Roundup: Talking About History

Christian Caryl: The Skeletons in Deng's Closet

Christian Caryl is the Washington chief editor of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. He is also a contributing editor to Foreign Policy and a senior fellow at the MIT Center for International Studies. Deng Xiaoping is the most important 20th-century leader you know almost nothing about -- unless you're Chinese. While most people in the People's Republic are perfectly aware that Deng deserves most of the credit for lifting them out of poverty and heaving China into the ranks of the world's leading industrial nations, in the rest of the world Chairman Mao is the one on the t-shirt. No question about it: Outside of his homeland, Deng, who died in 1997, has to be the least celebrated of the modern era's most successful statesmen.   There are many reasons for this.

Jon Wiener: Pearl Harbor and 9/11 ... A Fleeting Day of Infamy

Jon Wiener teaches history at UC Irvine and writes for the Nation magazine. If you Google "Pearl Harbor and 9/11," you get more than 4 million hits. In George W.

Jim Sollisch: MLK Memorial Crushes the Poetry – and Meaning – of Martin Luther King Jr.

Jim Sollisch is creative director at Marcus Thomas Advertising.I approached the new Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington with a set of expectations.This would be a monument to the power of words as much as it would be a memorial to a man. I wanted poetry made dimensional. I wanted the cadences and rhythms of his voice to resonate through stone or water or light. “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’”This is not just one of the most famous speeches in American history, in many ways it’s our national anthem. It’s the Langston Hughes poem, “I, too, Sing America,” updated. It’s the song of a generation.

Stephen F. Hayes: Five Myths About Dick Cheney

Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer for the Weekly Standard and the author of “Cheney: The Untold Story of America’s Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President.”He’s been called Darth Vader, feared or derided as a trigger-happy, torture-loving puppet master who called the shots over the eight years of the George W. Bush White House. And now, with the publication of his memoir, “In My Time,” Dick Cheney has once again grabbed the media spotlight. But what about the former vice president is real, exaggerated, or outright myth?1. Dick Cheney ran the Bush administration.Even before George W. Bush’s presidency started, conventional wisdom held that the real locus of power in the White House was with the vice president. A few days after the Supreme Court decided Bush v. Gore, a “Saturday Night Live” skit featured Will Ferrell as Bush, lamenting that “Dick Cheney’s going to be one tough boss.”

Naveed Ahmad: Scenes From Pakistan's 9/11 Decade

Naveed Ahmad is an investigative journalist and academic focusing on diplomacy, security, energy, and democratization.

Stephen Mihm: The Biographer’s New Best Friend

Stephen Mihm is an associate professor of history at the University of Georgia and the co-author of “Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance.”LEGEND has it that the newspaper mogul Joseph Pulitzer stumbled into success, buying The New York World on a lark in 1883. But this didn’t seem right to James McGrath Morris, who began working on a biography of Pulitzer a decade ago. Pulitzer was a deliberate, calculating man; impulse purchases weren’t part of his modus operandi.Mr. Morris suspected that one place to look for countervailing evidence was the arrival notices that 19th-century newspapers would print whenever someone significant checked into a local hotel — a forerunner to the tweet, enabling friends to know someone was in town and where to find them. If Pulitzer visited New York City to check out takeover targets prior to 1883, he might surface in these mundane social announcements. The problem was, The New York Times and other papers didn’t index such quotidian matters. So scanning tens of thousands of announcements for a single name wasn’t feasible.

Lee P. Ruddin: 9/11 and the Evolution (Not Revolution) of U.S. Policy Toward Iraq

Lee P. Ruddin is Roundup Editor at HNN.  “9/11 changed U.S. foreign policy dramatically,” says Gideon Rose. The editor of Foreign Affairs made his comments in a video as part of a special Council on Foreign Relations series that explores how the events of September 11 affected international relations. While such an assertion appears incontrovertible, the historical record says otherwise. It is only right and proper, then, as we commemorate the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, that we look at how America, in Rose’s words, “unleashed … power” on the Middle East generally and Iraq specifically, pre- and post-2001.   Do not get me wrong, Rose is spot on when he refers to “domestic political constraints” being lifted after the felling of the World Trade Center towers and part of the Pentagon building. Indeed, I find the former Clinton official’s argument that 9/11 forced the American people and the legislative branch to present the executive one with a “blank check”, thoroughly convincing. For all James M. Lindsay’s similarly-persuasive talk (in James P. Pfiffner and Roger H.

Tom Engelhardt: Let’s Cancel 9/11 and Bury the War State's Blank Check at Sea

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s as well as The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, The United States of Fear (Haymarket Books), will be published in November. Let's bag it.I’m talking about the tenth anniversary ceremonies for 9/11, and everything that goes with them: the solemn reading of the names of the dead, the tolling of bells, the honoring of first responders, the gathering of presidents, the dedication of the new memorial, the moments of silence.  The works.

Stanley Kutler: How Not to Commemorate 9/11

Stanley Kutler is the author of “The Wars of Watergate” and other writings.We fashionably compress our commemorations of 9/11 events into a neat triangle to include the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.  But in accepting this, we terribly distort our history, for any link between 9/11, the present Afghanistan War and the Iraq War is patently false.  To perpetuate the deceits of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney is only to delude ourselves.  The attack on America did not legitimate the foreign policy debacles that have hobbled us for much of the past decade.The American response in Afghanistan to the aerial assault of September 2001 was proper if it were limited to the overthrow of a regime that harbored the nation’s avowed enemies and designed to capture the perpetrators themselves.  But the decade-long quagmire of the Afghanistan War (with more casualties to come and with further devastation to our economy) has little justification for the nation’s strategic or tactical needs.  The original rationale for the war is long forgotten, yet it is now justified as part of a forever, ever-widening “War on Terror.”

Julian Bond and Jeanne Theoharis: History is paying for access denied to Parks’ papers

Julian Bond is a professor of history at the University of Virginia and a distinguished scholar in residence at American University. Jeanne Theoharis is professor of political science at Brooklyn College. She is writing a biography of Rosa Parks that is to be published next year. They wrote this for the Washington Post.Rosa Parks gave the first installment of her papers to Wayne State University’s Walter Reuther Library in 1976, explaining, “I do hope that my contribution can be made use of.”Thirty-five years later, nobody is making use of the rest of her papers.After her death in 2005, all of her effects and the rights to license her name became the subject of a dispute between Parks’ nieces and nephews and the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development, which she co-founded in 1987 with longtime friend Elaine Steele.In 2007, a Michigan probate court awarded custody of Parks’ possessions to Guernsey’s Auctioneers and instructed that the collection be sold in its entirety to a single buyer, with the proceeds from the sale divided, in an undisclosed settlement, between the litigating parties.

Andrew Sullivan: Did Osama Win?

Andrew Sullivan, former editor of The New Republic, weekly columnist for the Sunday Times of London, brought his hugely popular blog, The Dish, to the Daily Beast in 2011. He's the author of several books, including Virtually Normal, Love Undetectable, and The Conservative Soul. There was a perfunctory knock on my door before a friend rushed in to wake me up. “They’ve attacked the World Trade Center,” he yelled, looming suddenly above my bed. “They already did that,” I groggily responded. “You’ve got to get up!” he shouted as he rushed back out the door. And I actually went back to sleep. An hour later, rousing myself, I made my way to the laptop and saw a photo of a flash of fire near the top of one of the Twin Towers on AOL’s welcome screen. I suddenly realized it had not been a bomb but a plane. No: two planes. I ran over to my friend’s. And as I watched his television, video footage of the second plane, entering the tower like a diver slipping ripple-free into a pool, kept playing.

Bret Stephens: 9/11 and the Struggle for Meaning

Bret Stephens is the foreign-affairs columnist of the Wall Street Journal. December 7, 1951, came and went with scant ceremony. Harry Truman spent the day vacationing in Key West. Alben Barkley gave a speech in Honolulu in which he defended the war in Korea. Time magazine skipped the Pearl Harbor anniversary altogether: Its cover story that week was a lengthy profile of DeWitt and Lila Wallace. The Daily Double goes to the reader who can identify Barkley or the Wallaces without first turning to Google. Compare that to the wall-to-wall attention being given to the 10th anniversary of 9/11. Leon Panetta will speak at the Washington National Cathedral on Friday. President Obama will speak there Sunday, after visits to the three memorial sites in Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York. The World Trade Center memorial plaza will open to the families of the victims.

John Yoo: Ten Years Without an Attack

Mr. Yoo is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was an official in the Justice Department from 2001-03, and is co-editor of Confronting Terror: 9/11 and the Future of American National Security, just published by Encounter Books. Ten years ago this week, I switched on the TV in my Justice Department office and saw United Flight 175 destroy one of the World Trade Center towers. Shortly thereafter, American Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. One of the passengers on board was my friend Barbara Olson, a noted author and political commentator, who called from the plane to warn us. Only the brave Americans on United Flight 93 over Pennsylvania prevented a fourth plane from reaching D.C. As I left a deserted Washington that night, I witnessed the unbelievable—our capital's dark sky lit up by a burning Pentagon. But in the decade to follow, the most incredible thing to happen was this: nothing. After 9/11, terrorism experts inside and outside the government all agreed that more attacks would come. The coordinated hijackings revealed our open society's vulnerability and displayed the resources, sophistication and determination of a deadly enemy.

Richard Cohen: Sept. 11 ... The Day That Never Ends

Richard Cohen is a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post. The teacher stands before a class of young men. He is flanked by open windows. A military parade passes outside the school, and martial music fills the classroom. The teacher, Mr. Kantorek, is exhorting his students to enlist. “I believe it will be a quick war,” he says, “and there will be few losses.” It is 1914, the war lasted four years, and the losses were staggering. This is how the movie “All Quiet on the Western Front” begins. So did Sept. 11, 2001. We are just a few days short of the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that caused an enormous loss of life and a horror that is still emotionally unmanageable. I was in Lower Manhattan that day, and for a long time afterward the sad, damp wail of bagpipes — the inevitable “Danny Boy” and “Amazing Grace” — suffused the island, funeral after funeral after funeral.

Niall Ferguson: What If 9/11 Had Never Happened?

Niall Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard University and a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. He is also a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford University, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His latest book, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, was published in November. How different would the world be today if there had been no 9/11? What if the attacks had been foiled or bungled? One obvious answer is that Americans would probably care a lot less than they do about the rest of the world. Back on the eve of destruction, in early September 2001, only 13 percent of Americans believed that the U.S. should be “the single world leader.” And fewer than a third favored higher defense spending. Now those figures are naturally much higher. Right? Wrong.

Eric Trager: Why Does the Mideast Buy 9/11 Conspiracies?

Eric Trager, the Ira Weiner fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, is a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is writing his dissertation on Egyptian opposition parties. The 9/11 attacks catalyzed a tremendous shift in American foreign policy in the Middle East. Rather than prioritizing petrol, Washington targeted terrorist organizations, dethroned a dictator, and lobbied throughout the region for liberalization. Yet despite the billions of dollars spent policing Baghdad and protecting Benghazi, the unpopularity of the United States in the Arab world continues to be fueled by the belief that Islamist terrorists had nothing to do with 9/11, with many claiming the attacks were an American, Israeli, or joint American-Israeli conspiracy.

Andrew Roberts: Secrets of Nazi Secretaries

Historian Andrew Roberts' latest book, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, was published in the U.S. in May. His previous books include Masters and Commanders and A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900. Dr. Roberts is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Brunhilde Pomsel, Joseph Goebbels’s former secretary, has finally, at age 100, broken a 66-yearlong vow of silence and spoken to the German magazine Der Bild about her old boss.

David J. Rothkopf: The Black Hole of 9/11

David J. Rothkopf blogs for Foreign Policyandis the author of Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power.His next book, due out in early 2012, is Power, Inc.: The Epic Rivalry Between Big Business and Government—and the Reckoning That Lies Ahead. Recently, I've started to get calls from reporters doing pieces on the upcoming 10th anniversary of 9/11. The thrust of the conversations is the same: How were we changed by that watershed moment? But in responding to their questions and mulling the question in my head, I keep coming back to the same conclusion: 9/11, for all its tragic and heroic drama, is an easy event to overestimate. Indeed, we have been overestimating its significance since almost the moment it happened.

Eve Weinbaum and Rachel Roth: Beyond suffrage: How far have women come since?

Eve Weinbaum is director of the Labor Center and an associate professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Rachel Roth is director of communications and foundation support at the National Network of Abortion Funds and the author of a book on women's rights.

Thomas J. Craughwell: Remembering Ireland and Fighting for the Union

Thomas J.