Roundup: Talking About History

Robert A. Slayton: Reenacting Evil

Robert A. Slayton is professor of history at Chapman University and the author of, among other books, Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith.

Steven F. Hayward: The Liberal Misappropriation of a Conservative President

Steven F. Hayward is the F.K. Weyerhaeuser fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution, 1980–1989.Of all the unlikely developments in American politics over the last two decades, the most astonishing is this: liberals suddenly love Ronald Reagan. They have taken to celebrating certain virtues they claim Reagan possessed—virtues they believe are absent from the conservative body politic today—while looking back with nostalgia at the supposed civility of the political struggles of the 1980s.“There’s something there I miss today,” mused the former Democratic staffer and longtime talk-show host Chris Matthews in January about the relationship between Reagan and House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, the most powerful Democrat in Washington during Reagan’s first term. Matthews dreamily evoked a time when Reagan and O’Neill had drinks together, swapped Irish stories, slapped backs, and, they say, cut deals with a minimum of personal rancor—as opposed to the ugly relations between the two parties today.

Bruno De Cordier: Parallel Frontlines ... Ten Years of Soviet and American Occupation Compared

Bruno De Cordier works for the Conflict Research Group at Ghent University. “When I was serving there, it was the latter years of the war, at a time that everyone’s main concern was getting out unscathed and not saving Socialism”, a veteran from the Soviet-Afghan war told me several years ago. “It’s the sort of war and country that gets under your skin, brother. See, lately, I have followed closely what the Americans and Europeans are doing in Afghanistan and Iraq. The whole discourse about installing democracy, and the reality on the ground; it’s familiar”. But are both episodes really that similar? It is tempting to say so. For both, the cliched refrain that ‘it’s all about the oil’ doesn’t explain events. More important are security and ideology, though the global geopolitical context, of course, differs. The USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan was the result of the course and circumstances of the Cold War in which both sides had promoted satellite states and military blocs, rather than a war on terrorism and nation-building mission as characterised the 2000’s.  The Soviets did not face a 9/11 type event.

Vadim Birstein and Susanne Berger: The FSB Should Open Up the Wallenberg Files

Vadim Birstein, a molecular geneticist and historian, was a member of the first International Commission about Raoul Wallenberg 1990-91. Susanne Berger is a historical researcher and served as an independent consultant to the Swedish-Russian Working Group about Raoul Wallenberg’s fate, 1995-2001.www.raoul-wallenberg.eu. Next year marks the 100th birthday of one of the 20th century’s most admired figures: Raoul Wallenberg, who saved thousands of Jews from Nazi persecution in World War II Hungary only to be swallowed up himself in 1945 by Stalin’s Gulag. Although Soviet leaders claimed in 1957 that Wallenberg had died suddenly in the Lubyanka prison on July 17, 1947, the full circumstances of his fate in Soviet captivity have never been established. In a recent interview with The Associated Press, the current chief of the Federal Security Service’s registration and archives directorate, Lieutenant General Vasily Khristoforov, emphasized that he, too, considers Wallenberg a hero and that FSB officials are doing everything to uncover more documentation. He strongly denied withholding any information that would shed light on the truth. Yet it is indisputable that Russian officials for decades chose to mislead not only the general public but also an official Swedish-Russian Working Group that investigated the case from 1991-2001.

Andrew M. Manis: An American Hero: Fred Shuttlesworth, 1922-2011

Andrew M. Manis is an associate professor of history at Macon State College and author of, “A Fire You Can’t Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham’s Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth.”Fred Shuttlesworth died Wednesday morning. Even if you’ve never heard of him, if you are an American, that news means more to you than you might imagine.Separated by a few years, Shuttlesworth and I both grew up in Birmingham, Ala. Separated by race, he negotiated the black side of the color line in the town known as “Bombingham,” while I lived on the other side of the line, in what the white folk called the “city of churches.” That our hometown had such an ironic pair of nicknames was a fact I didn’t know and wouldn’t have understood even if I had. After 30 years of studying race and religion in America, I am still trying to understand such realities.

Konrad Yakabuski: War of 1812 and Collective Amnesia

Konrad Yakabuski is The Globe and Mail's chief U.S. political writer, based in Washington. There is a plaque on Washington’s L Street on the site of the former British Legation, now home to a chic condo complex, that should stir the heart of a Canadian in the U.S. capital. Few if any of the George Washington University students who walk by it on their way to Trader Joe’s likely ever notice it. But each time I pass, it confirms for me that there was a time when Canada was top of mind here. The plaque commemorates the 1817 signing of the Rush-Bagot Treaty, leading to the post-War of 1812 demilitarization of the Great Lakes and the eventual creation of the longest undefended border in the world. The “undefended” part may become a casualty of Sept. 11, 2001. But history can never erase the fact that Canadians have had an obstructed front seat on a great civilization of the second millennium. Ours is pretty good, too. And the bicentennial of the War of 1812 is an appropriate time to reflect, collectively, proudly, on why our forebears clung to their desire for an independent nation to the north of the United States...

Ronen Bergman: A State is Born in Palestine

Ronen Bergman is a senior political and military analyst for the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. He is at work on a book about the history of the Mossad.

Susan Orlean: Why German Shepherds Have Had Their Day

Susan Orlean is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author, most recently, of “Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend.”Los AngelesSUCCESS can be a drag. You yearn for it, strive for it, and then, when it finally arrives, it sets off repercussions you never anticipated that sometimes undo that success.Take the German shepherd. Originally bred to the exacting standards of a German cavalry officer, it became one of the 20th century’s most popular working breeds. But in recent years that popularity, and the overbreeding that came with it, has driven the German shepherd into eclipse: even the police in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, who had relied on the dogs for years, recently announced they were replacing them with Belgian Malinois, because the less-popular Malinois were hardier and more reliable.But there is good news about this bad news, if you are a lover of the breed, because less visibility, especially in inspiring roles as public servants, is likely to mean less demand for the dogs. That means less reason to produce too many puppies, which is the best thing that can happen to any purebred dogs.

Diane McWhorter: Fred Shuttlesworth: Marching in King's Shadow

Diane McWhorter is the author of “Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution.”IF you recognized the name of only one of the two greats who succumbed to cancer on Wednesday, that’s perhaps because the work of the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, who died at 89 in a hospital in Birmingham, Ala., was about as low-tech as it gets.Using an operating system of unadorned bodily witness, backed by a headlong courage that often tested the grace of his God, Mr. Shuttlesworth was the key architect of the civil rights revolution’s turning-point victory in Birmingham, the mass marches of 1963. Their internationally infamous climax, the showdown between the movement’s child demonstrators and the city of Birmingham’s fire hoses and police dogs, gave President John F. Kennedy the moral authority he needed to introduce legislation to abolish legal segregation, passed after his death as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Sidney Blumenthal: Celebrating Bill Clinton's Candidacy

Sidney Blumenthal served as assistant to the president during the second term and is the author of “The Clinton Wars.”The 20th anniversary of Bill Clinton’s announcement for the presidency will be celebrated this weekend at a gathering of those involved in the 1992 campaign in Little Rock. The following article was written for the occasion.After the Gulf War, the bulls of the Senate who had regarded themselves presidents-in-waiting demurred before the astronomical popularity of President George H.W. Bush. From the cloakroom to the great newsrooms, those who decided to venture into the race were written off as “the Democratic B-team — the end-of-the-bench substitutes who get to play only when the game is presumed to be hopelessly lost,” as Newsweek reported.

Economist editors and correspondents: How War Has Changed Afghanistan

In this blog, our Asia correspondents and our Banyan columnist provide comment and analysis on Asia's political and cultural landscape. The blog takes its name from the Banyan tree, under which Buddha attained enlightenment and Gujarati merchants used to conduct business. As a general rule, the longer outsiders spend in Afghanistan the more depressed they become about the place. Though there are not many foreigners who can boast of more than a few years' experience here, the West’s decade-long adventure has made the army of diplomats, aid workers and development people positively funereal. Hardly a conversation starts without a dark-humoured joke about the ultimate failure of the NATO mission. Everyone has their own particular reason to be glum. NGO types are disinclined to see glimmers of hope as they struggle to get anything done in a country where year after year the Taliban-led insurgency has strengthened and expanded, making it progressively harder to move staff around safely. There is rarely a week when human-rights officials don’t have some cause to tear their hair out—perhaps a Taliban stoning video or the discovery that the Afghan government is viciously abusing prisoners.

William Lambers: October 5th, 1947 – A Television First To Save Europe From Starvation

William Lambers is the author of several books including Nuclear Weapons and Ending World Hunger: School Lunches for Kids Around the World which features over 50 interviews with officers from the United Nations World Food Programme.On October 5, 1947 the first presidential address ever televised from the White House was delivered by Harry Truman. The President discussed the urgent hunger crisis facing Europe and how Americans could help through food conservation.At that time Europe was struggling in its recovery from World War II. Rebuilding from the devastation was difficult enough, but a harsh winter followed by a drought during 1947 ruined crops. Food shortages were rampant and Europe needed food to survive and rebuild.President Truman said of Europe, “The nations of Western Europe will soon be scraping the bottom of the food barrel. They cannot get through the coming winter and spring without help–generous help–from the United States and from other countries which have food to spare.“I know every American feels in his heart that we must help to prevent starvation and distress among our fellow men in other countries…. Their most urgent need is food. If the peace should be lost because we failed to share our food with hungry people, there would be no more tragic example in all history of a peace needlessly lost.”...

Douglas Cox: The Noriega File

Douglas Cox is an attorney and an associate law library professor at the City University of New York School of Law. A recent decision by a French court — paving the way for the return of former dictator Gen. Manuel Noriega to Panama after more than 20 years in prisons in the United States and France — has made a long-standing question suddenly urgent: What happened to the thousands of boxes of documents U.S. forces seized during Operation Just Cause in Panama in 1989? The surprising answer, the U.S. government recently confirmed, is that the U.S. Army still has them. The United States should immediately return these documents to Panama, where they are needed not only by historians and human rights researchers but also by attorneys on both sides of legal proceedings that will follow Noriega's return. During the U.S. invasion of Panama to remove Noriega from office, American forces seized 15,000 boxes of documents from Noriega's offices and the Panamanian Defense Forces.

Adam Szostkiewicz: Poland ... 1920 And All That

Adam Szostkiewicz writes for Polityka weekly news magazine in Warsaw.   As I write, TV trailers for an epic historical drama by the veteran Polish filmmaker Jerzy Hoffman are enticing me to go and see (and in 3D) how we crushed the Bolsheviks who dared to invade Poland just two years after our young state had risen from over a century of imperial partition. Make no mistake: 1920: The Battle of Warsaw is going to be a box-office hit, even though (or perhaps because) the times are hard. There is no doubt that in cinematic terms the Battle - in fact an almost two-week-long military confrontation near Warsaw, the capital of the restored (and thus second) Polish republic - is a major achievement that does justice to a historic national event. But what exactly was at stake in 1920: whose victory was it, and who today can best claim its mantle? The questions are more than ones of historical interest. For if the events of that moment are clear enough in Polish historiography, its high symbolic status has long ensured that it would be part of a contentious “battle of memory”.

Eve Fairbanks: What's Happened to Mandela's South Africa?

Eve Fairbanks is a writer living in South Africa. It is, by now, a familiar sort of headline: "South Africa Dithers Over Dalai Lama." Dithering, it seems, has become South Africa's default gesture on foreign policy. A few months ago, the dithering was over Libya. After breaking with its emerging-market counterparts Brazil, China, India, and Russia to throw its weight behind the U.N. resolution mandating a no-fly zone to support the rebels fighting Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi, South Africa almost immediately recoiled from that support, slamming the resulting NATO campaign, balking at releasing billions of dollars in assets to the rebels, and complaining about the unceremonious way Qaddafi was chased out of Tripoli. The West "undermin[ed] the African continent's role in finding a solution," griped South African President Jacob Zuma. Before Libya, it was the Burma question.

Anthony Grafton and Jim Grossman: No More Plan B: A Very Modest Proposal for Graduate Programs in History

Anthony Grafton (Princeton Univ.) is the president of the AHA. Jim Grossman is the executive director of the AHA.Entering graduate students file in. They're nervous, they're eager, they don't know quite what to expect. If the director of graduate studies does the job well, the annual orientation ritual will nourish their anticipation, while allaying their anxieties. Still, out of a sense of responsibility, faculty should keep one source of reasonable trepidation on the table: the job market. It is what it is, and entering students need to enter with their eyes open to it.But open to what? And what is the "it" that is the job market for historians? The academy alone? That is what we say when we offer statistics on placement. That is what we say when the department placement officer proffers the annual warning that ye who enter here do so at your own peril. Most orientations include a reference—in the best cases even some focus—on "alternatives." But the default, the hope, the gold ring, is the tenure-track position.

Doug Saunders: We Live in the Most Peaceful Age Ever

Doug Saunders is the chief of the Globe and Mail's London-based European Bureau, writes the weekly Reckoning column in the Focus section as well as daily reports and weekly features on European issues and international social and political trends.  Are we living through the least violent moment in human history? Has there ever been an age, during the past 10,000 years, with fewer wars or mass killings or chances of being murdered? The answer seems, to me, almost self-evident. There are terrible wars today, but they are extremely scarce, not very intense and do not affect the lives of many people. If we assume that Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria and Somalia are all “at war” today and all their people are affected, that means that just over 2 per cent of the world’s people know war. If you add simmering events like the Western Sahara conflict, the Middle East showdown and the Mexican drug wars, you might, at a stretch, get up to 4 per cent. Never before has this been the case. Forty years ago, at least a tenth of the world appeared to be in conflict; 70 years ago, more than half the world was. Earlier, it was no better: Pre-modern history (before 1500) was exceedingly murderous and violent, followed by half a millennium when near-total war was more norm than exception.

Sean Wilentz: 20 Years Later: How Bill Clinton Saved Liberalism From Itself

Sean Wilentz is a contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of Bob Dylan in America.October 3rd marks the twentieth anniversary of Bill Clinton’s announcement of his candidacy for the presidency. The distance of time permits some perspective on what Clinton was attempting to do when he set out on his quest.Since the end of World War II, every Democrat who has sought the presidency has attempted to update the legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. In announcing his candidacy Clinton called his reformed liberalism “a new covenant.” By this he meant a revitalized connection between government and the citizenry that rejected the Reagan Republican idea of laissez-faire, but that also reemphasized what Clinton called “the solid, middle-class virtues of hard work, individual responsibility, family, community, and faith.” The phrase “new covenant” did not stick, but the idea behind it would become the guiding light of the Clinton administration for the ensuing eight years. During that time, it offered Democrats and the nation at large a reopened path to the future that had been blocked since the distempers of the late 1960s and, in particular, since the tragedies of 1968....

Robert Zaretsky: The French Intellectual Crackup

Robert Zaretsky is a professor of French history at the University of Houston. He is the author, most recently, of Albert Camus: Elements of a Life (Cornell University Press, 2010).Slightly more than 250 years ago, Jean le Rond d'Alembert, co-editor of that massive monument to the Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie, opened a letter from a friend and collaborator. Big books, announced the missive, never lead to change, much less revolution: "It's the small, portable books at 30 sous that are dangerous. If the Gospel had cost 1,200 sesterces, the Christian religion would never have been established." Few people were more qualified to speak on this topic than d'Alembert's correspondent, Voltaire. Not only was he the most prestigious contributor to the Encyclopédie, but he was also the author of hundreds of pamphlets in which he railed against the enemies of reason and tolerance.Historians will always debate the relationship between Voltaire's words—and those of his fellow philosophes—and the revolutionary events that followed soon after his death. But his remark about books large and small raises intriguing questions about intellectual life in France today.

Gilbert King: The Mysterious of the Death of Siam's Boy King

Gilbert King is a writer for Smithsonian Magazine.Ananda Mahidol was a slight and painfully shy boy. When he was nine years old in 1935, he became the eighth king of Siam and captured the hearts of his people. But his reign was painfully brief, ending in his bedroom with a single bullet fired into his head at close range. He was 20 years old. Within hours, Ananda’s 18-year-old brother, Bhumibol, ascended to the throne, where he sits today. He has ruled for 65 years, longer than any current head of state, and has amassed a fortune estimated at more than $30 billion, making him the wealthiest royal in the world. His spending on schools and hospitals, as well as on disaster relief efforts, have helped bolster his considerable popularity among his subjects. Ananda’s death, however, remains unsolved and largely unmentioned in Thailand today.