History Archives

Our second history lesson of the day: on the occasion of Barack Obama's acceptance of the honor, it is worth looking back to a little history. Theodore Roosevelt, the first sitting President awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, did not attend the ceremony, but sent a telegram. But TR gave a Nobel lecture in 1910 - two years after leaving office, four years after winning the prize for mediating the end of the Russo-Japanese War, and four years before the world was plunged into The Great War - and his observations on peace are worth recalling, even as he was (at the time) optimistic about the possibilities for then-nascent international institutions:

In any community of any size the authority of the courts rests upon actual or potential force: on the existence of a police, or on the knowledge that the able-bodied men of the country are both ready and willing to see that the decrees of judicial and legislative bodies are put into effect. In new and wild communities where there is violence, an honest man must protect himself; and until other means of securing his safety are devised, it is both foolish and wicked to persuade him to surrender his arms while the men who are dangerous to the community retain theirs. He should not renounce the right to protect himself by his own efforts until the community is so organized that it can effectively relieve the individual of the duty of putting down violence. So it is with nations. Each nation must keep well prepared to defend itself until the establishment of some form of international police power, competent and willing to prevent violence as between nations. As things are now, such power to command peace throughout the world could best be assured by some combination between those great nations which sincerely desire peace and have no thought themselves of committing aggressions.

And so it is today; sometimes those combinations act through international institutions like the UN, sometimes they don't - and the day is not on the horizon when we could trust such institutions with police powers of their own. Those of us who love peace, therefore, must continue to heed Roosevelt's caution at how it is maintained.

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An observant reader notes that my description yesterday of Ted Kennedy's support for legal abortion as "lifelong" is an overstatement. In fact, early in his public career, even Ted Kennedy had not yet embraced the casual cruelty of his party towards the defenseless unborn; indeed, Kennedy's rhetoric in those early days, displays genuine compassion for the defenseless unborn. Given Kennedy's centrality to Democratic strategy on this issue - he was the leader of the fight against the Bork nomination - it's interesting to look back. Here's Kennedy during his 1970 campaign for a second full term in the Senate:

Spaulding was what today would be called "pro-choice," and Kennedy, at that time, was passionately opposed to abortion. So when the subject came up, the senator was in full voice. He screamed, "Don't tell me there isn't enough love in the world to care for all the unwanted babies." He mentioned that adoption agencies had waiting lists.

In 1971, Kennedy put his pro-life convictions in writing to a correspondent on Long Island:

Wanted or unwanted, I believe that human life, even at its earliest stages, has certain rights which must be recognized - the right to be born, the right to love, the right to grow old....Once life has begun, no matter at what stage of growth, it is my belief that termination should not be decided merely by desire....I also share the opinions of those who do not accept abortion as a response to our society's problems...When history looks back to this era it should recognize this generation as one which cared enough about human beings enough to...fulfill its responsibility to its children from the very moment of conception.

Sadly, Kennedy's estimate of how much love there was in the world, and how much his generation should care about fellow human beings, dwindled with the years - I leave to the reader to speculate on his motivations in the regard, but two of the groups most ardently in favor of legal abortion (not to suggest that they are mutually exclusive) are Democratic presidential candidates and men who have a lot of sex with women not their wives and don't especially like to pay the consequences. What is clear, however, is that the many years Kennedy spent trying to convince Americans that the pro-life movement was somehow extremist and anti-woman were really a renunciation of his own heart. Because once upon a time, Ted Kennedy cared about the unborn.

Ed Morrissey has some fun with an article contending that if trials were good enough for the Nazis, they should be good enough for Al Qaeda - but completely ignoring the fact that the Nuremberg trials were military commissions without the full panoply of criminal procedures available today in federal court.

For no particular reason but your entertainment: Richard Nixon (in 1963) plays his own composition on the piano:

I've always had a soft spot for Boris Yeltsin for his courage in standing up at a critical juncture to bring democracy to Russia and draw down the curtain on the Soviet empire; that alone will earn him a righteous place in the history books. Sad to say, though, Yeltsin's second act as head of state had a lot to do with the conditions that have led to democracy's long, slow demise in Russia; the man was just not cut out to run a country. A new book on the Clinton Administration has a telling anecdote:

Boris Yeltsin's late-night drinking during a visit to Washington in 1995 nearly created an international incident. The Russian president was staying at Blair House, the government guest quarters. Late at night, Clinton told Branch, Secret Service agents found Yeltsin clad only in his underwear, standing alone on Pennsylvania Avenue and trying to hail a cab. He wanted a pizza, he told them, his words slurring.

The next night, Yeltsin eluded security forces again when he climbed down back stairs to the Blair House basement. A building guard took Yeltsin for a drunken intruder until Russian and U.S. agents arrived on the scene and rescued him.

In the Soviet era, one imagines that the head of state would have been better protected from himself by his own security.

A bit off topic of where most people's heads are today, but my RedState colleague Skanderbeg has written up a fascinating account of the Battle of Plattsburgh, September 11, 1814. It's a characteristic illustration of the confluence of fortune and improvisation that have so often favored American military engagements.

Dinged Corners has a look at a Topps set of American history cards. Some of them are pretty cool.

Lest I let it pass unnoticed: happy 200th birthday to Abraham Lincoln.

Gallup has a poll out asking Americans to pick their greatest president from five choices: George Washington, Abe Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan. (H/T) Now, there are fair arguments to be had in ranking these five. Washington's greatness in establishing and embodying the office (I've been reading Akhil Amar's book about the Constitution's history and he argues - I'm sure he's not the only one - that Article II was basically written with Washington in mind all the way down to the title of "President") and in self-limiting his term, or Lincoln's valiant effort to hold the nation together? Reagan, who got more things right and fewer disastrously wrong than FDR, or FDR, who faced graver challenges and had a more sweeping effect on the nation and the office? Was JFK a good president, or an ultimately inconsequential one who served less than a single term and left most of his work unfinished?

Sadly, the results don't match up with serious answers to those questions. Lincoln ranks #1 overall, which is fine, but Washington is dead last. Among Republicans, Reagan is #1 (even as a big Reagan admirer, I find it a stretch to rate him over Lincoln and Washington), and far more ridiculously, among Democrats, Kennedy ranks first, with 35% of the vote.

Seriously....JFK? I mean, any thinking person who actually believes in what the Democrats profess to stand for has to prefer FDR to JFK. (Note that FDR and Reagan do best among people old enough to remember theier presidencies. Not so for JFK. Meanwhile, I don't know if we should be optimistic that the youngest voters are the only ones with the sense to give some real support to Washington). Kennedy was glamorous, and he's been lionized by a cult of personality ever since (I guarantee you there's an enormous correlation between people who think JFK was our greatest president and people who are big Obama fans), but his actual accomplishments are thin - and not only that, but his actual platform would have him branded a neoconservative today, what with his call for tax cuts, aggressive building of nuclear weapons, confrontation with the Soviet Union, and escalation of the war in Vietnam (Kennedy was still publicly backing the war as late as his prepared remarks in Dallas the day of his death, Oliver Stone to the contrary), and use of the CIA to assassinate foreign leaders. You can certainly find some strains of liberalism in Kennedy, but not really any more than in George W. Bush - the actual policy differences between Kennedy and Bush are pretty minimal. Yet his legacy has almost nothing to do with what Kennedy did or what he stood for.

Via Jonathan Last, an interview with Christopher McQuarrie, screenwriter of "Valkyrie" (which I have not seen, although I think I can guess how it ends). A lot of interesting stuff; I liked this:

Q. ... Saw "Valkyrie" and really enjoyed it. What struck me was that the film is a throwback to a time before "Saving Private Ryan" -- when movies about World War II didn't have to be Big Important Statements and could just be thrillers.

A. Thank you. What we've been trying to get across -- and what the criticism of the film seems to be -- is that we had the audacity to make a World War II movie that wasn't "important" -- as in, a giant statement about war. I mean, what more do you need than a bunch of Germans trying to kill Hitler? Isn't that all kind of obvious -- do they really need to be sitting around talking about their objection to war?

I had meant to link to this earlier - Stratfor had a tremendous writeup, on the occasion of the death of Mark "Deep Throat" Felt, on the real meaning of the revelation that Felt was Woodward & Bernstein's source. Basically, it's a reminder that anonymous sourcing is just another way for the media to be beholden to powerful figures, usually in the government, who are often acting in unsavory ways even when they tell the truth (and when a news report is anonymously sourced, there's no way to have any conifdence that it is true). Stratfor focuses on the fact that Woodward and Bernstein were basically naive pawns in Felt's continuation of J. Edgar Hoover's power game - particpants in, not opponents of, the dirty tricks of the era. Here's the key takeaway:

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Fortune takes what is intended to be a sympathetic look at Charles Ponzi, but doesn't really succeed in suggesting that he was any different from the many imitators who have followed, a good number of whom also seem to have started off as legitimate, well-intentioned businessmen.

The tradition of celebrating Christmas in December is, as most people familiar with the history of the early Church know, not based on a December birthday for Jesus - the Bible mentions nothing of the sort - but on accomodation of the Church calendar with the Roman traditional holidays around the winter solstice. The exact date of Christ's birth has generally been lost to history. There are two documentable historical events, however, that the Biblical narrative can be tied to - the Roman census under Caesar Augustus, and the Star of Bethlehem.

Here you can read one of the latest efforts to nail down the latter, an atronomical historian trying to pinpoint the "star" as being a particularly close conjunction of Venus and Jupiter in the night sky (such as we've been experiencing in less complete form the past few weeks - I had the kids on the lawn with the telescope a few weekends ago):

The researchers claim the 'Christmas star' was most likely a magnificent conjunction of the planets Venus and Jupiter, which were so close together they would have shone unusually brightly as a single "beacon of light" which appeared suddenly.

+++

Australian astronomer Dave Reneke used complex computer software to chart the exact positions of all celestial bodies and map the night sky as it would have appeared over the Holy Land more than 2,000 years ago.

It revealed a spectacular astronomical event around the time of Jesus's birth.

Mr Reneke says the wise men probably interpreted it as the sign they had been waiting for, and they followed the 'star' to Christ's birthplace in a stable in Bethlehem, as described in the Bible.

Generally accepted research has placed the nativity to somewhere between 3BC and 1AD.

Using the St Matthew's Gospel as a reference point, Mr Reneke pinpointed the planetary conjunction, which appeared in the constellation of Leo, to the exact date of June 17 in the year 2BC.

It's an interesting theory; such theories tend to be pretty common in Bliblical history, but as Reneke notes, astronomy is a fairly precise science, and identifying a specific astronomical event that fits so neatly with the Gospel account at least adds one small piece to a historical picture that is likely to remain somewhat elusive.

The specificity sets off some alarm bells, but if this is for real, it's pretty impressive work.

*Pedro: kicking it clean.

*Barack Obama as the Mirror of Erised.

*Debra Burlingame on Bill Clinton's Puerto Rican terrorist pardons.

*Good roundup of what's expected from various shows with the writers' strike over.

*The morality of waterboarding. This probably deserves a longer post but I agree 100% with the point that you have to consider the morally correct thing first and let the law follow.

*The most badass U.S. presidents in history. Hilarious.

*Stephen Green on why Hillary's South Carolina strategy was actually the opposite of Rudy's mistake.

*A fitting assessment of Harry Reid.

Didn't these guys already do this?

I have returned from my travels to exotic Pennsylvania. Thanks to Dr. Manhattan for filling in (the other planned guest blogger proved to busy to post).

Citizens Bank Park

We kicked off our trip to Pennsylvania by hitting Citizens Bank Park for a Saturday night game against the Braves (which offered a rare reason to root for the Phillies). We had bought tickets for the Sunday afternoon game, on the theory that a night game would be too late in particular for my 17-month-old daughter, but ESPN decreed that the Sunday game had to be moved to 8pm. Fortunately, the Phillies were very accomodating in exchanging our tickets, and we were able to get a row of six seats even though Saturday ended up being sold out.

It's a beautiful ballpark in the Camden Yards style, with large open-air walkways behind and under the seats. We took the kids to a Build-a-Bear in the lower level before the game, in which you could build a stuffed Phillie Phanatic (note: this was somewhat more of a summary process than your typical Build-A-Bear). We sat in Section 414 on the first base side of the upper deck (from the map you can see the view), which despite the height were good seats except that the steep angle of the upper deck puts you at the mercy of the good sense of the people in the front row to sit down and avoid blocking the view of home plate. Of course, the Phillies fans were not exactly shrinking violets about letting people know to sit down. We were sitting behind a rather indecently vocal collection of Braves fans (the guy in front of us was nice, the others were unwisely loud) and as for the Philadelphia fans, well, the reputation of Philly as the toughest park in the big leagues for the home team is well-deserved. The next day's paper didn't headline the game "Drunk on Boos" for nothing. The phans there hate Pat Burrell almost as much as Mets fans do, and they really hate Adam Eaton, the latter with good reason. I shouldn't laugh since the Mets have Brian Lawrence in the rotation and he is basically the same pitcher, but at least the Mets aren't paying Lawrence $8 million a year. Eaton was terrible, put the Phils in a hole they almost but couldn't quite get out of even against Lance Cormier.

Also on the stadium: the food didn't impress me. The Liberty Bell that lights up for hometown homers was OK but no Magic Apple. The out of town scoreboard along the fence takes some getting used to but is tremendously informative. There are too few places to get the count; I didn't love the layout of the big CF scoreboard. There were a preposterous number of moths in the air for the upper deck. The jerseys? Chase Utley jerseys were definitely the dominant theme. I did see one old-school fan wearing a Doug Glanville jersey. That said, the sign of a baseball town is the proportion of fans wearing the hometown colors, especially the female fans, and the Phillies phans don't disappoint (there were a very large number of young women and teens wearing the identical uniform of colored Phillies T-shirts and very short white shorts).

The racial makeup of the phans is a shock: I know in most towns your baseball crowds are largely white, but to get to Citizens Bank Park you drive through miles of all-black neighborhoods (what looked to my eye like working-class neighborhoods with clean, respectable houses, not slums), but in the park and the parking lot the only black people you see are ticket scalpers.

The Phillie Phanatic comes out at the 7th inning stretch, but unlike Mr. Met he fires hot dogs rather than T-Shirts into the seats. And lemme tell ya, Mr. Met is badly outgunned; while he uses a light shoulder launcher to fire shirts into the crowd, the Phanatic uses a hot dog shaped cannon mounted on a jeep.

Also on the game: I have never seen more dropped third strikes in my life. The Mets bullpen may be a mess but at least we don't have Jose Mesa. And Jeff Francouer has a freaking gun in right field; he uncorked one throw that had my jaw dropping before it was more than two feet out of his hand.

DUKW Tour

On Sunday, we took the "Duck Tour" of Philadelphia, which is cheesy but entertaining (we had always meant to take those tours in Boston and DC but never got around to it). One thing that made me think when we got off: they mentioned that the amphibious DUKW bus/boat you ride around in was manufactured during WWII and that they had sat dormant for years until the idea came to refit them for tourism...it made me wonder: were we riding on a piece of history? I guess that the DUKWs they use for these tours have been extensively refitted from military to civilian uses, but the idea that any part of the vehicle we were riding may have been used in the war gave some additional meaning to a tour that touched on everything from colonial Philadelphia to Rocky.

King Tut

Born in Arizona, moved to Babylonia....sorry, couldn't help myself. On Sunday evening, we went to see the King Tut exhibit at the Franklin Institute. On the whole, the exhibit was interesting, indeed, riveting, just knowing you are looking at things made - in some cases, of wood - multiple thousands of years ago. We went as well to the IMAX film about the excavation of the bodies of many pharoahs in the 1880s. Unfortunately the staff misinfored us about the starting time so we not only missed the beginning but ended up sitting in the front row. The baby's eyes nearly rolled out of her head trying to comprehend an IMAX screen from the perspective of the front row. The film, narrated either by Saruman or Count Dooku, talked about how the pharoahs believed that they would be immortal as long as their names were said, in which case I suppose thy succeeded, but then it also talked about how they were using the mummified bodies of Ramses the Great and other pharoahs to study disease, like they were hoboes who gave their bodies to science for a few bucks. Somehow, I can't imagine they would have approved.

The exhibit starts with relics from tombs other than Tut and works its way up to his immediate family (interesting note: the Egyptian royals may have been primitive but they found time to remember unborn fetuses of the royal family), and then escalated to Tut's own burial chamber and the things on his body...but I was disappointed when it ended with the diadem that crowned his head - and no sarcophagus, no death mask. I guess it's perhaps a politically difficult time to get that stuff out of Egypt but the whole iconography of the exhibit - including the repainting of the museum's steps - is in the image of the sarcophagus. It was a big letdown when nothing of the sort was there.

Instead, after you leave the Tut exhibit, you enter...the gift shop. Which sold, I kid you not, a Tut tissue dispenser modeled on the head of the sarcophagus (you pull Kleenex out of the nose). I guess being donated to science isn't the worst of it. (My son got a Tut baseball - I was disappointed not to see Cap Anson at the Pyramids).

After the gift shop, the next room has a glass case containing Bobby Abreu's #53 Phillies uniform. Talk about being put on metaphor alert.

Hershey

By coincidence, I was vacationing the same place Dr. Manhattan was this week - Hershey, PA. And lemme tellya, Milton Hershey could have taught the pharoahs a thing or two. His name is on the town, it's on the candy company, it's on the amusement park, it's on a school he endowed with $60 million in 1918, there's a statue of him at the amusement park and biographical filmstrips, there are even Kiss-shaped streetlamps on Chocolate Avenue (which intersects with Cocoa).

OK, out of time - short takes on some things I may or may not have time to revisit later: we saw more Amish people at Gettysburg than we did in Amish country; we saw Ratatouille in the theater, and it was no Incredibles but still very entertaining; and Jesus must have a good press agent in Central PA because He has one heck of a lot of billboards in the area.

American Heritage magazine suspends publication after more than 50 years, awaiting a buyer to bankroll the magazine, which still boasts 350,000 subscribers. A sad day for a fine magazine.

The NY Daily News has a cool photo retrospective of the famous air disaster 70 years ago this month.

You know, I hold no brief for the Confederacy, but haven't we slipped through the looking-glass when the "Museum of the Confederacy," which is a museum memorializing, well, the Confederacy, wants to drop the Confederacy from its name?

A museum, of all institutions, ought not to remove its own identity from its name.

Lincoln as a younger man? Could be. This one is the relevant comparison. Via Mike's Neighborhood.

Now the oldest ex-president ever.

The Washington Post looks back at America's first slaves, the bounty of a Portuguese slave ship seized by the British on the high seas and brought to Jamestown, Virginia.

The involvement of the Portuguese is a reminder of the fact that the U.S. was hardly the only slaveowning country in the Western Hemisphere. Simon Bolivar was a slaveholder, if (like a number of America's Founding Fathers) one who recognized the evils of slavery and promised to do something about it, but never did. Slavery wasn't abolished in the Bolivarian states in northern South America until 1854, Cuba in 1886, Brazil in 1888.

I've read a couple of sources (see here, here and here) saying that Mitt Romney's father, onetime Michigan Governor George Romney, was born in a splinter Mormon community in Mexico. Of course, we know that George Romney was a widely-touted but unsuccessful candidate for the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1968. My question is this: if George Romney was born in Mexico, to a family that had lived there for more than two decades, how was he "a natural born Citizen" of the US eligible to be president under Art. II Sec. 1 of the Constitution? Am I missing something?

UPDATE: Erick at RedState answers.

Over my recent vacation I finally caught up to reading Victor Davis Hanson's 2003 book Ripples of Battle: How Wars of the Past Still Determine How We Fight, How We Live, and How We Think. Though I was intimately familiar with Hanson's work from his National Review Online columns, this was my first introduction to his books, of which he has written many, several of them examining his thesis that Western Civilization has a distinctive "Western way of war" whose superiority is not coincidental to but rather determined by the liberal aspects of Western culture - individual freedom and initiative, free thought, free markets - that combine to produce superior technology, superior tactics, and the flexible, fast-adapting soldiers who can use them.

I highly recommend "Ripples of Battle." What Hanson does in the book - a brisk, page-turning 258 pages in paperback - is to look at three battles of the past - Okinawa, from World War II in the Pacific; the Civil War battle of Shiloh, Tennessee; and Delium, a battle between the ancient Athenians and Boetians (a region led by Thebes) - and examine the many impacts of the battle. What is unique about Hanson's analysis is that he mainly focuses on effects other than just the battle's strategic impact on a particular war, although Shiloh in particular was a pivotal battle by that reckoning. Instead, he works through the myriad other marks left by the battle. He starts with the shattering effects of Okinawa on his own family as a result of the death of his father's cousin and his namesake, Victor Hanson, and expands to examine the death of journalist Ernie Pyle at Okinawa and the loss of the men of an entire town, Thespiae, on the winning side at Delium. This contrasts with the legacy of ordinary infantrymen who survived, most particularly Socrates, who fought at Delium. Left unsaid is how many others who had as much to give humanity as Socrates perished in these and other battles. Hanson contrasts the military and political careers raised up by these battles - Grant, Sherman, and Nathan Bedford Forrest at Shiloh, Alcibiades at Delium - with those who were slain or ruined, like Simon Bolivar Buckner at Okinawa, and Albert Sidney Johnston and Lew Wallace at Shiloh. Hanson shows how the later careers of these men left many marks - on the decline and fall of Athens, the rise of the American popular novel, the growth of the Klu Klux Klan, and the development of modern total war as a two-pronged strategy of attrition of men and destruction of economic infrastructure.

The most relevant parts of the book, to the 21st century reader, are in Hanson's analysis (written against the backdrop of 9/11, but before the unfolding of the post-conquest insurgency in Iraq) of the kamikaze attacks at Okinawa - how they arose (not always voluntarily, as with today's suicide bombers), how the Americans fought and defeated them, how weak was their military impact, and yet how strong their long-term impact in two ways: because they were critical to convincing American war planners (along with the general to-the-last-soldier-and-civilian defense of Okinawa) that Japanese fanatacism required the use of the atomic bomb to prevent a staggering bloodbath of an invasion of the mainland, and because they showed weaker or technologically backward forces the world over that suicide attacks could help level the playing field against the superior Western way of war. Hanson makes the persuasive case that Hiroshima and Nagasaki can not possibly be understood without Okinawa, and ties it to his larger theme that suicide attacks tend to make the Western response only more deadly by weakening our moral scruples about unleashing the deadly power of the West to lay waste to its enemies.

Hanson's writing style is, as always, bracing and eloquent. He tells impossibly exciting stories, such as the superhuman bravery and only-in-Hollywood (you would think) escapes from death of Sherman and Forrest at Shiloh, yet he doesn't romanticize or glorify war; he sets the tone of the book by mourning the loss of Victor Handon, and along the way savages General Buckner's battle plan on Okinawa, highlights the blunders of both sides at Shiloh, and argues that Delium was basically an unnecessary and pointless battle. I learned a lot from this book - among others, about the orgins of military tactics, the career of Wallace (who wrote Ben-Hur as part of his campaign to salvage his reputation in the decades after Shiloh), and the coalition politics of Greek armies (in which is contained an implicit lesson about multilateral command structures: Hanson notes that the Thespians perished in such great numbers precisely because their more powerful coalition partners chose for them a particularly vulnerable section of the battle line. Coalition-style forces are also shown to fail in his account of the diffuse command structure of the Confederate Army before and after Shiloh).

The book is not without flaws. The coda, tying the lessons of these battles to the post-September 11 world, will sound familiar to readers of Hanson's columns, but seems artificially forced and tacked-on. Hanson doesn't trace all the battles' ripples explicitly; for example, because of its effects on the careers of Grant, Sherman, Garfield and others, Shiloh can probably be singled out as the moment when the Ohio Republican party became a dominant force in American politics, as it would remain for many decades afterwards. His discussion of Delium's impact on the career of Socrates spends too much time hammering home the point that Socrates' career after the battle was the source of his impact on Western civilization (Hanson also argues that his heroism in battle - contrasted to the capture of Plato's stepfather - may have made Socrates a particularly attractive role model to Plato), but even for all that counterfactual speculation he only glancingly discusses what effect the battle itself may have had on Socrates' own thinking, which Hanson suggests took a turn from a focus on natural science to moral philosophy after Delium. Also, he mentions that the only account of Socrates written by someone who knew him before Delium is a brutal satire by Aristophanes that was presented a year after the battle - but he misses the obvious point that even that account would likely have been lost to history because Aristophanes is unlikely to have put on a play lampooning a man recently killed in battle defending the city.

Nonetheless, it's a tremendous read, and one of continuing relevance in a world still feeling the effects of battles as ancient as Delium and as recent as southern Lebanon.

Interesting piece at CNN about African-Americans, mainly slaves, at Velley Forge and the roles they played in the Revolution.

I was out at Shea Stadium yesterday, for - among other things - my 4-month-old daughter's first baseball game. Before the game the Mets honored New York's last living Congressional Medal of Honor winner, Francis S. Currey. The official citation for his honor:

He was an automatic rifleman with the 3d Platoon defending a strong point near Malmedy, Belgium, on 21 December 1944, when the enemy launched a powerful attack. Overrunning tank destroyers and antitank guns located near the strong point, German tanks advanced to the 3d Platoon's position, and, after prolonged fighting, forced the withdrawal of this group to a nearby factory. Sgt. Currey found a bazooka in the building and crossed the street to secure rockets meanwhile enduring intense fire from enemy tanks and hostile infantrymen who had taken up a position at a house a short distance away. In the face of small-arms, machinegun, and artillery fire, he, with a companion, knocked out a tank with 1 shot. Moving to another position, he observed 3 Germans in the doorway of an enemy-held house. He killed or wounded all 3 with his automatic rifle. He emerged from cover and advanced alone to within 50 yards of the house, intent on wrecking it with rockets. Covered by friendly fire, he stood erect, and fired a shot which knocked down half of 1 wall. While in this forward position, he observed 5 Americans who had been pinned down for hours by fire from the house and 3 tanks. Realizing that they could not escape until the enemy tank and infantry guns had been silenced, Sgt. Currey crossed the street to a vehicle, where he procured an armful of antitank grenades. These he launched while under heavy enemy fire, driving the tankmen from the vehicles into the house. He then climbed onto a half-track in full view of the Germans and fired a machinegun at the house. Once again changing his position, he manned another machinegun whose crew had been killed; under his covering fire the 5 soldiers were able to retire to safety. Deprived of tanks and with heavy infantry casualties, the enemy was forced to withdraw. Through his extensive knowledge of weapons and by his heroic and repeated braving of murderous enemy fire, Sgt. Currey was greatly responsible for inflicting heavy losses in men and material on the enemy, for rescuing 5 comrades, 2 of whom were wounded, and for stemming an attack which threatened to flank his battalion's position.

That's enough to humble even a hardened combat veteran, let alone a guy like me. After the ceremony, Mr. Currey - now in his 80s - ended up sitting behind me for the game (we were in the loge). After Wagner got the last out, Mr. Currey stopped and wished good luck at the end of the game to a younger (twenties) guy in an Army t-shirt who appeared to be heading out to Iraq. The torch passes.

62 years is a very long time - long enough to turn a boy of 18 to an old man of 80, long enough to turn even the most searing emotional wounds to a long, dull throb, long enough to bury even the deepest of grudges, at least if scores have been adequately evened.

But 62 years should not be long enough to forget heroism to which we are all in debt. The Normandy invasion, 62 years ago this morning, was not the only battle of the Second World War, but it was certainly the most complicated and the most visibly pivotal, and it was an undertaking of great uncertainty by men fully aware of its dangers, who went anyway. In remembering their courage and sacrifice, we remember all the heroes of all the battles of that terrible war. 62 years later.

The Empire State Building today celebrates its 75th anniversary, having opened for business May 1, 1931. Super-skyscrapers and other monumental structures are traditionally built as symbols of prosperity and boom times - where else but America, where else but New York, would such a building be erected in the middle of a global depression?

Oh, and: they broke ground on the building January 22, 1930, finishing in less than a year and a half. And Ground Zero lies fallow.

John Fund reports an appalling story from the University of Washington in Seattle:

The issue before the [student] Senate this month was a proposed memorial to World War II combat pilot Gregory "Pappy" Boyington, a 1933 engineering graduate of the university, who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his service commanding the famed "Black Sheep" squadron in the Pacific. The student senate rejected the memorial because "a Marine" is not "an example of the sort of person UW wants to produce."

Digging themselves in deeper, the student opponents of the memorial indicated: "We don't need to honor any more rich white males." Other opponents compared Boyington's actions during World War II with murder.

"I am absolutely bewildered that the Student Senate voted down the resolution," Brent Ludeman, the president of the UW College Republicans, told me. He noted that despite the deficiencies of the UW History Department, the complete ignorance of Boyington's history and reputation by the student body was hard to fathom. After all, "Black Sheep Squadron," a 1970s television show portraying Colonel Boyington's heroism as a pilot and Japanese prisoner of war, still airs frequently on the History Channel. Apparently, though, it's an unusual UW student who'd be willing to learn any U.S. history even if it's spoonfed to him by TV.

As for the sin of honoring a rich white male, Mr. Ludeman points out that Boyington (who died in 1988) was neither rich nor white. He happened to be a Sioux Indian, who wound up raising his three children as a single parent.

What fools. What ingrates.

This is a bit long, and I'm never sure how fair or accurate Wikipedia's history is, but it's worth a reading at some length for a timely history lesson on a time and place when a zealous Muslim came to power in a largely non-Muslim empire, and inflicted terrible damage that eventually sent his empire into decline (a story with many parallels to Philip II of Spain) and ushered in the centuries of sectarian warfare in the Indian subcontinent that led, eventually, to the partition of India and the creation and later nuclear armament of Pakistan.

I probably knew this guy's story when I was a freshman in high school and studying the history of India among other Asian cultures, but if so I'd long since forgotten him.

We were having a discussion over in RedHot and I thought I'd re-post my point here.

The Holocaust needs to be understood in two dimensions.
One is the horizontal dimension, comparing it to other events close in time. Many horrible things were done during that era, from deliberate atrocities like Stalin's and Mao's use of famines to defensible but nonetheless horrifying tactics like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The horizontal dimension argues for the non-uniqueness of the Holocaust, but does not minimize its horror.

The other is the vertical dimension: the Holocaust can't be separated from the long, lamentable history of hatred and violence against Jews in Europe. Viewed in this sense, the Holocaust is different from contemporaneous events not directed at Jews but different only in degree from prior pogroms.

Like many historical events, the Holocaust is only properly understood if you combine the two dimensions, and see that it was the interaction between deep-rooted historic anti-Semitism and a time and place when the methods of mass propaganda and mass production were applied to mass murder as never before or since.

Of course, I should note that a favored tactic of Holocaust denial/minimization is to emphasize the horizontal dimension while utterly ignoring the vertical dimension. You need to take both together.

I can't let pass without comment the death, at the ripe old age of 101, of George Frost Kennan, the great foreign policy analyst and author of the concept of "containment" of the Soviet Union. Kennan was one of the giants - he wasn't always right but he was hugely influential and incisive. You can read his NY Times obit here, plus more from David Adesnik here and Daniel Drezner here. I spent more time reading Kennan than almost any other academic writer in high school and college, especially his work on the peace of Versailles and the unsuccessful U.S. intervention in Russia during the Russian Revolution, the subject of my senior thesis in college. Kennan was an unsparing critic of Woodrow Wilson's impractical idealism, and a lively reconstructor of the Russian and American scenes of the era.

I wouldn't, as Instapundit does, call him "the Wolfowitz of the Cold War," given that Kennan spent more of his time battling hawks (like Paul Nitze, who also only died only recently) than doves; Kennan was mortified by the extent to which containment developed into an active military policy. Kennan's cold-blooded realism hasn't worn well over time, although I'll admit that I found his view initially appealing. One insight Kennan gets too little credit for is his prediction, from the very outset of the Cold War, that the internal tensions of the many nationalities within the Soviet Union would eventually tear the USSR apart.

As you may have seen elsewhere (see here, for example), yesterday was the 60th anniversary of the beginning of the 36-day battle for Iwo Jima, one of the critical battles of the final stages of encircling Japan, and setting up air basis that could run bombing raids on the Japanese mainland unimpeded, in preparation for the planned invasion of Japan. (As such, among other things, the nature of the resistance by the Japanese at Iwo Jima is both a critical part of the moral calculus of Hiroshima as well as a window into the obstacles we faced in turning postwar Japan into a civil democracy at peace with its neighbors and with us).

The resistance put up by the Japanese at Iwo Jima has few parallels in military history, and is staggering to the imagination: some 21,000 Japanese soldiers stood to defend Iwo Jima, and only 1,083 of them were taken alive; the other 20,000 fought to the death rather than surrender. 6,821 Americans died overcoming that resistance. Rest in peace.

Americans held in Stalin-era gulags? Apparently so.

Ace has some interesting news about Hermann Goering's suicide. (See also here).

Jay Nordlinger has lots of interesting stuff from the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland; this, from newly elected Ukranian president Viktor Yuschenko, is interesting:

[Yuschenko] claims that the toast — the act of toasting — originated in Kiev, anciently. You see, the most popular method of eliminating one's opponents was poison. (This, of course, is all too meaningful, coming from Yushchenko.) So you clinked your glasses extra hard, so that some of his drink would spill into yours, and some of yours would spill into his.

Speaking of Carson, Bill Simmons' intern asked last week: "Can you imagine being the idiot that erased the old "Tonight" shows? I bet he's the first guy to be put IN the Hollywood Walk of Fame." Yeah, that's bad. But I can top that one: read this harrowing account of how war photographer Robert Capa risked life and limb landing with the Allied invasion on D-Day, shooting over 100 irreplaceable images of the heroism, chaos and tragedy of that landing, only to have all but ten destroyed by a darkroom assistant's blunder.

Gregg Easterbrook reviews "Collapse" by Jared Diamond, and gives an overview of Diamond's thesis, in his earlier book "Guns, Germs, and Steel," that the advantages of Western societies are wholly and completely an accident of environmental conditions. As set forth in this and other reviews (no, I haven't read the books), Diamond's thesis sounds like a classic example of a useful insight carried to ludicrous extremes. Easterbrook:

Diamond's analysis discounts culture and human thought as forces in history; culture, especially, is seen as a side effect of environment. The big problem with this view is explaining why China -- which around the year 1000 was significantly ahead of Europe in development, and possessed similar advantages in animals and plants -- fell behind. This happened, Diamond says, because China adopted a single-ruler society that banned change. True, but how did environment or animal husbandry dictate this? China's embrace of a change-resistant society was a cultural phenomenon. During the same period China was adopting centrally regimented life, Europe was roiled by the idea of individualism. Individualism proved a potent force, a source of power, invention and motivation. Yet Diamond considers ideas to be nearly irrelevant, compared with microbes and prevailing winds. Supply the right environmental conditions, and inevitably there will be a factory manufacturing jet engines.

Of course, to argue that the environmental factors Diamond cites were a boon to the West is to state the obvious; to suggest that they, and the conditions to which they contributed, also contributed to the West's dynamic culture of individualism and rational, skeptical thought is likewise common sense. But, as Easterbrook points out, it's hard work to ignore culture completely. Easterbrook also notes the logical leap made by Diamond's latest book, "Collapse," when it tries to generalize lessons for the wider world from the collapse of societies like Easter Island and the Viking settlement in Greenland:

How much do Diamond's case studies bear on current events? He writes mainly about isolated islands and pretechnology populations. Imagine the conditions when Erik the Red founded his colony on frigid Greenland in 984 -- if something went wrong, the jig was up. As isolated systems, islands are more vulnerable than continents. Most dire warnings about species extinction, for example, are estimates drawn from studies of island ecologies, where a stressed species may have no place to retreat to. "Collapse" declares that "a large fraction" of the world's species may fall extinct in the next 50 years, which is the kind of conclusion favored by biologists who base their research on islands. But most species don't live on islands. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the leading authority on biodiversity, estimates that about 9 percent of the world's vertebrate species are imperiled. That's plenty bad enough, but does not support the idea that a "large fraction" of species are poised to vanish. Like most species, most people do not live on islands, yet "Collapse" tries to generalize from environmental failures on isolated islands to environmental threats to society as a whole.

A theme I've noted before here is that many bad ideas are simply good ideas stretched too far. This seems like a perfect example.

"I have long since learned that a man may give offense and yet succeed."

--John Adams, on diplomacy (in a letter to Congress from the Netherlands defending his decision to press aggressively for Ducth support in the American Revolution, against charges of, among other things, having offended the French)

The New York Times has an article about a historian's rather thin-sounding argument that President Lincoln was gay. This sounds like wishful thinking on the part of the Times, but, for more, see here.

UPDATE: Actually, it is misleading to call the author of the book in question a "historian" - the Times, in fact, describes him as a "psychologist, influential gay writer and former sex researcher for Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey." Make of that what you will.

Here’s a tribute to the late Iris Chang, who committed suicide in November. It is a sad tale, almost as sad as the one Chang became famous for retelling.

63 years ago today. Go here for one of the less-remembered (by me, anyway) stories of that attack.

UPDATE: Murdoc Online has a fascinating account, including the after-action report, for the initial confrontation with a Japanese submarine a little over an hour prior to the bombing.

For reasons that are unclear to me, I got a free sample issue in the mail of "At The Yard," a magazine following the minor leagues. What caught my attention was an article on how Dwight Eisenhower apparently told reporters in 1945 that he had played minor league ball under an assumed name ("Wilson") in 1909 when he was 19. Grantland Rice reported that Ike played center field in the Central Kansas League (presumably a fairly low-level minor league), batting .288, scoring 43 runs and stealing 20 bases in a season of a little over 200 at bats. (Here's what little else I could find on this online).

(A side note: am I the only one who thinks Grover Alexander, a Nebraskan who was three years older than the Kansan Eisenhower also entered pro ball in 1909, bore a striking resemblance to Ike?)

Anyway, as the article (not available online, so far as I can tell) points out, Eisenhower abruptly stopped talking about his pro baseball career after that, and with good reason: he played football and baseball at West Point, which he entered in 1911, and to do so he would have had to sign an NCAA eligibility card stating that he had not played professional sports - and if he signed that card falsely, it would be a violation of West Point's honor code, something Ike would not want to admit to once he was embarked on a career in politics. In today's atmosphere, of course, it's unlikely he would have gotten away with this without someone digging this up.

But if there's some enterprising SABR type out there who would like to dig up the old minor league box scores, this sounds like a fun project to look into.

An alert reader pointed out that today is Winston Churchill's 130th birthday.

Paul Nitze, one of the leading architect’s of America’s Cold War strategy, has died at 97.

Nitze, an ideological rival of the surviving George Kennan, helped encourage a more militarily aggressive approach to containing Communism that would controversially manifest itself in Korea and Vietnam, but which would ultimately contribute to American victory in the great struggle of the second half of the 20th century. The graduate school that bears his name issued this statement.

The Daily News has an interesting article about legendary 19th century songwriter Stephen Foster; I'd never known that Foster wrote most of his classic American folk songs from an apartment in lower Manhattan, or that he died a nearly penniless alcoholic at age 37.

Dr. Weevil notes that there was at least one example of someone trying to cross the Berlin Wall in the other direction:

In the late '70s or early '80s The American Spectator reported that a young West German had tried repeatedly to do just that. After apprehending him for the 8th or 18th time (details are a little fuzzy now), the East German authorities demanded that the West German authorities put him in a mental hospital. It was, as TAS noted with cheerful contempt, a very revealing demand.

Nazis, Bolsheviks, the Khmer Rouge . . . there's plenty of candidates. But very high on the list, and in close competition with Pol Pot's regime, has to be the government of Francisco Solano López, who ruled Paraguay from 1862 to 1870. Solano López, placing undue faith in his large and powerful army and completely ignoring geographic and demographic realities, led Paraguay into the catastrophic War of the Triple Alliance against Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. The war, described in more detail here, left 57% of Paraguay's population dead and the nation at the mercy of its neighbors:

The Paraguayan people had been fanatically committed to López and the war effort, and as a result they fought to the point of dissolution. The war left Paraguay utterly prostrate; its prewar population of approximately 525,000 was reduced to about 221,000 in 1871, of which only about 28,000 were men. During the war the Paraguayans suffered not only from the enemy but also from malnutrition, disease, and the domination of López, who tortured and killed countless numbers. Argentina and Brazil annexed about 55,000 square miles (140,000 square km) of Paraguayan territory: Argentina took much of the Misiones region and part of the Chaco between the Bermejo and Pilcomayo rivers; Brazil enlarged its Mato Grosso province from annexed territory. They both demanded a large indemnity (which was never paid) and occupied Paraguay until 1876. Meanwhile, the Colorados had gained control of Uruguay, and they retained that control until 1958.

You learn something new every day - my dad was telling me this story about Pearl Harbor over the weekend, and it's pretty horrifying. When they righted the capsized USS Oklahoma in 1943 and raised the USS West Virginia in 1942 they found that men had survived inside each of the ships for some two weeks after the attack, waiting in vain to be rescued; sailors in the West Virginia had scratched off days on a calendar as far as December 23, 1941:

Late Spring 1942 found Navy salvage teams finally getting to work on the WV.

An Inventive series of tremic cement patches were fitted to her port side, and enough water pumped out to partially float the once grand ship. BB48 was nudged across the Harbor into drydock and the grim task of finding bodies began.

For Commander Paul Dice, compartment A-111 was expected to be like the rest: Put on gas masks, place some goo into a bodybag and let the Medical boys worry about identification. They had seen it all, but this compartment was different. Dice first noticed the interior was dry and flashlight batteries and empty ration cans littered the floor. A manhole cover to a fresh water supply was opened. Then he saw the calendar. It was 12"x14" and marked with big red Xs that ended December 23. Hardened salvage workers wept uncontrollably as they realized the fate of these men. Word quickly spread among salvage crews: Three men had lived for 16 days to suffer the most agonizing deaths among the 2800 victims at Pearl Harbor.

More here, here and here.

For all of President Bush's obstacles to re-election, there are a number of reasons why I have a hard time imagining Kerry actually winning this thing. The history of incumbent presidents is one of them. When was the last time an incumbent president got ousted really by surprise, without massive dissension in his ranks, without a huge overhang of economic doom? I mean, look how many things had to go wrong for incumbents to lose in the past century:

Bush I - Major fissures in the party (as shown by Buchanan's primary challenge), major third party candidate (Perot), more severe recession than anyone could claim today with a straight face (though they try), and his party had been in power 12 years, which always exerts a pull back to the middle. His opponent (Clinton) won with 43% of vote.

Carter - Major recession (remember stagflation?), international humiliations, malaise, major fissures in the party (between Kennedy's primary challenge and fighting between the Carter White House and Hill Democrats), and a serious third party candidate (John Anderson) who gave anti-Reagan voters an alternative to re-upping the incumbent.

Ford - Watergate overhang, gigantic debate gaffe (Poland), never elected in his own right, barely survived primary challenge by Reagan that split the party.

LBJ - Hung it up after New Hampshire primary after internal revolt on war, and his party was rent in two in November; never faced general electorate.

Hoover - Great Depression, and his party had been in power for 12 years.

Taft - Party split in two, Taft's popular predecessor (Teddy Roosevelt) ran as a third party candidate, his opponent (Wilson) won with less than 40% of vote, and his party had been in power 16 years.

Compare these to, say, Harry Truman, who saw his party split three ways and still got re-elected amid a weak economy and international crises. I think the forces of inertia and incumbency are stronger than we think, and may help Bush on top of his other strengths.

I've been off my routine with various work-related crises since Friday; hopefully, I'll be back to something like a normal blogging schedule in another day or two.

In the meantime, here's is an interesting site giving an overview of the Battle of the Atlantic, one of the key and less-remembered campaigns of World War II. (Steven den Beste has argued here and here and here that this was the most important battle of the war).

My grandfather was in the US merchant marine; if I remember correctly, I think he was at sea during World War II (he was also in the British Royal Navy in WWI as a teenager); it's sobering that the site notes that, at least on the British end, the casualty rate in the merchant marines was higher than for any of the branches of the armed services, with about 1/6 of the men who went to sea losing their lives.

Distinguished historian Daniel Boorstin has died at 89. One of the several books I'm still working through at the moment is Boorstin's The Seekers, which is well-written and has a nice general summary of the history of major thinkers in Western Civilization (some of whom I can use to brush up on).

Tim Blair offers some amusing historical perspective on presidential polls.

Via Daniel Drezner, I swear I'm not making this up:

Baywatch star David Hasselhoff is griping that his role in reuniting East and West Germany has been overlooked....

Barely a month after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the city that had been divided by politics for more than 40 years was united in song.

And leading the chorus of several hundred thousand voices was a man hitherto known to the rest of the world for driving a talking car....

Speaking to Germany's TV Spielfilm magazine, the 51-year-old carped about how his pivotal role in harmonising relations between the two sides of the divide had been overlooked.

"I find it a bit sad that there is no photo of me hanging on the walls in the Berlin Museum at Checkpoint Charlie," he told the magazine.

Liberal writer Jack Beatty had an interesting article in The Atlantic online about Calvin Coolidge, noting that Coolidge was never really the same after his son died from a freak infection in the summer of 1924. I'm not sure I buy all of Beatty's animosity towards Coolidge's record, but it's an argument worth reading.

So, Nuon Chea - second-in-command to Pol Pot with the Khmer Rouge -- makes a grudging admission of "mistakes":

I admit that there was a mistake. But I had my ideology. I wanted to free my country. I wanted people to have well-being . . . I didn't use wisdom to find the truth of what was going on, to check who was doing wrong and who was doing right. I accept that error.

Even with this tepid apology, however, the denial continues:

Nuon Chea said the number of people who died was not in the millions. He acknowledged that many did die but said it was impossible to say how.

"People died but there were so many causes of their deaths. We have to know the situation, what the situation was like."

The record, however, is out there for those who care to look. Cambodia from 1975-1979 wasn't Stalin's Russia or Hitler's Germany; it was much worse:

By far, the most deadly of all communist countries and, indeed, in this century by far, has been Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot and his crew likely killed some 2,000,000 Cambodians from April 1975 through December 1978 out of a population of around 7,000,000. This is an annual rate of over 8 percent of the population murdered, or odds of an average Cambodian surviving Pol Pot's rule of slightly over just over 2 to 1.

(See the chart here as well). You know, there's a lot bad that can be said of the Vietnam War, from any political perspective, a lot more than there's space to deal with here; it was a poorly conceived and run enterprise in many ways, and has led to many necessary reforms and refinements in American foreign and military policy. But it's just awfully hard to look with any trace of human compassion at what happened in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, as well as in Vietnam and Laos after the war, and say it wasn't worth fighting the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia at all. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the war, Americans were fighting a real enemy, one that was deeply evil and unalterably murderous. Let us hope that, in the present war, we never elect a government that repeats the mistakes of 1975 in abandoning the field to such an enemy. (Veterans of the Ford Administration's failed attempt to get aid from Congress for South Vietnam in its last need, like then-White House Chief of Staff Don Rumsfeld and then-Deputy Chief of Staff Dick Cheney, remember this). Cambodia can happen again.

Matt Labash's look at songs written for Howard Dean is so funny it almost brought tears to my eyes:

While I'm hardly the first to state that the Dean campaign is remarkably free of people of color, I am, after spending a day on songsfordean.com, the person who has suffered through the most painful reminders of it in rapid succession. From coffeehouse bluesmen who over-enunciate every whitebread word, to hot blasts of undiluted folk so earnest that it could make the Weavers cry uncle, the songs are by and for white people. Sort of. There are two versions of the "Howard Dean Rap" . . . They use dated rap terminology like "chill" and "wack." One line goes, "Stop and stare, say hey, lookie there! / It's a doctor! Where? And he knows health care!" "Lookie there?" If they were real rappers, they'd get their asses kicked even in East Hampton, where Dean hails from. By the time they recite Bush's falling "P to the O to the double L" numbers, you just want to grab the first B-to-the-L-to-the-ACK person you can find, and tuck a reparations check into their breast pocket while apologizing profusely.

Labash also has some amusing thoughts on past presidential campaign songs:

[T]here's John Quincy Adams's "Little Know Ye Who's Coming." With the melody pinched from the Scottish "Highland Muster Roll," it's a sunny little ditty that reminds voters what's coming if they fail to elect Adams. The list is not encouraging: "Fire's comin', swords are comin', pistols, knives and guns are comin'." Additionally coming were slavery, knavery, hatin', and Satan, "if John Quincy not be comin'."

Read the whole thing.

We remember.

The Washington Post notes a recent study that diagnoses William Howard Taft as suffering from sleep apnea; apparently, Taft was known to fall asleep at inopportune moments, including in meetings with the powerful Speaker of the House.

Insert your own joke about the fact that the accounts of Taft's sleeping habits were drawn from the notes of presidential aide Major Butt.

I'm still not sure what to make of the story that Josef Stalin wanted John Wayne killed. MSNBC can't seem to decide, though, whether this comes from a bio of Stalin or of the Duke.

The folks over at Setting the World to Rights are still going strong with their pro-Israel but warts-and-all history-of-Israel series; the first chapter covered 70AD-1921, and chapters 2-5 cover 1923-56. There was some interesting stuff there I hadn't known, including some vivid accounts of the 1948 war. I'm sure some of their accounts are controversial -- in Israel, everything's controversial -- but it reads like a good primer if you're unfamiliar with the history.

Another source that looks worth an exploration (if a bit popup-infested) is the online Encyclopedia of the Orient (so-called, but focusing on the Middle East and North Africa). I've no idea if this is a fair or reliable source, but it does appear to have some pretensions to comprehensiveness.

After watching Meet the Press this morning, I'm stuck with the same thought I have every time I watch Doris Kearns Goodwin speak on an interactive panel: Why is she valued by the mainstream media? Leaving aside her plagarism problems, her analysis is superficial ("If we don't increase government revenue for causes like protecting the environment, who is going to protect the air that we all breathe??"). In addition, she typically strains to draw a historical analogy to current events. Her performance today included (a) reminding the viewers that Churchill lost an election shortly following the end of WWII and thus Bush was highly vulnerable in 2004 and (b) in criticizing proponents of a tax cut, relaying that tired anecdote about the man who offers an attractive female a large sum of money for sex and then, after she agrees, offering her one dollar claiming that he has already established the type of woman she is. Commentary like this can be provided by a moderately-accomplished college student, not a historian that certain people hold in esteem.

As an update to Hibernian's posting on the Louisiana Purchase, here is an article from the Washington Post that has some interesting details regarding the transaction, including that the U.S. had to work with outside bankers (who charged 6% interest) in order to finance the purchase.

Was 'Deep Throat' White House deputy counsel Fred Fielding?

The job of balancing the federal budget got a little easier this weekend, when the last remaining Civil War widow died, taking her $70/month VA pension with her.

CNN has an interesting report on a new book claiming that the Chinese discovered America more than 70 years before Columbus. It's hard to tell if this is legit, but hopefully the book will provoke serious scholarly debate that will give the rest of us a better fix on the answer.

David Pinto had the link to this short, time-wasting questionnaire; here's how I scored:

Guess I'll be brushing up on my dueling and my New York Post . . .

On the other hand, as far as sympathy is concerned, the campaign to vilify Stephen Ambrose should be about done for a while.

On the subject of the French, if you wanted a reason for the cultural decline of the martial spirit in France, think about the military families and veterans organizations, even in such a demilitarized culture as the U.S., that helps keep that spirit alive. Then think about the wholesale slaughter of France's best fighting men in several wars, stretching from the decimation of Napoleon's Grand Armee (Paul Johnson's biography tells of how his best troops were massacred by close-quarters cannon fire at Waterloo) to Verdun. I'm not going to get all Social Darwinist here, but the loss of so many men of any inclination to soldier had to have a depressing impact on the culture's tolerance for battle, one that Americans (even given the bloodletting of the Civil War) can scarcely imagine.

Anyway, that's one thought that came to mind in this fascinating Newsweek/MSNBC story on the discovery of a mass grave of Napoleon's army in Vilnius, in Lithuania. And there's a modern touch, too: the Lithuanians, bless their hearts, want to exploit the grave to further their campaign to get into the EU. Commercialism is the best revenge.

Just in time for the first test of George W. Bush's pre-emption doctrine, comes news that the United States fired the first shot at Pearl Harbor.