text: This is where we excerpt articles about history that appear in the media. Among the subjects included on this page are: anniversaries of historical events, legacies of presidents, cutting-edge research, and historical disputes. Steven Shapin: How uses, not innovations, drive human technology
  Elizabeth Song: A different sort of July 4th
  Greg Lockhart: The Minefield ... An Australian Tragedy in America's Vietnam War
  Tessa Morris-Suzuki: Who Was Responsible ... From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbor
  Trudy Kuehner: Teaching About the Military in American History
  David Satter: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union
  Priscilla J. McMillan: A Word About Lee Harvey Oswald
  Mother Jones Magazine: 30th Anniversary of Mass Arrests at Seabrook, NH, Anti-Nuclear Rally
  Amity Shlaes: Why should we celebrate the New Deal?
  Charles Culbertson: Gun might have altered outcome of Civil War
  Jerome Cohen: An anniversary worth remembering ... Mao's crackdown on intellectuals
  Tony Platt, Alexandra Stern: It's time to stop honoring the leaders of the eugenics movement Richard Labunski: Madison and Mozart ... June 1788
  Merlin Chowkwanyun: How Oprah was taken in by a slavery myth
  Chester Finn: Why national academic standards are needed
  Michael Gerson: Unchained by Idealism-The 200th anniversary of history's end of the British slave trade
  Thurgood Marshall Showed What `Justice' Means
  Nouri Al-Maliki: America had its civil war. Why expect freedom to come easy to Iraq?
  Steven Shapin: How uses, not innovations, drive human technology
  The technologies that we have available substantially define who we are. The nineteenth-century Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle didn't much like the new industrial order, but he did understand the substantive relationship between human beings and their technologies: "Man is a Tool-using Animal. . . . Nowhere do you find him without Tools; without Tools he is nothing, with Tools he is all." Seen in this light, my kitchen is a technological palimpsest. Even the older items were once innovations—like my Brown Betty teapot, whose design goes back to the seventeenth century but which is still produced in England, not having been significantly improved on since. And even the newest items contain design or functional elements from the past, such as the QWERTY keyboard of my laptop, patented in 1878. The way we think about technology tends to elide the older things, even though the texture of our lives would be unrecognizable without them. And when we do consider technology in...
  Friday, June 29, 2007 - 15:53
  SOURCE: National Review Online (6-29-07)
  Two years ago, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough told the U.S. Senate that American History was our nation's worst subject in school. The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (a.k.a., "our Nation's Report Card"), released last month, bears that out again. Our children do worse in American history than they do in reading or math. McCullough testified we were facing the prospect of national amnesia, saying, "Amnesia of society is just as detrimental as amnesia for the...
  Friday, June 29, 2007 - 15:21
  SOURCE: Daily Pennsylvanian (student newspaper) (6-28-07)
  [Elizabeth Song is a College junior from Clemmons, N.C.]
  In Philadelphia's graveyards, history comes alive. Take a stroll through the cobble-stoned heart of Old City, and you'll find some of America's earliest burial grounds.
  Christ Church Burial Ground is one of these. On the corner of 5th and Arch streets, the church's property holds the graves of seven signers of the Declaration of Independence, including that of Benjamin Franklin.
  Franklin's grave is littered with pennies from well-wishers - $3,000 a year's worth, according to Tourism Director Anne McLaughlin.
  Philadelphia mayors, numerous naval notables and medicinal pioneers occupy some of the 4,000 or so grave sites - along with female domestics, merchants, slaves and infant children. The burial ground's youngest member is Edward Roberts (just three hours old), and its eldest member lived to be over a century. Burial ground coordinator John Hopkins, who has devoted...
  Thursday, June 28, 2007 - 21:33
  SOURCE: Japan Focus (6-10-07)
  [Greg Lockhart is a former army officer, turned Vietnam literary scholar and translator. His book, The Minefield: An Australian Tragedy in Vietnam was published in May 2007 by Allen & Unwin of Australia.]
  In Vietnam, the purpose of Graham's 'barrier' was to separate and to shield Phuoc Tuy's most densely populated villages in the southwestern District of Long Dat from his enemy'...
  Thursday, June 28, 2007 - 19:15
  SOURCE: Japan Focus (6-19-07)
  [Tessa Morris-Suzuki is Professor of Japanese History, Convenor of the Division of Pacific and Asian History in the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University, and a Japan Focus associate. Her book Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan's Cold War has just been published at Rowman & Littlefield ]
  When, in mid-2005, Japan's Yomiuri newspaper began to publish a series of articles on the question of "war responsibility", the event attracted nationwide and even international interest. Now the newspaper series has become a book, published in a two-volume version in Japanese and in a one-volume abridged English translation entitled Who Was Responsible? From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbour. There can be no doubt that these publications mark an important moment in the long and vexed history of East Asia's "history wars" – the ongoing conflicts between Japan and its neighbors (particularly China and both Koreas) about memory of and responsibility for...
  Thursday, June 28, 2007 - 18:47
  On March 24–25, 2007 FPRI's Marvin Wachman Fund for International Education hosted 44 teachers from 23 states across the country for a weekend of discussion on teaching about the Military in U.S. history. The Institute was held at and co-sponsored by the Cantigny First Division Museum in Wheaton, Ill. It was webcast to registrants worldwide (see www.fpri.org/education/militaryushistory for videocasts and texts of lectures).The History Institute for Teachers is co-chaired by David Eisenhower and Walter A. McDougall and made possible by a grant from the Annenberg Foundation. Future history weekends include Teaching Military History: Why and How, also to be held at and co-sponsored by the First Division Museum.Paul Herbert, Ph.D., Colonel, US Army (Ret.), Executive Director of the Cantigny First Division Foundation, welcomed participants to Cantigny. The Museum grounds were provided by the estate of Robert McCormick, editor-owner of the...
  Thursday, June 28, 2007 - 17:31
  SOURCE: Foreign Policy Research Institute (6-1-07)
  [David Satter is Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of Age of Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union (Yale 2001) and Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State (Yale, 2004). This essay is based on his presentation at Living Without Freedom: A History Institute for Teachers sponsored by FPRI's Marvin Wachman Fund for International Education, May 5–6, 2007, held at and co-sponsored by the National Constitution Center and the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia. FPRI's History Institute program is chaired by David Eisenhower and Walter A. McDougall and receives core support from the Annenberg Foundation. The program on Living without Freedom was supported by a grant from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.]
  Not all the mechanisms of repression in unfree societies are violent. People can be conditioned to obey, and once the proper conditions have been put in place, the influence of mass...
  Thursday, June 28, 2007 - 17:23
  SOURCE: Washington Decoded (6-11-07)
  [Priscilla J. McMillan is the author of Marina and Lee (Harper & Row, 1977), and more recently, The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race (Viking, 2005).]
  Oswald was a believing Marxist, and his motive was to strike the deadliest blow he could imagine at capitalism in the United States. Oswald had been headed that way most of his sentient life. He had, by his account, become seriously interested in politics at fifteen or sixteen, when someone on a street corner in the Bronx handed him a leaflet about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been executed two years earlier as spies for the Soviet Union. At eighteen, huddled in his...
  Wednesday, June 27, 2007 - 20:44
  SOURCE: Photo Essay at Mother Jones (Click on the SOURCE link to view the photos.) (5-4-07)
  On April 30th, 1977, a rag tag army of 2,400 people descended, marching and singing, on Seabrook, New Hampshire, to protest the building of a new nuclear power station.
  Inspired by the civil rights movement and mentored by the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group, the "Clamshell Alliance," a small group of local activists, had trained the crowd to express their collective frustration with the powerful nuclear lobby. The tactic was non-violent civil disobedience. A "Village Square" was established on the grounds of the plant to encourage education, discussion, and resistance to the nuclear industry. A legislative assembly was formed and passed ordinances banning nuclear power and the transportation of waste "in town's limits." Toilets were installed, tents pitched, and by 10 pm, respecting their self-imposed curfew, the Clams went to sleep.
  The Clamshell had structured the crowd into "affinity groups...
  Wednesday, June 27, 2007 - 19:15
  SOURCE: WSJ (6-25-07)
  [Miss Shlaes, a Bloomberg columnist and visiting senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is author of the just-published "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression" (HarperCollins), from which this is adapted.]
  Yet concerning Schlesinger's own period of study, the 1930s, there has been curiously little argument. The American consensus is Schlesinger's consensus: that FDR saved democracy from fascism by co-opting the left and far right with his alphabet programs. Certainly, an observer might criticize various aspects of the period, but scrutiny of the New Deal edifice in its entirety is something that ought to be postponed for another era -- or so we learned long ago. Indeed, to take...
  Wednesday, June 27, 2007 - 15:12
  SOURCE: http://www.newsleader.com (6-26-07)
  From the death notice that appeared in the Staunton Spectator, you'd never have known there was anything special about Lorenzo Sibert, who died Sept. 25, 1881:
  Interestingly, Sibert...
  Tuesday, June 26, 2007 - 20:56
  SOURCE: WSJ (6-26-07)
  [Mr. Cohen is a New York University law professor specializing on China and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.]
  Yet a third major event of modern Chinese history -- the "antirightist movement" of 1957-58 -- is being publicly ignored in both the mainland and Hong Kong, despite its impact on millions of Chinese intellectuals and the course of their country's development, and despite its...
  Tuesday, June 26, 2007 - 20:34
  Tony Platt, Alexandra Stern: It's time to stop honoring the leaders of the eugenics movement SOURCE: San Francisco Chronicle (6-10-07)
  Many communities around the country are grappling with what to do about schools, buildings, monuments and public places named after Confederate heroes or people who profited off slavery and racism. The University of Colorado renamed a residence hall after it came to light that the original honoree had participated in a 19th century massacre of American Indians. Brown University did a thorough study of the "grievous crimes" committed by its founders who owned slaves or...
  Tuesday, June 26, 2007 - 19:16
  Richard Labunski: Madison and Mozart ... June 1788
  SOURCE: http://www.courier-journal.com (6-22-07)
  [Richard Labunski is a journalism professor at the University of Kentucky and author of "James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights." (www.richardlabunski.com)]
  June is not just a time to celebrate the beginning of summer. It is an occasion to remember two extraordinary individuals -- one practicing the art of politics, the other the art of music -- who during this month in 1788 changed the world for the better.
  James Madison, the shy intellectual from Virginia who was small in stature and had a thin voice, battled the charismatic Patrick Henry for three weeks beginning June 2 at the Virginia Ratifying Convention in a sweltering converted theater in downtown Richmond. The 170 delegates, who had been elected by the people, were closely divided over whether the most populous state should approve the Constitution and join the union.
  Henry and other Anti-Federalists believed the...
  Tuesday, June 26, 2007 - 18:47
  SOURCE: New Republic (6-13-07)
  [Merlin Chowkwanyun is a PhD student in history at the University of Pennsylvania.]
  It seemed like just another harmless moment on daytime TV: Oprah Winfrey
  began an"Ask Dr. Oz" segment with the physician Mehmet Oz, and the two
  arrived at the subject of excessive sweating. Oz cited high blood pressure
  as a major cause and then asked Winfrey if she knew why black Americans
  experienced hypertension at disproportionate rates.
  No problem so far. But then Winfrey answered Oz's question by reviving
  what scholars have called the"slavery hypothesis" of hypertension. Black
  Americans, that thesis holds, experience greater rates of hypertension
  today because those slaves most likely to survive the brutal journey to
  the New World had bodily constitutions that retained higher amounts of
  sodium; with more sodium, they were likelier to survive ailments related
  to salt- and water-deprivation that often resulted in death. But, while
  sodium-retention became an adaptive trait that helped many...
  Tuesday, June 26, 2007 - 18:21
  SOURCE: Education Week & Gadfly (6-22-07)
  The United States isn't the only land where primary-secondary schooling was traditionally the responsibility of the states or provinces, while the national government played a minor, even peripheral role. Nor are we the only people now struggling to adapt that old decentralized arrangement to the realities of the 21st century, with its globalizing economy, rising mobility, instant communications, and ebbing affection for local idiosyncrasy--and agonizing over what mechanisms might best yield a measure of high-standard uniformity and accountability without shackling schools and educators to a deadening, politically vulnerable, bureaucratic sameness. That something needs to change is clearer every day, as we observe the peculiar risks and odd incentives of a policy regimen in which states set their own standards and tests--and pay for the lion's share of education costs--even as they are held to account by Washington for their performance and told what to do with poorly...
  Friday, June 22, 2007 - 06:07
  SOURCE: Washington Post (6-20-07)
  The trade had been developed and expanded by the most enlightened and culturally progressive nations of Europe. Investors over the years included Isaac Newton, John Locke, the British royal family and the Church of England. Little stigma was attached to this mainstream form of commerce in the late 18th...
  Wednesday, June 20, 2007 - 13:32
  SOURCE: The Hartford Courant (6-13-07)
  Forty years ago, on June 13, 1967, President Lyndon Johnson strode into the Rose Garden for a news conference, accompanied by a tall, distinguished black man.
  "I shall send to the Senate this afternoon," Johnson said, "the nomination of Mr. Thurgood Marshall to the position of associate justice of the Supreme Court. ... He is best qualified by training and by very valuable service to the country. I believe it is the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place." Marshall was then best known for his role as an architect of Brown v. Board of Education and the effort to overturn legal segregation.
  But what both Marshall and Johnson understood was that that struggle was never only about blacks but about the soul and future of our country.
  During his quarter-century on the court, Marshall advanced a jurisprudence of freedom, opportunity and justice that improved the lives of all Americans. He...
  Wednesday, June 13, 2007 - 21:15
  SOURCE: Washington DeCoded (6-13-07)
  [Priscilla J. McMillan is the author of Marina and Lee (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), and more recently, The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race (New York: Viking, 2005).] After decades of speculation about a grassy knoll, the Zapruder film, and an acoustical tape, the man behind it all is too often overlooked. Lee Oswald was not a cardboard figure but a human being, and although he had barely turned twenty-four at the time he killed President Kennedy, he had a motive.
  Oswald was a believing Marxist, and his motive was to strike the deadliest blow he could imagine at capitalism in the United States. Oswald had been headed that way most of his sentient life. He had, by his account, become seriously interested in politics at fifteen or sixteen, when someone on a street corner in the Bronx handed him a leaflet about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been executed two years earlier as spies for the Soviet Union. At...
  Wednesday, June 13, 2007 - 16:30
  SOURCE: WSJ Opinion Journal (6-13-07)
  Our struggle in Iraq is similar to the great American quest, and is perhaps even more complicated. As your country was fighting that great contest over its unity and future, Iraq was a province of an Ottoman empire steeped in backwardness and ignorance. A half a century later, the British began an occupation of Iraq and drew the borders of contemporary Iraq as we know them today. Independence brought no relief to the...