Roundup: Talking About History

Eva Weisel: Honoring All Who Saved Jews

Eva Weisel lives in Los Angeles. She is retired from the banking industry.IN December 1942, when I was 13 years old, German troops occupied my hometown. Within days, our house was commandeered as an officers’ mess hall. I soon had a yellow star on my dress, setting me apart from many of my childhood friends. The men of our family were ordered into forced labor. My happy life had vanished.Luckily, an influential local man knew of our difficult straits and generously offered his protection. One night, he ferried the women, children and old men in our family to a farm he owned about 20 miles outside of town. There, he said, we would be safe. Though the stables he provided us for lodging were modest, with just a drape across the door to protect against the elements, we were relieved to be behind the thick, high walls of his property. We were deeply grateful.

Dominic Tierney: Close What Newt Gingrich and the History Channel Have in Common

Dominic Tierney is assistant professor of political science at Swarthmore College. He is the author of How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War.The Republican candidate Newt Gingrich and the cable channel History have both followed the same formula for success, by elevating fantasy over actual history. The difference, however, is that Newt wants to carry his sensational vision of a bygone age into office.Newt is the most prominent self-described "historian" in the United States. If he were elected in 2012, he would be only the second president after Woodrow Wilson to hold a PhD. Indeed, according to Newt, his gifts at decoding the past are so illustrious that Freddie Mac paid him $1.6 million, not for lobbying, but for his historical skills. Meanwhile, over on cable, the History Channel is rising in popularity with the mission statement, "History: Made Every Day." With practitioners and purveyors of the past soaring so high, these might seem like giddy times for the historical profession....

Tom Taylor: Canada Is Still Here, 200 Years Later

Tom Taylor is author of Brock’s Agent, a War of 1812 novel about the redemption of Upper Canada’s first secret agent. This year marks the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812, a war that many consider Canada’s war of independence, not from Britain but from the United States. Historians often take the beginning of the war to be the Battle of Tippecanoe in November 1811, when General William Harrison and the U.S. Fourth Infantry burned Prophet’s Town to the ground. Tecumseh never forgave the Americans for destroying his home and consequently he fought beside the British to his death. The United States declared war on Great Britain on June 18, 1812 under the guise of an injured party. The Royal Navy was seizing British deserters off American ships, impinging on newly won American sovereignty. And British orders in council prevented any country trading with France directly. All cargoes had to be approved by England before they could touch a French controlled port.

Ron Grossman: A Historian Looks Back -- With Shivers and Memories

Ron Grossman writes for the Chicago Tribune.Crossing the lobby of the Chicago Marriott Downtown hotel later this week, you might hear enigmatic snatches of conversation, like:"I'm intrigued by 'Constructive Aspects of Mass Violence.' And you?""I'm off to 'Pirates, State Actors and Hegemonic Systems in the pre-Modern Mediterranean.'"Those would be the voices of historians choosing from among the 257 sessions of their annual gathering. Upward of 1,500 scholars are expected to attend the convention of the American Historical Association, which meets in Chicago every half-dozen years or so.When it does, I'm flooded with nostalgia accompanied by cold sweats. Half a century ago, I was a graduate student in history. The AHA's meeting is both a forum for the exchange of ideas and a job market — my memories of which co-mingle with scenes of the longshoremen's shape-up in "On the Waterfront." It's done more civilly now, across tables in a ballroom....

Rich Lowry: Thatcher vs. Decline

Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.Margaret Thatcher is on the cover of Newsweek, or — the next best thing — Meryl Streep is on the cover as the former British prime minister in a new biopic.Thatcher is a rich theme. If the types who expound on such things didn’t so hate her politics, she’d launch a thousand dissertations on those inexhaustible academic themes of class and gender. As the daughter of a grocer, she was looked down upon as the personification of, in the words of one highfalutin critic, "the worst of the lower-middle-class." As a woman in a man’s world, she was venomously attacked by her opponents as a "bitch" or "the bag."At this moment in our history, though, it is Thatcher’s central purpose that is most important: her unyielding rejection of British decline. She rejected it with every bone in her middle-class body, even though sophisticates scoffed at such a naïve nationalism. She rejected it even though the grandees of her own party said it was inevitable. She rejected it even though she knew reversing it meant forcing a wrenching political and economic crisis.

Alexis Madrigal: How CIA Spied on Soviets During Cold War

Alexis Madrigal is a senior editor at The Atlantic. He's the author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology.Here's your mission, should you choose to accept it: build a camera that can take high-resolution photographs of the Earth from orbit and return them to the Central Intelligence Agency. There's only one catch: you don't get to use a computer or a single kilobyte of network bandwidth.That's the task that the United States government gave to a group of engineers at the optical instruments company Perkin-Elmer in Danbury, Connecticut at the height of the Cold War. It was October 1966 and the new development of the new satellite system, Hexagon, was underway. The project was a follow-on to very successful Corona satellite program and a complement to the higher-resolution Gambit satellite.

Martin Kettle: Margaret Thatcher Unmasked ... The Lady Was For Turning

Martin Kettle is an associate editor of the Guardian and writes on British, European and American politics, as well as the media, law and music.My new year's resolution for 2012 is easily stated. Avoid lazy labels and simplistic stereotypes in political commentary, even when it is about Margaret Thatcher. As with all such resolves, this one is easier to say than to do, since few reputations have become so set in stereotypical aspic as Thatcher's. She remains worshipped on the right and excoriated on the left, with almost no middle ground. What more is there to say?Quite a large amount, in fact, if the state papers from 1981 – released by the National Archives at midnight last night under the 30-year rule – are a guide. Documents from one of the most embattled early years of Thatcher's 11-year premiership depict a rather more nuanced and pragmatic politician than the officially sanctioned labels of visionary or villain would allow.

Post Carbon Institute: 300 Years of Fossil Fuels in 300 Seconds

Rodric Braithwaite: The Myths of Russia

The writer was British ambassador in Moscow from 1988 to 1992.On Christmas Day 1991 we were still wearing our funny hats and eating our mince pies when Mikhail Gorbachev came on television to tell the world that he had resigned as President of the Soviet Union. We looked out at the Kremlin on the other side of the Moscow River. The Red Flag was fluttering down for the last time.

Melanie Kirkpatrick: The World's Most Repressive State

Ms. Kirkpatrick, a former deputy editor of the Journal's editorial page, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. Her book on North Koreans who escape and the people who help them will be published next year.A few minutes after the news of the death of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il flashed across computer screens on Sunday night—Monday morning on the Korean Peninsula—I received an email from a North Korean defector. The man, who is now living in Seoul and is a Christian, was exultant: "God blesses all of us," he wrote. The defector's sentiments will be shared by many, especially his long-suffering countrymen.The best-known aspect of Kim Jong Il's legacy is a nuclear North Korea. During his rule, which began in 1994 after the death of his father Kim Il Sung, the younger Kim accelerated the nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile programs initiated by the elder Kim. He went on to proliferate both technologies to Iran, which today would not be on the brink of being a nuclear power if it were not for his assistance.

Michael Gerson: Havel’s Revolution of Truth

Michael Gerson was a speechwriter for President Bush and is now a columnist for the Washington Post.As the heroes of the Cold War walk off into the mist — Ronald Reagan, then John Paul II, now Vaclav Havel — each departure makes that world more distant and foreign. But it is too early for forgetfulness, which would also be ingratitude.Once in a nightmare, European dissidents lived in prison, in whole nations that were prisons. They were confined to mental hospitals by governments sustained through the promotion of mass delusion. They were forced to make confessions of imagined crimes by regimes that were criminal enterprises.And then the government of Czechoslovakia went a step too far. In 1976, it arrested a band called The Plastic People of the Universe for offenses against cultural conformity. This was a perfect symbol of communism: a system that could not tolerate the unauthorized singing of songs. The regime’s stupidity undermined its capacity to intimidate. Havel — a countercultural intellectual and rock fan — co-founded the Charter 77 human rights movement. Never has bad popular music been put to better use.

Alan Wolfe: Evil Ain't What It Used to Be

Alan Wolfe is professor of political science and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. He is author and editor of more than 20 books, including, most recently, Political Evil: What It Is and How to Combat It....[F]or all his dreams of glory, Kim Jong Il was no Hitler. And the decidedly ignominious, if not pathetic, way that once powerful leaders in North Africa and the Middle East lost their power should remind us it is one thing to run corrupt and oppressive regimes -- and another entirely to deploy an astonishingly powerful military apparatus in the service of world conquest and the elimination of an entire race of people. The hawkishly inclined want us to believe that the United States cannot have an enemy unless he is deemed to be a carbon copy of the bad guy against whom the good war was fought. But Hitlers, thankfully, are rare....

Barron H. Lerner: When Lobotomy Was Seen as Advanced

Dr. Barron H. Lerner, professor of medicine and public health at Columbia University Medical Center, is the author, most recently, of “One for the Road: Drunk Driving Since 1900.”Most of us recall lobotomies as they were depicted in the movie “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest”— horrifying operations inappropriately used to control mentally ill patients. But in the 1950s, surgeons also used them to treat severe pain from cancer and other diseases.Now a Yale researcher has uncovered surprising new evidence of a famous patient who apparently received a lobotomy for cancer pain during that time: Eva Perón, the first lady of Argentina, who was known as Evita. The story is an interesting, sad footnote in the history not only of lobotomy, but of pain control.

Elliot J. Corn: Mother Jones, Grandmother of Unionism and Soul of American Socialism

Elliot J. Corn is Professor of History at Brown University and author of Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America, Hill and Wang, New York, 2001. "A torrent of applause broke out and turned into an uproar when a little woman walked to the podium. Her face, marked by age, could be anyone's grandmother, but it was the grandmother of hundreds of thousands of miners ... Listening to her speak, her influence on these polyglot hordes is understood. She had the strength, spirit and above all, the flame of indignation. It was divine wrath incarnate."This is how the writer Upton Sinclair, famous for his novel about the slaughterhouses of Chicago (The Jungle), describes Mother Jones. He adds: "She told endless stories of adventures, the strikes led by her, of her speeches, meetings with presidents, governors, heads of industry and prison camps.She had traveled around the whole country where the fire of protest was propagated in the hearts of men. Her story is an odyssey of revolt "(1).Sinclair's words are extremely accurate. For 25 years, this lady had no fixed abode. Once, before Congress, she said: "Like my shoes, my address follows me wherever I go."

John Sainsbury: In the Afterglow, a Balanced View of Empire

John Sainsbury is a professor of history at Brock University.A hundred years ago, the British Empire reached its zenith. At least it did in pomp and circumstance, even as its foundations were beginning to crumble. The defining event was the Great Durbar in Delhi, when, on Dec. 12, 1911, King George V was crowned Emperor of India.It was a brilliantly choreographed ceremony, designed to give visible expression to the British conception of India as an enduring hierarchy of loyal subjects. As magnificently dressed maharajas, nawabs and other notables paid homage to their Emperor King, the emergent force of Indian nationalism – and India’s dire economic problems – could be temporarily disregarded.[Is] empire ... now a taboo subject? No. ... Enlightening conversation about empire has shifted from what empire means in terms of ideology to the more neutral ground of what it means in terms of communal and personal experience.

Tom Perriello: Humanitarian Intervention ... Recognizing When, and Why, It Can Succeed

Tom Perriello is a former member of Congress and conflict analyst who has conducted research in Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and Darfur.The use of force always entails grave dangers and human costs, and progressives have been leery particularly since the Vietnam era of supporting it, even to prevent or end mass atrocities, repression, and other systematic human suffering. Wise leaders will always remain wary of war. But wisdom also requires us to acknowledge two dramatic changes in our ability to use force for good. First, in a single generation, our ability to intervene without heavy casualties has improved dramatically. Second, the range of diplomatic and legal tools for legitimizing such interventions has likewise expanded. During this same period, we have been reminded tragically of the real and staggering human cost of inaction, most notably in the 800,000 lives lost in Rwanda. The tendency to feel less moral responsibility for the results of inaction and to overvalue the risks of acting in difficult situations is natural, but it is ultimately indefensible.

Tim Padgett: Panama Hasn't Overcome Strong-Man Past

Tim Padgett is Miami and Latin America Bureau Chief for Time magazine.Panamanians are doing their best to register indifference to the return of Manuel Noriega. The 77-year-old former military dictator, drug-trafficking convict and all-around banana-republic creep, who’s been rotting behind bars in Florida and France since the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama, was flown home Dec. 11 to begin serving 60 more years in prison for ordering the murders of political opponents in the 1980s. By collectively shrugging, his countrymen would like the rest of the world to think that Panama has moved well beyond those tropical strongman days, into a functioning, institutional democracy in which Noriegas are museum pieces.

Caroline Glick: Yes, Palestinians Are an Invented People

Caroline Glick is an American-Israeli journalist for Makor Rishon and is the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post.Last Friday, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, did something revolutionary. He told the truth about the Palestinians. In an interview with The Jewish Channel, Gingrich said that the Palestinians are an "invented" people, "who are in fact Arabs."His statement about the Palestinians was entirely accurate. At the end of 1920, the "Palestinian people" was artificially carved out of the Arab population of "Greater Syria." "Greater Syria" included present-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Jordan. That is, the Palestinian people were invented 91 years ago. Moreover, as Gingrich noted, the term "Palestinian people" only became widely accepted after 1977.

Jorge G. Castañeda: What Latin America Can Teach Us

Jorge G. Castañeda is a professor of politics and Latin American and Caribbean studies at New York University, who served as foreign minister of Mexico from 2000 to 2003. IN a Bertelsmann Foundation study on social justice released this fall, the United States came in dead last among the rich countries, with only Greece, Chile, Mexico and Turkey faring worse. Whether in poverty prevention, child poverty, income inequality or health ratings, the United States ranked below countries like Spain and South Korea, not to mention Japan, Germany or France.It was another sign of how badly Americans are hurting their middle class. Wars, famine and violence have devastated middle classes before, in Germany and Japan, Russia and Eastern Europe. But when the smoke cleared and the dust settled, a social structure roughly similar to what existed before would always resurface.No nation has ever lost an existing middle class, and the United States is not in danger of that yet. But the percentage of national income held by the top 1 percent of Americans went from about 10 percent in 1980 to 24 percent in 2007, and that is a worrisome signal.

Michael J. Crosbie: Why the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Failed—and How to Fix It

New York Dozen author Michael J. Crosbie is an architect and chair of the Department of Architecture at the University of Hartford. He writes frequently about architecture and design for a variety of print and online publications.Nearly 15 years after President Clinton signed legislation for the construction of a memorial to Dr. Martin Luther King on Washington, D.C.'s National Mall, the finished work was dedicated in October. The memorial is on the south side of the mall, on the edge of the Tidal Basin overlooking the Jefferson memorial. If you draw a straight line from the Jefferson to the Lincoln memorial, the King memorial is about halfway between them.The memorial is intended to be entered from the corner of Independence Avenue and West Basin Drive, which is unlikely, because most pedestrian traffic approaches the memorial from farther east on Independence (the way I walked in), or from the FDR memorial to the south. If you arrive at the memorial the way the designers had envisioned, you might not at first see the memorial at all. At the corner there is a large amoeba-shaped planter made of granite -- this was added late in the design as a security measure to keep vehicles from driving into the memorial (Washington is littered with these makeshift "bomber barriers").