will scholars get the chance to legitimately assess his legacy in Vietnam?

[Mr. Greenberg is the author of Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image (2003). He teaches history at Rutgers University.]he other day, the John F. Kennedy Library and the National Archives announced that they would be holding a conference in March on the

Adam Cohen: Democracy in America, Then and Now, a Struggle Against Majority Tyranny

During the War of 1812, an angry mob smashed the printing presses of a Baltimore newspaper that dared to come out against the war. When the mob surrounded the paper's editors, and the state militia refused to protect them, the journalists were taken to prison for their own protection. That night, the mob broke into the prison, killed one journalist and left the others for dead. When the mob leaders were brought before a jury, they were acquitted. Alexis de Tocqueville tells this chi

Ken Olsen: Discovering Lewis and Clark

..."A dismaying amount of our history has been written without regard to the Indians," writer and historian Bernard DeVoto observed more than 50 years ago. Such disregard is glaring in many mainstream stories of Lewis and Clark. "They wouldn't have made it if we hadn't been here to show them how to hunt and what wood to chop," Hudson's granddaughter, Cassi Rench, says of the Mandan's critical role in Lewis and Clark surviving the 45-below days

Neve Gordon: Hamas ... Sharon's Legacy?

[Neve Gordon teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University, Israel, and is the editor of From the Margins of Globalization: Critical Perspectives on Human Rights.] Both the Israeli and Palestinian political arenas are in turmoil. In Israel, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's stroke has left the country and his newly established party, Kadima, in disarray. In the Palestinian territories, the ruling Fatah party is rapidly losing popular support, and the Islamist party Hamas is gaining ground.

Daniel Goldhagen: Turkey should follow Germany's example ... and deal with its history

[Mr. Goldhagen, a member of Harvard's Center for European Studies, won Germany's triennial Democracy Prize in 1997 for his contributions to German democracy for having written "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust."] ... The Turkish government and people should use the Pamuk affair as a spur to rethinking the wisdom of their historical cover-up of the Armenian genocide. And to do that, they should look for guidance to the center of Europe itsel

Mark Naison: Live With It! Liberal and Leftist Professors are Here To Stay!

[Mark Naison is Professor of AFrican American Studies and History, Fordham University.] The whole question of liberal and leftist bias on university faculties came to the fore recently when a Conservative Alumni group offered $100 to any student who would take notes on the lecture of 30 faculty members at UCLA who the group identified as "radical professors" I hardly think this an issue worthy of such extreme measures Yes, Conservatives are right--- un

David Horowitz: Bruin Alumni Association ... How Not to Wage a Campus Campaign

An organization calling itself the Bruin Alumni Association has been getting a lot of press lately, almost all of it bad. And deservedly so. Several of its conservative board members, James Rogan, Stephan Thernstrom, Manny Klauser and Jascha Kessler have already resigned. We applaud them for doing so, and hope they will be followed by others. The Bruin Alumni Association is the brainchild of Andrew Jones, a UCLA graduate who briefly worked for the Center for the Study of Popular Cu

Paul Mitchinson: The New JFK Conspiracy Books

There’s been a recent deluge of new material on the Kennedy assassination. Formerly top-secret documents and hundreds of fresh interviews have seemingly led to one unshakable conclusion: John F. Kennedy’s assassination was the result of a conspiracy. But there’s a wee problem. Just who instigated the conspiracy? According to “Rendezvous with Death,” a new documentary by German filmmaker Wilfried Huismann, it was Cuban intelligence. According to Lamar Waldron’s Ultimate Sacrifice, it

Dana Stevens: The New World is another chin-scratching poem

For a certain core group of patient, passionate cinephiles, The New World (New Line), Terrence Malick's retelling of the story of the Jamestown settlement, was already a major movie event before it even hit screens last Christmas. (Since withdrawn for a recut by the director, the movie reopens nationwide today in slightly shortened form.) Malick began his career with two films of an almost Rimbaudian purity and perfection: Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978). These movies, both of them lyr

Yossi Melman and Steven Hartov: Munich: fact and fantasy

In 1984 the blood of the Israeli intelligence operatives and the Palestinian terrorists they hunted in "the war of the spooks" was still congealing in the back alleys of Europe when a young Israeli named Yuval Aviv teamed up with the Canadian George Jonas, a budding journalist. Aviv claimed to be a freshly defrocked Mossad assassin with a true tale to tell, and the game began. Their resulting bestseller, Vengeance, was a detailed account of Israel's response to the Munich

Al Neuharth: Hillary has it wrong, Bush not the 'worst'

The 2008 presidential election still is more than 33 months away, but the campaign to succeed President Bush started in earnest this week. Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., seeking an almost certain re-election to that seat this year but with both eyes on her party's presidential nomination in two years, charged that the Bush administration "will go down in history as one of the worst that has ever governed our country." She's wrong. As a serious student of polit

Simon Jenkins: A map supporting claims that the admiral Zheng He reached the New World in the early 15th century is plainly a hoax

We all know that a lie goes halfway round the world while truth is putting on its boots. But what if the lie goes the whole way? What if it claims to circumnavigate the globe? Last week came purported evidence that the Chinese admiral Zheng He sailed his great fleet of junks round the world a century before Columbus, Da Gama and Magellan. An 18th-century copy of a map dated 1418 has emerged from a Shanghai bookshop, depicting North and South America, Australia and Antarctica. The ma

Gregory Haines: Can't we just teach serious history in the classroom?

[Sydney high school history teacher Gregory Haines, in Quadrant magazine, laments the state of his profession.] ACADEMIC history has been under threat and perhaps in decline for some time. In part, this is due to an overall decline in arts faculties and a consequent search for relevance, funding and position in enterprise universities which are increasingly geared for vocational training rather than broad education. But there are other factors at work. The rise of postm

Tony Kushner: Defending 'Munich's' disputed territory

[Tony-, Emmy- and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner's works include "Caroline, or Change" and "Angels in America." "Munich," written with Eric Roth, is his first screenplay.] At a recent family gathering, my cousin-in-law, Janice, asked me to respond to complaints she'd read over and over again about "Munich," the Steven Spielberg film I co-wrote with Eric Roth, which she hadn't yet seen. The movie is stirring up a lo

Clyde Haberman: When Pols Use History to Score Points

NEW YORK'S junior senator, Hillary Rodham Clinton, joined quite a group of substance abusers the other day. In this bunch, no one is likely to even try kicking the habit. The substance is history. The abuse is taking some of its most brutal and shameful chapters - slavery, the Holocaust, the massacre of American Indians - and exploiting them for whatever issue happens to land on the agenda. Not that Mrs. Clinton invented the technique. She merely followed a well-worn pa

Robert J. Samuelson: Our History by the Numbers

Let us now praise the newest edition of "Historical Statistics of the United States," whose five volumes and 1,781 tables are about to hit libraries and universities all over the country. We study history for many reasons: (1) it's interesting; (2) it helps explain who we are and how we got this way, and (3) with luck, we may learn from the past. But the discovery of history is always an exhausting project—part adventure, part ordeal—because the past is shrouded in its own secrets of t