Roundup: Talking About History

Robert Dallek: Untold Story of the Bay of Pigs

Robert Dallek is a presidential historian. 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.

Guy Sorman: Is Islam Compatible with Capitalism?

Guy Sorman, a City Journal contributing editor, is the author of Children of Rifaa: In Search of a Moderate Islam and many other books. The moment you arrive at the airport in Cairo, you discover how little Egypt—the heart of Arab civilization—is governed by the rule of law. You line up to show your passport to the customs officer; you wait and wait and wait. Eventually, you reach the officer . . . who sends you to the opposite end of the airport to buy an entry visa. The visa costs 15 U.S. dollars; if you hand the clerk $20, though, don’t expect any change, let alone a receipt. Then you make the long hike back to the customs line, where you notice that some Egyptians—important ones, apparently—have helpers who hustle them through. Others cut to the front. It’s an annoying and disturbing welcome to a chaotic land, one that has grown only more chaotic since the January revolution. It’s also instructive, effectively demonstrating why it’s hard to do business in this country or in other Arab Muslim lands, where personal status so often trumps fair, universally applied rules.

Donald W. Livingston: David Hume ... The First Conservative

Donald W. Livingston is professor of philosophy at Emory University and the author of Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy. The conservative political tradition is usually thought to begin with Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke observed that the Revolution did not aim at reforming society but at overturning the entire social and political order and replacing it with one grounded in man’s natural “reason.” He offered this quote from a leader in the National Assembly: “All the establishments in France crown the unhappiness of the people: to make them happy they must be renewed, their ideas, their laws, their customs, words changed … destroy everything; yes destroy everything; then everything is to be renewed.” Burke saw that total criticism demands total transformation, which demands total control.

Michael Cox: 9/11 Anniversary ... From Empire to Decline

Professor Michael Cox is an Associate Fellow, Americas, Chatham House, and Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics. Having seen off the Soviet Union ten years earlier, and having then experienced what can only be viewed as one of the more successful economic decades in its over two hundred year history, America at the start of the new millennium looked to be riding high in an international system where it clearly faced challenges and problems but no serious threat worthy of the name. So powerful did it in fact seem that few could even remember that rather anxious little moment just before the end of the Cold War when writers like Paul Kennedy had been talking earnestly about the republic's inevitable decline over the longer term. A nation with deficits as large as the US, and carrying the imperial burden that it did, simply could not go on running the world's affairs.

Rick Perlstein: What Did Nixon Say?

Rick Perlstein is the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. Last month, a federal court ruled that the testimony Richard Nixon made to the Watergate grand jury in the summer of 1975 should be unsealed and released to the public. The decision has the potential to settle finally the question of whether the nation's 37th president was a criminal. The grand jury testimony, which Nixon gave in San Clemente, was the only time in history he was required by law to be honest about Watergate. And now we will know what he said. While Nixon was president he refused to testify at the trials of Watergate conspirators or before the Senate Select Committee investigating Watergate. The Constitution, he insisted, forbade it.

David Clay Large: The Games the Nazis Played

David Clay Large, a professor of history at Montana State University, is the author of “Nazi Games” and the forthcoming “Munich 1972.”FEW Olympics are as famous as the 1936 Berlin Games, whose 75th anniversary falls this month. The publicity that accompanied the competition, held under the watchful eye of Adolf Hitler, supposedly tamed the Nazi regime, if only temporarily — a story that has since justified awarding the Games to places like Soviet Moscow, Beijing and Sochi, Russia, host of the 2014 Winter Olympics.But much of that story is myth. Indeed, the Olympics gave the Nazis a lesson in how to hide their vicious racism and anti-Semitism, and should offer today’s International Olympic Committee a cautionary tale when considering the location of future events.When the committee awarded the Olympics to Berlin in 1931, Hitler was not yet in power. But by 1936 there was little question that anti-Semitism and racism lay at the heart of the Nazi ideology: the so-called Nuremberg Laws, which codified policies to isolate Jews and other minorities from German life, had been approved the year before....

Joseph A. McCartin: The Strike That Busted Unions

Joseph A. McCartin, an associate professor of history at Georgetown University, is the author of the forthcoming “Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike That Changed America.”THIRTY years ago today, when he threatened to fire nearly 13,000 air traffic controllers unless they called off an illegal strike, Ronald Reagan not only transformed his presidency, but also shaped the world of the modern workplace.More than any other labor dispute of the past three decades, Reagan’s confrontation with the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, or Patco, undermined the bargaining power of American workers and their labor unions. It also polarized our politics in ways that prevent us from addressing the root of our economic troubles: the continuing stagnation of incomes despite rising corporate profits and worker productivity.By firing those who refused to heed his warning, and breaking their union, Reagan took a considerable risk. Even his closest advisers worried that a major air disaster might result from the wholesale replacement of striking controllers. Air travel was significantly curtailed, and it took several years and billions of dollars (much more than Patco had demanded) to return the system to its pre-strike levels....

Gideon Rachman: Beware the Guns of August

Gideon Rachman was appointed Chief Foreign Affairs Columnist and an Associate Editor of the Financial Times in July 2006.By the time this column is published I will be on holiday in France, and the US might finally have stepped back from the abyss of debt default.Viewed from Europe, the American financial uproar is baffling. It is not just the entirely avoidable nature of the crisis. It is also its timing. The entire European political calendar is constructed around the idea that nothing ever happens – or should be allowed to happen – in August.The drama that surrounded the emergency eurozonesummit in Brussels in late July was partly caused by the threat of financial chaos, if Greece was not lent more money. But an unstated reason for the sense of urgency of the leaders around the conference table was a desperate desire to get a deal wrapped up – before the holiday season began in earnest.

Lee P. Ruddin: Remembering the Birth of the CSS Alabama 150 Years On

Lee P. Ruddin is Roundup Editor at HNN.  The Atlantic alliance has been forged anew with the Obamas’ recent state visit to the UK. While the ceremonial side of things including a 41-gun salute was to be expected, the Prime Minister and President serving up barbecued sausages in Downing Street’s newly acquired ‘Rose Garden’ and high-fiving during a game of ping-pong in south London was certainly not. Neither was the phrase ‘special relationship’ expected to crop up in virtually every speech and interview during the forty-fourth president’s two-day stay, and yet it did, which signals that the romance is back on track after the rocky patch during Gordon Brown’s premiership.

Johann N. Neem: Why We Should Teach National History in a Global Age

Johann N. Neem is an associate professor of history at Western Washington University and the author of Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts (Harvard University Press, 2008). This article was adapted from a longer essay, "American History in a Global Age," which appeared in the February 2011 issue of History and Theory.Americans face a unique challenge today in defining their identities. Globalizing markets have connected us with faraway peoples and places, allowing us to buy cheap goods manufactured in nations with limited labor and environmental protections. Globalization has also spurred heavy migration and a demand for freer international trade. Our identities may follow markets, reducing the centrality of the nation-state in our lives.Is it a good thing for our identities to be globalized? I would argue no. Progressive politics, including the redistribution of wealth between the well-off and the less so, is predicated on a coherent and vibrant nationalism. Paradoxically, in an age of globalization, our schools must make Americans more aware of their connections to the world while reinvigorating the teaching of our national history.

Michael Cohen: The Best and Worst Foreign Policy Presidents of the Past Century

Michael Cohen is a Senior Fellow at the American Security Project. He is currently writing a book on the 1968 presidential election.  Who were the best and worst presidents in American history? It's the sort of barstool conversation bandied about amateur historian and policy nerds like myself on a semi-regular basis. But as this question has come up in recent weeks around the blogosphere it got me thinking about a slightly more discrete question: Who are the best and worst foreign policy presidents of the last 100 years?After reaching out to host of historians, foreign policy experts, academics and various think tankers here's one stab at answering a question which, in many respects, has no right answer. How you choose the best and worst foreign policy President depends in large measure on what values inform your vision of what a good foreign policy looks like. If you're a foreign policy idealist, Wilson would seem pretty good; a foreign policy realist; you might cast a vote for George H.W Bush or even Richard Nixon.

Tony Dokoupil: Madman in Chief

Tony Dokoupil co-writes the "Research Report" column for the Columbia Journalism Review. His writing has also appeared in Newsweek International, Newsweek, Radar, New York Press, and Publisher's Weekly, among other publications. He's a Ph.D candidate in communications at Columbia Journalism School.     By now, the 2012 Republican presidential contenders have all been tattooed by the opposition, branded as boring, damaged, or even insane. The entire GOP is “barking mad,” as The New Republic recently put it, and the party’s White House hopefuls display what The New Yorker calls “crackles of craziness.” This kind of talk flows both ways, of course.

David Anderson: It's Not Just Kenya. Squaring up to the Seamier Side of Empire is Long Overdue

David Anderson is professor of African politics at the University of Oxford and a fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. He is also the author of Histories of the Hanged: Britain's Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire. . History teaches us that empire can bring out the worst in people. In Britain we applaud the "civilising mission" of our imperial past, but are less happy to acknowledge the violence and brutality that so often girded our imperial endeavour. It is time we were more honest. As a nation Brits nurture memories of empire that are deceptively cosy, swathed in a warm, sepia-tinted glow of paternalistic benevolence. The British empire, so the story goes, brought progress to a primitive and savage world.

James Wizeye: To Claim Tutsis Caused Rwanda's Genocide is Pure Revisionism

James Wizeye is first secretary at the Rwanda high commission, London.. . Despite their claims not to be deniers and revisionists, Edward Herman and David Peterson's assertions on the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis of Rwanda depict a deliberate effort to rewrite and revise the history of the slaughter (Response: We're not genocide deniers. We just want to uncover the truth, 19 July). "Our work reallocates the primary responsibility for the genocide of April-July 1994, away from the standard account's 'conspiracy to commit genocide' by 'Hutu Power', towards Tutsi leader Paul Kagame and his superior armed forces," they state.

Stephen Ellis: Mandela, Communism, and South Africa

Stephen Ellis is Desmond Tutu professor in the social sciences at the Free University Amsterdam, and a senior researcher at the African Studies Centre, University of Leiden.

Jewish Daily Forward: Liberate the Letter, Pt 2

On October 26, 1960, just days before Election Day, the two candidates for president issued statements commemorating the 170th anniversary of George Washington’s letter on religious pluralism to the Jews of Newport, R.I. The Republican, Vice President Richard Nixon, delivered his remarks in person, quoting from the letter’s definition of “toleration” and noting with pride that “after 170 years this letter still inspires us.” The Democrat, John F. Kennedy, could not attend and sent Eleanor Roosevelt to represent him. She referenced a different excerpt of the letter, its most famous, extolling the fact that America “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”The 221st anniversary will be celebrated this August in Newport with a public reading of the letter; the governor of Rhode Island is scheduled to attend. But the honored guests won’t read from the original letter, because no one can read from the original letter. As the Forward has reported, it is locked up in an arts storage facility in suburban Maryland, and the private foundation that owns the iconic document has refused to allow it to be publicly shown and refused to say why.

Aaron Friedberg: The Unrealistic Realist

Aaron Friedberg is a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University. His latest book, A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia, has just been published by W.W. Norton.On China By Henry Kissinger (Penguin, 586 pp., $36)Henry Kissinger may be the most influential figure in the making of American foreign policy since the end of World War II, and he is certainly the most prolific. Since stepping down as secretary of state in 1977, Kissinger has written eight books, totaling more than seven thousand pages and several million words. And this is to say nothing of the five books he wrote before attaining high office, and the innumerable articles, essays, and speeches he has produced since. Like the man himself, these works are ambitious, prolix, self-serving, and at times brilliant.

Nicholas de Monchaux: The Spirit of the Spacesuit

Nicholas de Monchaux, an assistant professor of architecture and urban design at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of “Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo.”...If the dazzling image of midcentury spaceflight obscures its dark origins, close scrutiny of the Apollo spacesuit reveals a different and more robust approach to innovation — one that should inspire us at this uncertain moment in space exploration.Early in the Apollo program, the conventional wisdom was that the spacesuits would be like the rockets: adamantine, metallic, armored and smooth. But repeatedly, prototypes of such suits failed under pressure. In the end, the Apollo spacesuit was made in a more unassuming fashion: needle-sewn by seamstresses taken from the shop floor of Playtex, the bra and girdle company.

Matthew Levitt: Iranian Doublespeak on the Anniversary of the AMIA Bombing

The writer directs the Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and is the author of the forthcoming book Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s ‘Party of God.’ Seventeen years ago this week, Hezbollah operatives working closely with Iranian intelligence blew up the Israeli-Argentine Mutual Association (AMIA) building in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people and wounding 300 more.

Paul Collins: How To Get Ahead in Tabloid Journalism ... Murdoch's Minions Have Nothing on the Journalists of 1897

Paul Collins teaches creative writing at Portland State University, and his latest book is The Book of William: How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered the World. Follow him on Twitter. It was 1 a.m. on a hot July night when detectives marched into the offices of the New York World. "Where's the head?"they demanded. In the summer of 1897, that question meant just one thing in Manhattan newsrooms, and it wasn't a request to meet the managing editor. The head everyone sought was of William Guldensuppe, a masseur who had disappeared in late June from his Hell's Kitchen apartment. He'd reappeared scattered in pieces along the Lower East Side, the Bronx, and Brooklyn. What was still missing, though, was his head—which, rumor had it, a jealous lover had hidden inside a block of plaster. To William Randolph Hearst, the crime was perfect opportunity to trumpet his newly launched New York Evening Journal. Hearst offered a whopping $1,000 reward to solve the crime, and even formed a "Murder Squad" of reporters who were ready to resort to flashing badges and pistols to make citizen's arrests.