History Readings

“The Arab states’ loathing and fear of political Islam is so strong that it outweighs their allergy to Benjamin Netanyahu,” the prime minister of Israel, said Aaron David Miller

“I have never seen a situation like it, where you have so many Arab states acquiescing in the death and destruction in Gaza and the pummeling of Hamas,” he said. “The silence is deafening.”

In the battle with Hamas, Mr. Elgindy said, the Egyptian fight against the forces of political Islam and the Israeli struggle against Palestinian militants were nearly identical. “Whose proxy war is it?” he asked.

You could blackmail Johnson on this stuff, and it might be worth doing,” Haldeman says. It’s not clear exactly what Haldeman has in mind, but Nixon perks up. He suddenly remembers that he signed off on a proposal by White House aide Tom Charles Huston to use wiretaps and break-ins to protect national security. “Bob, you remember Huston’s plan? Implement it,” Nixon says. A staffer objects, and Nixon explodes, “I mean, I want it implemented on a thievery basis. Goddamn it, get in there and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.”

In the lead-up to the election, Johnson had offered peace negotiations in exchange for the halt in bombing. For years, historians have tried to get to the bottom of allegations that Nixon, using a pro-Nationalist Chinese lobbyist named Anna Chennault as a go-between, tried to get the South Vietnamese government to torpedo the proposal. The evidence remains a little sketchy. In a recently released oral history, Huston, who looked into the bombing halt at Haldeman’s request, suggests Nixon was culpable, but there is still no smoking gun. Nonetheless, Hughes shows that we still have much to learn by connecting the dots of Nixon’s angry venting and the shadowy world of national-security spying

fellow Nixonologist Luke Nichter, who is a professor at Texas A&M and runs an excellent website called nixontapes.org in addition to co-authoring The Nixon Tapes, is already following this trail. He recently told me that he is looking for evidence of other Nixon-era break-ins conducted in the name of national security. This sort of deep-cover spying hardly started with the cybersleuthing disclosed by Edward Snowden

A second illusion of those who marched proudly into battle in 1914 was that they would be shooting at the enemy, but that he would not be shooting back, or at least not effectively

The Europeans were so enraptured by the power the machine gun gave them over colonial rebels that they never bothered to plan seriously for facing the weapon themselves.

Yet another illusion on both sides in 1914 was that a key force would be the cavalry

The BBC has announced it will collaborate with four British universities to offer online courses about World War I, beginning in October.

will focus on trauma and memory, heroism in industrialized warfare, early military aviation and how the war — and the ensuing peace — changed the world.

The BBC, founded just four years after the end of the war, will curate its archives to bring relevant contemporary material to the courses.

an insidious historical myth: that the reparations and other treaty measures were so odious that they made Adolf Hitler’s rise and World War II inevitable

In truth, the reparations, as the name suggests, were not intended as a punishment. They were meant to repair the damage done, mainly to Belgium and France, by the German invasion and subsequent four years of fighting. They would also help the Allies pay off huge loans they had taken to finance the war, mainly from the United States. At the Paris peace talks of 1919, President Woodrow Wilson was very clear that there should be no punitive fines on the losers, only legitimate costs. The other major statesmen in Paris, Prime Ministers David Lloyd George of Britain and Georges Clemenceau of France, reluctantly agreed,

The fact is that Germany could have managed to pay, but for political reasons chose not to.

Dès 1991, le grand orientaliste Bernard Lewis s'inquiétait de voir Israël devenir, sur le modèle du Liban, «une association difficile, une de plus, entre ethnies et groupes religieux en conflit». Et il ajoutait: «les juifs se trouveraient dans la position dominante qu'avaient autrefois les Maronites avec la perspective probable d'un destin à la libanaise en fin de parcours.» Pour empêcher cette prédiction de se réaliser, il serait urgent de faire ce qu'Ariel Sharon, à la fin de sa vie, appelait de «douloureuses concessions territoriales». Si ses successeurs y répugnent, c'est parce qu'ils se défient de leur partenaire, mais c'est surtout parce qu'ils ont peur de leurs propres extrémistes. Ils craignent la guerre civile entre Israéliens qui accompagnerait le démantèlement des implantations de Cisjordanie.

Si la civilisation de l'image n'était pas en train de détruire l'intelligence de la guerre, personne ne soutiendrait que les bombardements israéliens visent les civils. Avez-vous oublié Dresde? Quand une aviation surpuissante vise des civils, les morts se comptent par centaines de milliers. Non: les Israéliens préviennent les habitants de Gaza de toutes les manières possibles des bombardements à venir. Et lorsqu' on me dit que ces habitants n'ont nulle part où aller, je réponds que les souterrains de Gaza auraient dû être faits pour eux. Il y a aujourd'hui des pièces bétonnées dans chaque maison d'Israël.

Je critique la politique israélienne. Je plaide sans relâche depuis le début des années quatre-vingt pour la solution de deux Etats. Je condamne la poursuite des constructions dans les implantations en Cisjordanie. Je dis que l'intransigeance vis-à-vis du Hamas devrait s'accompagner d'un soutien effectif à l'autorité palestinienne.

Now no one is alive who served in the trenches or on a dreadnought, and the reliance is entirely upon documents, there can be, paradoxically, far more rigour in the analysis, as sources are tested against each other, and the unreliability of active memory ceases to intrude.

Few historians have the range of specialisms needed, at least in the depth to which each is required, to tell the whole story,

First, an understanding of the history of power, international relations since (at least) the Congress of Berlin and of European diplomacy is required to illuminate the catastrophe of August 1914.

The inflation-adjusted net worth for the typical household was $87,992 in 2003. Ten years later, it was only $56,335, or a 36 percent decline,

Those are the figures for a household at the median point in the wealth distribution — the level at which there are an equal number of households whose worth is higher and lower.

study also examined net worth at the 95th percentile. (For households at that level, 94 percent of the population had less wealth and 4 percent had more.) It found that for this well-do-do slice of the population, household net worth increased 14 percent over the same 10 years.

what can change from person to person, and what shapes the way we map out our days, is our subjective perception of time—how quickly it passes and how much of it we think we have. 

From Libya to Palestine to parts of the Egyptian Sinai, armed—and increasingly hard-line—Islamist groups are making significant inroads. This is the Arab world’s Salafi-Jihadi moment.

In Libya and Syria, even non-Salafi groups like the Brotherhood are adapting to the new world of anti-politics, allying themselves with local armed groups or working to form their own militias.

This is one of the great tragedies of the past few years—that a movement meant to demonstrate that peaceful protest could work ultimately demonstrated the opposite.

He said that in his own congregation, some were comparing the flow of immigrant children to the Kindertransport, a rescue mission in the late 1930s that sent Jewish children from Nazi Germany to Britain for safekeeping.

“The question for us is: How do we want to be remembered, as yelling and screaming to go back, or as using the teachings of our traditions to have compassion and love and grace for the lives of God’s children?” Rabbi Knight said.

The backlash to the backlash is broad, from Unitarian Universalists and Quakers to evangelical Protestants. Among the most agitated are Catholic bishops, who have long allied with Republican politicians against abortion and same-sex marriage, and leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, whose adherents tend to lean right.