Roundup: Talking About History

Ron Rosenbaum: Revisiting The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Ron Rosenbaum is the author of Explaining Hitler and, most recently, How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III.Nineteen sixty: Only 15 years had passed since the end of World War II. But already one could read an essay describing a “wave of amnesia that has overtaken the West” with regard to the events of 1933 to 1945....But in 1960, there were two notable developments, two captures: In May, Israeli agents apprehended Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and flew him to Jerusalem for trial. And in October, William L. Shirer captured something else, both massive and elusive, within the four corners of a book: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. He captured it in a way that made amnesia no longer an option. The issue of a new edition on the 50th anniversary of the book’s winning the National Book Award recalls an important point of inflection in American historical consciousness....

Michael Wahid Hanna: The Iraqi Revolution We’ll Never Know

Michael Wahid Hanna is a fellow at The Century Foundation.In a tumultuous year that witnessed the fall of Arab tyrants and the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, proponents of the 2003 invasion, including former Vice President Dick Cheney and conservative academic Fouad Ajami, have sought to portray the decision to topple Saddam Hussein's regime as the hidden driver of the Arab Spring. But rather than revisit history, why not-- on this one-year anniversary of Tunisian strongman Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali's downfall -- try our hand at alternate history: If the U.S. had never invaded Iraq, would Saddam's Baathist regime still be standing in today's Middle East?This question, of course, is a bedeviling one. It is difficult to imagine the region absent U.S. military intervention in Iraq. The war itself fueled regional dysfunction -- particularly in reaffirming and expanding pernicious notions of sectarian identity. Clearly, the specter of enhanced Iranian influence and the spillover effects of Iraq's brutal sectarian civil war in 2006-2007 loom large over the region, most obviously with respect to Syria and Bahrain.

Jefferson Morley: From Abolitionism to OccupyDC

Jefferson Morley is the Washington editor of Salon and author of the forthcoming book, Snow-Storm in August: Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835 (Nan Talese/Doubleday).Before there was  Martin Luther King, there was John Francis Cook. He was Washington’s first civil rights leader, a preacher, and teacher who founded of the 15th Street Presbyterian Church, which originally stood in the place now known McPherson Square, today the home of the OccupyDC camp.

John Sainsbury: The Iron Lady's Soft Spot for the NHS

John Sainsbury is a professor of history at Brock University.The Iron Lady, the much-heralded biopic about Margaret Thatcher’s remarkable political career — and, jarringly, her subsequent dementia — is dividing audiences in Britain along much the same regional and class lines as she divided the country during her 11 years as prime minister.The film opened in North American cinemas on Friday, enabling Canadians to join the Brits in revisiting her epic battles.Watch as Thatcher (convincingly portrayed by Meryl Streep) faces down the National Union of Mineworkers, goes to war against Argentina to recover the Falkland Islands, humiliates the Tory “wets,” and confounds Britain’s Europhiles and their unpatriotic enthusiasm for a common European currency.Thatcher — despite invoking St. Francis of Assisi when she arrived at Number 10 Downing Street in 1979 — was a conviction politician, who was not afraid of making enemies. But there was one item missing from her list of targets: Britain’s National Health Service (NHS).Think about it: The doyenne of free-market capitalism accepted socialized medicine, and was even an enthusiast for it....

Eugene Robinson: Martin Luther King and the Dream that Came True

Eugene Robinson writes a column for the Washington Post.He would be an elder statesman now, a lion in winter, an American hero perhaps impatient with the fuss being made over his birthday. At 83, he’d likely still have his wits and his voice. Surely, if he were able, he would continue to preach, to pray — and to dream.For the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., dreaming was not optional. It was a requirement of citizenship to envision a fairer, more prosperous nation no longer shackled by racism and poverty. It was a duty to imagine a world no longer ravaged by senseless wars. His most famous speech was less an invitation to share his epic dream than a commandment.In these sour, pessimistic times, it is important to remember the great lesson of King’s remarkable life: Impossible dreams can come true.This is not a partisan message; King was every bit as tough on Democrats as Republicans. His activism even transcended ideology. His call for social justice and his opposition to the Vietnam War were rightly seen as liberal, but his insistence on the primacy of faith and family was deeply conservative. His birthday is a national holiday because his words and deeds ennoble us all....

Jesse Jackson: The New South is Legacy of Martin Luther King

Jesse Jackson is a civil rights activist, a Baptist minister, former candidate for president, and was one of the last men to see MLK alive.New Hampshire’s primary grabs headlines today, but if history is any guide, the Jan. 21 South Carolina primary will play a far greater role in determining the Republican winner.Of that state’s population, 28 percent are African American, and could be a major factor in the primary. But Republican candidates have made little effort to reach out to the black community. Republican South Carolina voters are likely to be nearly as white as they were in Iowa and New Hampshire. All the Republican candidates will pay tribute to Dr. King on his birthday next week, but they seem oblivious to one of his greatest contributions: the creation of the New South.

Charlayne Hunter-Gault: Don't Forget the Climb to the Mountaintop

Charlayne Hunter-Gault, a regular contributor to The Root, is the author of To the Mountaintop: My Journey Through the Civil Rights Movement, published by Roaring Brook Press and the New York Times Company. ...Recent studies in the U.S., for example, report that the younger generation's knowledge about even the civil rights movement of the 1960s -- let alone the generations-old history of black resistance to unjust laws designed to keep them "in their place" -- is practically non-existent. They might know about Martin Luther King Jr., and maybe Rosa Parks. But what about all the others who led President Barack Obama to say that he stood "on the shoulders of giants"?

Wilmer Leon: MLK Was More Than a Dreamer

Dr. Wilmer Leon is the producer-host of the national talk radio show Inside the Issues With Wilmer Leon and a teaching associate in political science at Howard University. You can reach him at wjl3us@yahoo.com. Follow him on Twitter.  In the years since his assassination, I have been troubled by what I consider to be the co-opting of Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision. What has troubled me over the years is how his revolutionary message has been hijacked, compromised and relegated to being that of just a dreamer.People are comfortable with dreamers. Why? Dreamers are safe and in a restful state. Dreamers are docile and easy to manipulate. To cast King in the light of a dreamer allows people to be convinced that substantive change resulting from clear vision and direct action is not necessary.

Rob Goodman: Gluttony, Roman Style

Rob Goodman, a former congressional speechwriter, is co-author of Rome's Last Citizen, a book on Cato the Younger and the Roman Republic, to be published in 2012 by Thomas Dunne Books....For those of us left numb by the Internet, it might help to consider the ways in which gorging on information parallels (and has, for many of us, replaced) gorging on sensual pleasures. And if we want to take that comparison seriously, there is no better guide than the pioneering Roman novelist of decadence, Gaius Petronius Arbiter. Few have ever described—or lived—the attractions and exhaustions of overindulgence more vividly.

Stephen Tuck: King of All Nations

Stephen Tuck is a history lecturer at Pembroke College, Oxford, a visiting fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard and the author of “We Ain’t What We Ought to Be: The Black Freedom Struggle From Emancipation to Obama.”AMERICA remembers the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a national champion of civil rights. But he was an international icon, too — and like many icons, his legacy was used for a range of purposes that moved far beyond, and even ran counter to, his famous dream.Indeed, it was King’s “I have a dream” speech that sealed his global fame. We’ve all seen photos of the hundreds of thousands marching in 1963 Washington. But thousands also marched that day in London, Tel Aviv and Accra, Ghana.In my home country, Britain, support for the march was overwhelming. Many watched King’s speech live via the newly launched Telstar satellite. In London, demonstrators marched to the American Embassy carrying a banner that read, “Your fight is our fight.”

David Hayes: Margaret Thatcher, Between Myth and Politics

David Hayes is deputy editor of openDemocracy, which he co-founded in 2000. He has written textbooks on human rights and terrorism, and was a contributor to Town and Country (Jonathan Cape, 1998). His work has been published in PN Review, the Irish Times, El Pais, the Iran Times International, the Canberra Times, the Scotsman, the New Statesman and The Absolute Game.This is not the kind of comeback Margaret Thatcher would ever have wanted. There was a time, in the wake of her tearful departure from 10 Downing Street in November 1990, when she seemed to be holding on to the dream of recovering Britain’s prime ministership. So dominant had she been for over a decade - over both the country’s political scene and the psyche of millions of its citizens - that it would not have been altogether fanciful to imagine her reappearing, in the manner of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, to declaim: “I am big - it’s the politics that got small!”

Elfadil Ibrahim: How Genocide Denial Legislation Confuses Law and History

Elfadil Ibrahim is from Sudan, a recent graduate of the University of Aberdeen with an LLM in oil and gas law.The 20th century was a century of immense progress largely attributed to the brutality that had preceded it. The lesson of this century was to curb the power of propaganda; Europe witnessed firsthand the kind of destruction it tends to create. Many had acquiesced to Hitler’s "Final Solution", not only in Nazi Germany, but throughout the continent. With this in mind, France’s recent legislative initiative to criminalise denial of the Armenian genocide may be misguided, but not without its merits.

Daniel J. Flynn: Sterilizing the Left’s Eugenics History

Daniel J. Flynn is the author of numerous books, including "Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America," forthcoming from ISI Books this fall. He writes a Monday column for HumanEvents.com and blogs at www.flynnfiles.com.North Carolina offered reparations on Tuesday to victims of its nearly-half-century sterilization campaign. Starting with Indiana in 1907, more than half of the states codified eugenics programs of varying degrees of fervor during the twentieth century. But North Carolina is thus far the only state to offer to compensate the victims.“We are attempting to achieve a level of financial compensation and other services that can provide meaningful assistance,” explained Dr. Laura Gerald, chair of the state’s Eugenics Task Force. “Compensation also serves a collective purpose for the state and sends a clear message that we in North Carolina are a people who pay for our mistakes and that we do not tolerate bureaucracies that trample on basic human rights.”

Benny Morris: Genocide-Denial Bill Rocks Turkish-French Relations

Benny Morris is a professor of history in the Middle East Studies Department of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is the author of 1948, A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (Yale University Press, 2008).A while back, Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu announced that his country had embarked on a foreign policy based on "zero problems with our neighbors."But it would seem that Turkey's "zero-problems" policy has in recent years been anything but—with Turkey most recently and loudly at loggerheads with Israel (over Palestine), Cyprus (over the extent of territorial waters and gas-drilling zones and rights), Syria (over the Assad regime's bloody suppression of internal dissent), Iraq (over anti-Kurdish cross-border incursions by the Turkish army) and Greece (over Greece's planned border fence to keep out would-be infiltrating Turkish emigrants bound for the EU).Recently, it was the turn of Turkish-French relations, with Turkey recalling its ambassador from Paris and suspending all bilateral contacts and relations—political, economic and military—in the wake of the passage by the French lower house of parliament, the National Assembly, of a law prohibiting genocide denial, including the Armenian genocide of World War I....

George F. Will: The Little League All Stars Who Were Never Beaten

George F. Will writes for the WaPo.They are nearing 70 now, the 11 men who were 12-year-old boys in 1955 and who are remembered for the baseball games they could not play. They were — actually, with their matching blue blazers and striped ties, they still are — members of the Cannon Street All Stars.The Cannon Street YMCA is near the Ashley River, which flows toward the harbor and Fort Sumter. The unpleasantness that started there in 1861 had left pertinent questions unsettled 94 years later, when the All Stars, all African Americans, decided to enter this city’s Little League tournament. Charleston canceled the tournament because blacks and whites simply did not play together. Actually, they did, all the time, in informal settings, on vacant lots. “Kids do not mess up the world, adults do,” says Leroy Major, 69, the All Stars’ pitcher and a retired schoolteacher.

Craig Fehrman: Jefferson's Bible

Craig Fehrman is working on a book about presidents and their books.

Linda Melvern: Rwanda ... At Last We Know the Truth

Linda Melvern is an investigative journalist and author of A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda's Genocide (2000) and Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwanda Genocide (2004).Few events have been the subject of as many rumours and lies as the assassination on 6 April 1994 of Rwanda's President Juvénal Habyarimana. We may never know the identity of the assassins who fired the two missiles that blew his jet apart as it came in to land at Kigali International Airport; yet this one key event signalled the targeted elimination of Rwanda's political opposition, and triggered the genocide of the Tutsi people.

Jordan Michael Smith: Kennan’s Opposite ... Gaddis Wrote the Book on Containment’s Architect But Didn’t Follow It

Jordan Michael Smith, a contributing writer at Salon, has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, and Boston Globe.The premier Cold War historian first met the premier Cold War diplomat in 1974. Then a very junior professor at Ohio University, John Lewis Gaddis asked the already iconic George Frost Kennan if he could interview the former policy planner and ambassador to the USSR for an article he was writing for Foreign Affairs. It was only a brief interview, says Gaddis, and they met "only a couple of other times" before Kennan agreed to let Gaddis become his authorized biographer in 1981. Finally released in November after 30 years of work, George F. Kennan: An American Life is a triumph of scholarship and narrative. It is the best book yet written on the most important American foreign-policy thinker-practitioner of the 20th century.

Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper: How Empire Ruled the World

Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper are history professors at New York University, and the authors of Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference, Princeton University Press, 2010.Why, in 2011, think about empires? We live in a world of nation-states — over 200 of them, each with their seat in the UN, their flag, postage stamps and governmental institutions. Yet the nation-state is an ideal of recent origin and uncertain future and, for many, devastating consequences.Empire did not give way to a secure world of nations with the end of Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Romanov or German rule after the first world war or, in the 1940s-1970s, with decolonisation (by the French, British, Dutch, Belgian and Portuguese). Many recent conflicts — Rwanda, Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan, ex-Yugoslavia, Sri Lanka, the Congo, the Caucasus, Libya, etc — emerged from failures to find viable alternatives to imperial regimes, after 1918, 1945 and 1989.

Richard Vinen: Britain Needs to Forgive and Forget the Iron Lady

The writer teaches history at King’s College London and is author of Thatcher’s Britain: The Politics and Social Upheaval of the 1980s.Meryl Streep remarked that she had tried, in the film The Iron Lady, to capture what it was about Margaret Thatcher that aroused such "venom". Venom is the right word. Recently, when I wrote an article that might have been interpreted as sympathetic to Lady Thatcher, my inbox filled with hate mail. Some of it was obscenely misogynistic, some based on simple errors (surprising how many people think that she privatised the railways) and some just mad. One man insisted she was a coward because she had refused to debate with him; it did not seem to occur to him that there might have been simpler reasons why she, or her advisers, thought that his invitation to debate deserved to go in the bin.