Roundup: Talking About History

John Lewis: What Would Martin Luther King Jr. Say To President Obama?

Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) has been a member of the House of Representatives since 1987. Forty-eight years ago Sunday, when Martin Luther King Jr. was about to make his historic speech on the National Mall, I was huddled close to the statue of Abraham Lincoln, tapping on a portable typewriter, making last-minute changes to my own speech. As the newly elected chair of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, speaking at the March on Washington was one of my first important actions. Dr. King spoke tenth; I was sixth. Today, I am the last surviving speaker from the march. When I think back on that day, and the hundreds of thousands of people who responded to the call to march on Washington, there is no question that many things have changed. Then, Martin Luther King Jr. was a controversial figure taking risks so that his voice might be heard. Today, the mere mention of his speech — and its powerful “I have a dream” refrain — evokes hope for the future, stirring memories of the past and mandates for change, but the context in which Dr.

John Thornhill: Russia's Past is No Sign of its Future

The author is a former FT Moscow bureau chief. Russians sometimes say it is impossible to predict anything in their country – even the past. The heroes of one era are airbrushed from the next. The brave advances of one leader are denounced by his successors as hare-brained schemes. It is often difficult, as Boris Pasternak once wrote, to distinguish victories from defeats. This constantly shifting historical kaleidoscope applies to the failed hardline Communist party putsch of August 1991 that rapidly led to the unravelling of the Soviet Union a few months later. Over the past 20 years, those shattering events – which led to the disintegration of an empire, an economy, an ideology and a political regime – have caused ceaseless controversy.

Robert Hopkins: Munich still haunted by Nazi-era buildings

Robert Hopkins lives in Munich.Last Sunday, I was walking from the main station in Munich to the Neue Pinakothek art gallery. But I never got there. On the way, I discovered a new detailed information board with a map showing the location of many former Nazi buildings in the area known as Maxvorstadt, to the north of the city centre, and I decided to investigate.This showed both existing buildings and the sites of buildings destroyed in the bombing raids on the city during on October 2 and 3 1943 and on January 7 1945. Nearby is another information board with details of the new Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, planned to open at the end of 2013 on the site of the former so-called Brown House, the Nazi Party HQ in the city.Naturally, such a centre will inevitably attract neo-Nazis but it is good that this did not stop those who initiated the project to go ahead, allowing people interested in knowing exactly what happened in the city in the dark days of the Thirties and Forties as the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party took control of the country.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Once Upon a Time in Westphalia

Geoffrey Wheatcroft is an English journalist and author, whose books include Yo, Blair! (Politico’s Publishing, 2007), The Strange Death of Tory England (Allen Lane, 2005) and The Controversy of Zion (PerseusBooks, 1997), which won a National Jewish Book Award .For God’s sake do not drag me into another war,” said the Reverend Sydney Smith in 1823.I am sorry for the Spaniards—I am sorry for the Greeks—I deplore the fate of the Jews; the people of the Sandwich Islands are groaning under the most detestable tyranny; Bagdad is oppressed . . . Thibet is not comfortable. . . . The world is bursting with sin and sorrow. . . . Am I . . . to be eternally raising fleets and armies to make all men good and happy?That witty and humane clergyman had lived through a time of troubles: the American rebellion followed by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, strife over more than twenty years at terrible cost to the inhabitants of the countries where war was waged, from Spain to Russia. Although the price paid by England was slight by comparison, at least in human life if not in gold, those conflicts made the very question of war—whether and why it should be waged—as lively a topic in England as it is today in America, or should be.

Samuel J. Redman: Our Last Chance to Record the Voices of New Deal Workers through Oral History

Samuel J. Redman is a Ph.D. candidate in history at UC Berkeley. He is also an academic specialist at the Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) of the Bancroft Library. At ROHO, he is the lead interviewer for the Rosie the Riveter/WWII American Homefront oral-history project. His dissertation examines the use of human remains for the purposes of research and display in the United States.

Lawrence Downes: An American Songbook

Lawrence Downes is a member of the editorial board of the New York Times.The death of Jerry Leiber, the lyricist who brought us “Stand by Me,” “Yakety Yak” and other early rock ’n’ roll classics, gives us a moment to pause and give thanks for sugar cane. Sugar cane led to a great wave of Chinese immigration to Cuba, which, through a roundabout process of musical pollination, put an idea into the heads of Mr. Leiber and his collaborator, Mike Stoller, when they were still teenagers breaking into the business in Los Angeles.The story goes like this. In the 1940s, a musician in Havana, Kiko Mendive, records “Chinito, Chinito,” about brassy Cuban girls heckling a Chinese laundryman walking down the street. The record becomes a hit, makes its way to Mexico City, then to the barrios of Los Angeles. There, a young Mexican-American bandleader, Don Tosti, records his own version — a little faster, more rocking — in 1949.

Seth Lipsky: A Missing Monument to Religious Freedom

Mr. Lipsky was editor of the Forward from 1990 to 2000. The annual reading of George Washington's letter to the Jews—which took place this weekend at the Touro Synagogue in Newport, R.I.—will echo with extra significance this year, as a campaign is now under way to make the original letter available for public viewing. The campaign was launched earlier this year by the Jewish Daily Forward after the newspaper discovered that Washington's letter—in which he vowed that the new American government would "give to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance"—is locked away in storage by an owner who is loath to share access with the rest of his countrymen. Neither the Forward nor anyone else is suggesting that the owner, who bought the letter in 1949, is not within his rights. The letter is, after all, private property. But it is also a national treasure, containing one of the greatest statements on religious liberty of all time. And the campaign to give it a public home—so it can be leaned over and read as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are—comes at a time when the free exercise of religion is increasingly constrained around the world...

Robert Dallek: Untold Story of the Bay of Pigs

Robert Dallek is the author of An Unfinished Life : John F. Kennedy, 1917 - 1963.From a transport ship floating in Cuba’s Bay of Pigs, CIA operative Grayston Lynch knew the U.S. mission to overthrow Fidel Castro was faltering. The Cuban exiles he had brought with him had abandoned their posts, so he grabbed the boat’s recoilless rifles and machine guns and began firing at the aircraft overhead.On a day of chaos and infamy in April 1961, Lynch would soon understand the consequences of his shooting. He had fired on his agency’s own planes, which were trying to protect the U.S.-led Cuban exiles invading the island from being slaughtered by Castro’s forces. “We couldn’t tell them from the Castro planes,” Lynch later explained.

Adam Winkler: The Secret History of Guns

Adam Winkler is a professor of constitutional law at UCLA law school. This article is adapted from his forthcoming book, Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America, to be published by W. W. Norton in September. The eighth-grade students gathering on the west lawn of the state capitol in Sacramento were planning to lunch on fried chicken with California’s new governor, Ronald Reagan, and then tour the granite building constructed a century earlier to resemble the nation’s Capitol. But the festivities were interrupted by the arrival of 30 young black men and women carrying .357 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns, and .45-caliber pistols.The 24 men and six women climbed the capitol steps, and one man, Bobby Seale, began to read from a prepared statement. “The American people in general and the black people in particular,” he announced, must

Edith Sheffer: Surprising lessons from the Berlin Wall, 50 years later, for the U.S. and Middle East

EDITH SHEFFER is assistant professor of history at Stanford University and author of "Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain" (Oxford University Press, September 2011).Fifty years ago, on August 13, 1961, the Berlin Wall went up overnight. It immediately became a chilling icon of political repression. Yet on its semicentennial it is time we recognize how the wall's strength came as much from concrete as from the society that supported its creation. As fortified borders proliferate around the world today, such as those between the U.S. and Mexico and the Israeli "security fence," Germany's story warns us that walls can permeate the culture with enduring and even deadly consequences.As East Germany built the Berlin Wall to stem the mass flight of East Germans to the West, it became a flash point of the Cold War standoff and of human tragedy, with daring escapes, at least 136 deaths, and divided communities, friends, and families.

Alexander Golts: The Military's Role in Defeating the Coup

Alexander Golts is deputy editor of the online newspaper Yezhednevny Zhurnal. There is an old saying about the Soviet army: After every victory, the slackers are rewarded and the heroes are punished. This expression came to mind in connection with the 20th anniversary of the 1991 coup attempt. Analysts on television and the radio talk about the standard heroes: the Muscovites who set up blockades and threw themselves at the tanks and Boris Yeltsin, then-president of the Soviet Russian Republic, who led the movement against the coup plotters. For hard-line Communists, even the conspirators are heroes to this day because they selflessly tried to save the Soviet empire from collapse, we are told. But there has been little praise for the Soviet officers who defied the coup plotters’ orders to shoot into crowds of civilians. Of course, their refusal was not necessarily based on moral principles. After all, there are plenty of instances when Soviet officers compliantly fulfilled their superiors’ orders to fire on civilians.

David Kenner: Do We Finally Know Who Killed Rafiq Hariri?

David Kenner is assistant editor at Foreign Policy. Lebanese politics, for the past six years, has in large part revolved around competing stories. In the wake of the February 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, the country's political factions have struggled to provide a more persuasive account of who killed the iconic Sunni leader and why, and how the perpetrators carried out the operation. The latest chapter in this growing opus came today, with the release of the U.N. Special Tribunal on Lebanon's long-awaited indictment. Much of this version of the story was already known. The tribunal had made public the names of the four Hezbollah members that were charged under the indictment in late July.

Stephen J. Marmon: The Star-Spangled Shores of Tripoli

Mr. Marmon reported on Congress for the New York Times. His new book, The Cheaters: America's Political Sex Scandals, will be published next year. Rebel forces in Libya raised their nation's old red, black and green banner over two more towns this week, from which they're now preparing to attack Tripoli. As they move to reclaim Libya from 40 years of tyrannical rule, we should recall that our flag was raised there two centuries ago, marking America's emergence as an international military power. After our Revolutionary War, the Barbary Coast pirates—based in Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco—were a major foreign-policy crisis for the new United States. Since the 13th century those marauders had attacked European ships in the Mediterranean, freeing crews and cargoes only after receiving ransom payments. Without the protection of the British or the French navy, American shipping began to fall prey to the pirates in 1784. More than one-fifth of U.S. trade then was with Mediterranean countries.

Lane Wallace: The Berlin Wall ... The Symbolic End of Communism's Utopian Dream

Lane Wallace is an author, pilot and entrepreneur who has written several books for NASA. She won a 2006 Telly Award for her work on the documentary, Breaking the Chain.  Fifty years ago this week, the division of Germany into East and West was, literally, etched in stone with the erection of the infamous Berlin Wall. While the wall stood, there were any number of memorials to its brutality, cost, and tragedy -- crosses and flowers marking where loved ones had been shot by the guards on the Wall, attempting to cross from East to West. Nobody, of course, tried to flee across the other way.  But to me, the one image that always best epitomized the tragedy of the wall was a poster-sized photograph I bought at the Berlin Wall when I was an exchange student in Germany in 1978.  It was taken the day the "wall" -- which was only barbed wire, to start with -- made the political border between the two halves of Berlin something more ominous. It showed a very little boy at the barbed-wire barrier, reaching his arms up toward an East German soldier, who had put his rifle over his shoulder and was reaching down, across the barbed wire, to pick up the little boy.

Dmitry Trenin: Building a Republic 20 Years After the Putsch

Dmitry Trenin is director of the Carnegie Moscow Center. His most recent book, Post-Imperium: A Eurasian Story, was published this summer. Chinese leader Zhou Enlai may have been correct when he told U.S. President Richard Nixon in 1972 that it was too early to determine the impact of the French Revolution, but 20 years is usually enough to assess the importance of most historical events. It is also sufficiently close to remember what actually happened and to feel the elapsed period. Yet three days in August 1991 that changed the course of world history are still a cause of confusion and contestation in the former Soviet Union. For most in Europe and the United States, 1991 takes a back seat to the fall of the Berlin Wall. This clearly demonstrates that what mattered to the West, then and now, was the reunification of Europe and of Germany within it. The fate of the Soviet Union itself was not an issue in the Cold War.

Peter Rutland and Philip Pomper: Stalin Caused the Soviet Collapse

Peter Rutland is a professor of government at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Philip Pomper is author of Lenin’s Brother: The Origins of the October Revolution. Twenty years after the August 1991 coup that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is worth revisiting the puzzle of the Soviet Union’s abrupt demise. Which individual more than any other should be held responsible for the Soviet collapse? The usual answers would be Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (for liberals) or U.S. President Ronald Reagan (for conservatives). But in reality, only one figure deserves the credit: Josef Stalin. Stalin is often portrayed as an evil strategic genius who took advantage of the weakness of the West and the presence of the Red Army in Berlin in 1945 to expand the Soviet empire deep into Europe. In reality, Stalin’s projection of Soviet power into Central Europe was a strategic blunder that ultimately doomed the Soviet state.

François Furstenberg: Ethan Allen Was the Founding Father of Vermont and Kind of a Greedy Jerk

Ethan Allen was at various times: reckless speculator, captain of the continent's largest paramilitary force, outlaw with a £100 bounty on his head, American Revolutionary commander, prisoner of war, best-selling author, radical Deist philosopher, and founding father of Vermont. Despite this remarkable life, and despite a time when biographies of America's Founding Fathers fall from the presses like rotten apples from a tree, in the last half-century only one full-length biography had been written about Ethan Allen. How could this be?As Ethan Allen: His Life and Times, a new and frustrating biography by Willard Sterne Randall, shows, Allen is hard to write about. He poses a challenge not so much because he is different from more famous Founders like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or Benjamin Franklin but because he resembles them perhaps a bit too much—in ways most Americans prefer not to think about.

Klaus Wiegrefe: Adenauer Wanted to Swap West Berlin for Parts of GDR

Klaus Wiegrefe writes for Der Spiegel where he has been in charge of its contemporary history section since 1997.  Former German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was known not to mince his words when it came to the Soviets and their allies.

Nina Khrushcheva: The Walls of August

Nina Khrushcheva, author of Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics, teaches international affairs at The New School and is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York. History’s milestones are rarely so neatly arrayed as they are this summer. Fifty years ago this month, the Berlin Wall was born. After some hesitation, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev allowed his East German counterpart, Walter Ulbricht, to erect a barrier between East and West Berlin in order to ensure the survival of communism in the entire Soviet bloc.

Lewis E. Lehrman: The Nixon Shock Heard 'Round the World

Mr. Lehrman is chairman of the Lehrman Institute. On the afternoon of Friday, Aug. 13, 1971, high-ranking White House and Treasury Department officials gathered secretly in President Richard Nixon's lodge at Camp David. Treasury Secretary John Connally, on the job for just seven months, was seated to Nixon's right. During that momentous afternoon, however, newcomer Connally was front and center, put there by a solicitous president. Nixon, gossiped his staff, was smitten by the big, self-confident Texan whom the president had charged with bringing order into his administration's bumbling economic policies. In the past, Nixon had expressed economic views that tended toward "conservative" platitudes about free enterprise and free markets. But the president loved histrionic gestures that grabbed the public's attention.