History News Network

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.

Greg Mitchell, in Editor & Publisher (Aug. 8, 2004):

Hiroshima did not matter much this year, but then it rarely does, except in anniversary years ending in "0." Alas, this year marked merely the 59th anniversary of the first use of an atomic weapon over the center of a city, on Aug. 6, 1945. If Hiroshima barely made the press this year, Nagasaki didn't register at all, but that's nothing new. It is, as a sociologist in Nagasaki once told me, "the inferior A-bomb city."

Few journalists bother to visit Nagasaki, which was half-destroyed by an American bomb 59 years ago today. It remains the Second City and "Fat Man" the forgotten bomb. No one ever wrote a bestselling book called "Nagasaki," or made a film titled "Nagasaki, Mon Amour." Yet in some ways, Nagasaki is the modern A-bomb city. For one thing, when the plutonium bomb exploded above Nagasaki it made the uranium-type bomb dropped on Hiroshima obsolete.

A beautiful city dotted with palms built on a hill surrounding a deep harbor (it's the San Francisco of Japan, Nagasaki has a rich, bloody history, as any reader of Shogun knows. Three centuries before Commodore Perry came to Japan, Nagasaki was the country's gateway to the West. The Portuguese and Dutch settled there in the 1500s, and Urakami, a suburb of Nagasaki, became the country's Catholic center. Thomas Glover, one of the first English traders there, supplied the rifles that helped defeat the Tokugawa Shogunate in the 19th century.

Glover's life served as a model for the story of "Madame Butterfly." In Puccini's opera, Madame Butterfly, standing on the veranda of Glover's home overlooking the harbor, sings, "One fine day, we'll see a thread of smoke arising ..." If she could have looked north from Glover's mansion, now Nagasaki's top tourist attraction, on Aug. 9, 1945, she would have seen, two miles in the distance, a thread of smoke with a mushroom cap.

By 1945, Nagasaki had become a Mitsubishi company town, turning out ships and armaments for Japan's increasingly desperate war effort. Few Japanese soldiers were stationed here, and only about 250 of them would perish in the atomic bombing (slightly fewer than the Allied prisoners of war who died that day). It was still the Christian center in the country, with more than 10,000 Catholics among its 250,000 residents. Most of them lived in the outlying Urakami district. At 11:02 a.m. on Aug. 9, 1945, "Fat Man" was detonated more than a mile off target, almost directly over the Urakami Cathedral, which was nearly leveled, killing dozens of worshippers waiting for confession. Concrete roads in the valley literally melted.

While Urakami suffered, the rest of the city caught a break. The bomb's blast boomed up the valley destroying everything in its path but didn't quite reach the congested harbor or scale the high ridge to the Nakashima valley. Some 45,000 perished instantly, with another 50,000 fated to die afterwards. The plutonium bomb hit with the force of 22 kilotons, almost double the uranium bomb's blast in Hiroshima. If the bomb had exploded as planned, directly over the Mitsubishi shipyards, the death toll in Nagasaki would have made Hiroshima, in at least one important sense, the Second City....

James Warren, in the Chicago Tribune (Aug. 8, 2004):

Exhausted by the self-absorption of Bill Clinton, I turned late one recent night to the exhilarating self-deception of Richard Nixon. A switch from Clinton's $12 million memoir to Nixon's mostly forgotten, secret audiotapes was timely. Baby Boomers may feel very moth-eaten when realizing that Monday marks the 30th anniversary of his resignation as president amid the nation's greatest political scandal, Watergate. While Clinton provides an interesting take on the hectic essence of life in the Oval Office, his is a personal memoir with all the failings of the genre. It's not journalism, it's not history; it's one man's quite self-serving take.

Nixon, however, presents us with the most detailed account of an American presidency--perhaps of any world leader--via an astounding 3,800 hours of the once-secret tapes. And he also presents us, posthumously, with some distinct cautionary notes when it comes to appraising the performance of public figures.

"There is absolutely nothing like the tapes," says Stanley Kutler, a University of Wisconsin historian.

Look at it this way: Wouldn't you crave to know exactly what was being said in the Oval Office before the invasion of Iraq? For sure, there are the claims of certain participants of what was said (and some are relayed via Bob Woodward's recent book, "Plan of Attack").

But are they truly to be trusted? With Nixon, you've got, for example, the exact conversation in which he decides to blockade and mine Haiphong harbor in North Vietnam ("Let it fly, let it fly," he tells National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger). But Nixon's self-inflicted ignominy is also a prime reason that subsequent presidents have not left us with a similar raft of recordings. Just too dangerous.

"They are a treasure trove of oral source material. Defying all the common assumptions about dealing with modern political history, they are a collection that outstrips anything I know in any period," said University of Missouri-St. Louis historian Charles Korr, who wishes he had had such rich fare to exploit when he researched books on 17th Century English foreign policy and the legacy of the Major League Baseball players union.

Precious few take the opportunity, but you can listen to hour after hour of a key 20th Century figure at his best, worst and most plainly indifferent: in all his undisguised brilliance, skullduggery, vanity, self-pity, bigotry, discussion of the shattering and clandestine opening of relations with the People's Republic of China, deceiving of colleagues, frustrations over the Vietnam War, sophisticated takes on domestic policy and dealings with family.

As revealing are the unavoidable portraits of hundreds of aides and world figures with whom he speaks on the phone or in one of several offices Nixon bugged, including the Oval Office, an office next door at the Old Executive Office Building and one at Camp David. With the exception of just two people--Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman and Haldeman aide Alexander Butterfield--none had a clue that they were being taped.

Thus, you can hear the apple-polishing of Kissinger but also Kissinger's shrewd takes on world affairs and individuals; United Nations Ambassador George H.W. Bush's loyal and cheerful recounting of the latest UN crisis; California Gov. Ronald Reagan lobbying Nixon to yank us out of the UN (one can almost see Nixon rolling his eyes; the at times Machiavellian maneuverings of chief domestic adviser John Ehrlichman; major players like West German Chancellor Willy Brandt delineating Cold War politics; Adm. Thomas Moorer, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, being lambasted for lack of progress in Vietnam; and even Ted Williams talking baseball and Sammy Davis Jr. talking about the fancy country club in Los Angeles that won't take his kind.

... Even conservative critics have accepted the notion that Woodward and Bernstein were instrumental in Nixon's downfall. "[T]he Washington Post.. decided to make the Watergate break-in a major moral issue, a lead followed by the rest of the East Coast media," Paul Johnson wrote in his book "Modern Times: A History of the World from the 1920s to the Year 2000." This "Watergate witch-hunt," Johnson declared, was "run by liberals in the media..the first media Putsch in history."

Woodward dismisses both detractors and fans who contend that the media unseated a president. "To say that the press brought down Nixon, that's horseshit," he says. "The press always plays a role, whether by being passive or by being aggressive, but it's a mistake to overemphasize" the media's coverage.

But it was Woodward and Bernstein's best-selling book, "All the President's Men," that focused public attention on the young reporters, especially after Hollywood turned it into a blockbuster movie starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. The film immortalized the chain-smoking anonymous source called "Deep Throat," who met Woodward at night in deserted parking garages after first signaling for meetings with elaborate codes. Warner Brothers promoted the movie as "the story of the two young reporters who cracked the Watergate conspiracy...[and] solved the greatest detective story in American history. At times, it looked as if it might cost them their jobs, their reputations, perhaps even their lives."

Despite the hype, Woodward and Bernstein did not write a comprehensive history of Watergate, just a memoir of their own experience covering it. "The fallacy in 'All the President's Men' is that..the movie is all from our point of view, so that it seems to be a story about us," Woodward acknowledges. "But that's just one piece of what happened early in the process."

Still, as sociologist Michael Schudson wrote in his book "Watergate in American Memory," that's not the way the public sees it: "A mythology of the press in Watergate developed into a significant national myth, a story that independently carries on a memory of Watergate even as details about what Nixon did or did not do fade away. At its broadest, the myth of journalism in Watergate asserts that two young Washington Post reporters brought down the president of the United States. This is a myth of David and Goliath, of powerless individuals overturning an institution of overwhelming might. It is high noon in Washington, with two white-hatted young reporters at one end of the street and the black-hatted president at the other, protected by his minions. And the good guys win. The press, truth its only weapon, saves the day." ...

The ancient Greeks were the world's first sports fans. They loved games of all kinds, which they called "agones.'' That's how we came by our words "agony'' and "antagonist,'' which should give us a good idea of how the Greeks viewed their games: as agonies in which antagonist is pitted against antagonist until one comes out on top. A better English term for what they had in mind might be "contest'' or "struggle'' or even "power performance.''

Ancient Greece was a society of alpha males who took their fun seriously. Whether they were at war with one another (which they often were, and which they got a huge bang out of) or enjoying more peaceful pursuits, they insisted that certain rules be followed and that there always be, right in the middle of everything, an agon.

In war, there was nothing that thrilled them more than a fight to the death, one army's champion pitted against the other's. In peacetime, they couldn't just take in a poetry reading, listen to a concert or watch a play. They had to enliven the proceedings with a poetry contest, a music contest, a drama contest. There always had to be a declared winner on whom the laurels could be heaped and at least one miserable loser. Even their parties, which easily developed into orgies, included contests over which participant could deliver the most eloquent toast or tell the funniest joke or get the farthest with the flute girl. Needless to say, it was the flute girl who lost.

If by sports we mean only a few guys kicking a ball around, the Greeks were not the inventors. Soccer in its simplest form has been with us ever since the invention of animal husbandry, soon after which some playful young shepherd probably kicked an inflated sheep's bladder or a decapitated sheep's head in the direction of another shepherd, who was inspired to kick it back. Certain bloodthirsty Celtic and Mesoamerican tribes - the Irish and the Aztecs, in particular - preferred human heads rather than sheep parts for such diversions, which soon developed into rudimentary team sports.

But if by sports we mean a series of organized contests of physical prowess, conducted according to acknowledged rules in the presence of enthusiastic crowds and scheduled well in advance to encourage participation by all the best athletes available for the sheer glory and fame of winning, we are talking about a purely Greek invention....

According to legend, the ancient Olympic Games were founded by Heracles (the Roman Hercules), a son of Zeus. Yet the first Olympic Games for which we still have written records were held in 776 BCE (though it is generally believed that the Games had been going on for many years already). At this Olympic Games, a naked runner, Coroebus (a cook from Elis), won the sole event at the Olympics, the stade - a run of approximately 192 meters (210 yards). This made Coroebus the very first Olympic champion in history.

The ancient Olympic Games grew and continued to be played every four years for nearly 1200 years. In 393 CE, the Roman emperor Theodosius I, a Christian, abolished the Games because of their pagan influences.

Approximately 1500 years later, a young Frenchmen named Pierre de Coubertin began their revival. Coubertin is now known as le Rénovateur. Coubertin was a French aristocrat born on January 1, 1863. He was only seven years old when France was overrun by the Germans during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Some believe that Coubertin attributed the defeat of France not to its military skills but rather to the French soldiers' lack of vigor.* After examining the education of the German, British, and American children, Coubertin decided that it was exercise, more specifically sports, that made a well-rounded and vigorous person.

Coubertin's attempt to get France interested in sports was not met with enthusiasm. Still, Coubertin persisted. In 1890, he organized and founded a sports organization, Union des Sociétés Francaises de Sports Athlétiques (USFSA). Two years later, Coubertin first pitched his idea to revive the Olympic Games. At a meeting of the Union des Sports Athlétiques in Paris on November 25, 1892, Coubertin stated,

Let us export our oarsmen, our runners, our fencers into other lands. That is the true Free Trade of the future; and the day it is introduced into Europe the cause of Peace will have received a new and strong ally. It inspires me to touch upon another step I now propose and in it I shall ask that the help you have given me hitherto you will extend again, so that together we may attempt to realise [sic], upon a basis suitable to the conditions of our modern life, the splendid and beneficent task of reviving the Olympic Games.

His speech did not inspire action. Though Coubertin was not the first to propose the revival of the Olympic Games, he was certainly the most well-connected and persistent of those to do so. Two years later, Coubertin organized a meeting with 79 delegates who represented nine countries. He gathered these delegates in an auditorium that was decorated by neoclassical murals and similar additional points of ambiance. At this meeting, Coubertin eloquently spoke of the revival of the Olympic Games. This time, Coubertin aroused interest.

The delegates at the conference voted unanimously for the Olympic Games. The delegates also decided to have Coubertin construct an international committee to organize the Games. This committee became the International Olympic Committee (IOC; Comité Internationale Olympique) and Demetrious Vikelas from Greece was selected to be its first president. Athens was chosen for the revival of the Olympic Games and the planning was begun....

Japan Focus Introduction In late 1937, a Tokyo newspaper reported on a "hundred head contest" in which two Japanese imperial army officers competed to see who could lop off one hundred Chinese heads first during the campaign to take the Chinese capital city of Nanjing. The contest is symbolic of the perversion and loss of military discipline during the Japanese capture and occupation of the city that has come to be known variously as the Nanjing Massacre, the Rape of Nanjing, or simply the Nanjing Incident. The event belongs to a long list of 20th century atrocities, and is emblematic of Chinese suffering at the hands of a barbarous Japanese military as well as of Japanese predations across wartime Asia and the Pacific.

As part of what one might call a "canon" of horror, various groups have interests in how the event is remembered not only in China and Japan, but also internationally. Estimates of the numbers killed at Nanjiing vary from several thousand to over 300,000, depending on national and political persuasion and the parameters one puts in terms of time, place, and ethnicity of victim. (See David Askew, "New Research on the Nanjing Incident," available at http://www.japanfocus.org/109.html).

The essay by Suzuki Chieko is a self-conscious part of Japanese discourse over how remembrance of Japan's wartime past will structure current and future Japanese state policy. In this polarized discourse, wartime predations abroad are linked to a potential return of an oppressive domestic order in the present, so those who seek to defend postwar Japanese democratic as well as pacifist ideals, as Suzuki does, fear denial of Japanese atrocities in the past.

Although Japan's postwar Constitution was drafted by Gen. Douglas MacArthur's Occupation staff, most Japanese welcomed its guarantees of civil liberties and its renunciation of war as an instrument of foreign policy. As Suzuki notes, however, the ban on the dispatch of troops overseas has weakened since the first Gulf war in the early 1990s, when many Japanese felt unfairly criticized for failing to contribute more than money to that international effort. With attitudes toward the postwar pacifist settlement shifting, conservative political forces led by Prime Minister Koizumi have succeeded in gradually legitimizing the dispatch of Self Defense Forces abroad. As in the post 9/11 United States, under the rubric of special counter-terrorism measures the government has steadily expanded the range of activity in the name of national security. And, for only the second time in the postwar era there are concrete measures being taken to revise the constitution. The first effort at constitutional revision in the late 1950s and early 1960s failed. Conditions now make revision seem more likely.]

Shukan Kinyobi Editor's Introduction When the Japanese army occupied Nanjing in December 1937, the Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun newspaper (the present-day Mainichi Shinbun) carried four reports -- printed November 30 and December 4, 6, and 13 -- on a "hundred head contest" between two army lieutenants to see who could first kill one hundred Chinese with their swords.

After Honda Katsuichi mentioned this "hundred head contest" in his 1971 Chugoku no tabi (Travels in China), a debate arose in the journals between Honda and Hora Tomio (then a professor at Waseda University) on one side, and Yamamoto Shichihei (aka Isaiah Ben Dasan) and Suzuki Akira, who challenged the account. This debate more or less came to an end with the 1977 publication of Honda's edited volume, Pen no inbo (Conspiracy of the Pen), but recently Sankei shinbun, Seiron and like newspapers and journals have once again taken up the issue charging that the "hundred head contest" was a fabrication.

This is the background against which the two lieutenants' surviving families have lodged an appeal in court. Specifically, theirs is a libel suit calling for an injunction on publication, lodged against the Mainichi Newspapers Company (successor to the Tokyo Nichinichi Shinbun) that reported on the competition, the Asahi Shinbun Publishing Company that published Honda's Chugoku no tabi and Nankin e no michi (Road to Nanjing), Kashiwa Shobo, publisher of "Suemono kiri ya horyo gyakusatsu wa nichijo sahanji datta" (Using corpses for sword practice and prisoner atrocities were an everyday event) and the essay collection Nankin daigyakusatsu hiteiron 13 no uso (13 Lies in Denials of the Nanjing Massacre), and against author Honda.

On April 10, 2003 the Tokyo Supreme Court issued a verdict in favor of Nanjing Massacre survivor Li Xiuying in her defamation suit against claims that she was a fraud. But immediately afterward, on April 28, the "hundred head" suit was brought.

Why was a suit like this, one that challenges the existence of the hundred head contest, brought immediately after the court ruling in Li Xiuying's favor? It was not brought simply out of spite for the lost litigation, nor due to a stubborn refusal to admit defeat. To begin with, 11 of the 17 lawyers who jointly filed for plaintiffs had given support to those who had accused Li of being a fraud. Next, during the first two days of the trial, supporters for the plaintiffs jammed into the confined courtroom in numbers double those normally allowed. And, although other news organs carried only short reports on details of the suit, the Sankei shinbun, known for its narrowly nationalistic editorial policy, allotted extensive coverage amenable to the plaintiff's point of view. Accordingly, we can consider the "hundred head" litigation to have been systematically planned.

So why are reports from 66 years ago being litigated now? The attack on reporting about the "hundred head contest" isn't new; it has been going on for 30 years.

Attack began with Honda Katsuichi's 1971 Asahi shinbun series "Travels in China." "Travels in China" was a revolutionary series, revealing to wide numbers of Japanese the reality of wartime predations that he learned about during his travels, heard from survivors of atrocities committed by Japanese military in China. Although before then history texts might have described wartime sufferings of the Japanese people, they hadn't touched on Japanese predations in Asia. These reports had a great impact on Japanese who learned the truth about the past from them.

In reaction, a sense of crisis arose among those seeking to glorify the war of aggression and revise the postwar constitution. The attacks on Honda began with the immediate target being the "hundred head contest,' what one might call the "overture" of the incident most representative of Japan's war of aggression, the Nanjing Massacre.

The first to act was Yamamoto Shichihei (Isaiah Ben Dasan), who persisted in attacking Honda for over three years in the journal Shokun!, beginning in 1972. Considering the influence such attacks might have, Honda engaged in a public debate with Yamamoto in Shokun!'s pages. But this so-called "hundred head debate" ended with Yamamoto's complete defeat as so many of his assertions were slipshod and ripped apart by Honda.

Next was Yamamoto's pinch hitter, Suzuki Akira. Suzuki also reported on the "hundred head" problem in the pages of Shokun!, later bringing his findings out in a book titled "Nankin daigyakusatsu" no maboroshi (Illusion of the "Nanjing Massacre"). As it turned out, this book was awarded Bungei Shunjusha's Oya Soichi prize in nonfiction. Based on a visit to the presiding judge of the Nanjing military tribunal, and on their prison writings and defense memoranda, Suzuki argued that the two officers had been unjustly executed on the basis of false reports. The prize selection committee swallowed his argument that the "hundred head contest" was a ruse. However, this book was part of a scheme to cast doubt on the truth of the whole of the Nanjing Massacre.

In reaction to such attacks, Honda dug up and thoroughly refuted their claims with testimonials that: showed the "hundred head" contest to have been an atrocity committed against prisoners of war (not battle killings) ("Shishime testimony") [1]; undercut the blunt Japanese sword theory that held that swords would not hold their edge through so many decapitations (Uno testimony) [2]; and made clear that the contest was not just a war correspondent's fabrication (Sato testimony). [3] Then Hora Tomio wrote Nankin daigyakusatsu: "maboroshi" ka kosaku hihan (The Nanjing Massacre: Criticism of the Making of an Illusion) [4], which refuted Suzuki point by point. In particular, Hora used the testimonies to thoroughly lay bare a false "alibi" report that the two officers had met war correspondents at the foot of Nanjing's Zhongshan mountain.

Afterwards, unsubstantiated denials of the Nanjing Massacre continued unabated, in places like the Sankei shinbun and Seiron in addition to the Bungei shunju and Shokun!. The Study Group on the Nanjing Incident (Nankin Jiken Chosakai), founded in 1984 in response to these activities denying the Massacre, has contributed greatly to illuminating the Nanjing Massacre.

The denial thesis became increasingly bankrupt in the late 1980s. First, it came to light that Tanaka Masaaki had altered the text in as many as 300 places when he published the field diary of General Matsui Iwane, [the officer in charge of Japanese troops in Nanjing]. [5] Second, the editors of Kaiko, the publication of Kaikosha, the fraternal organization of former Imperial Army cadets, recognized in print that "the Japanese army committed illegal murders in Nanjing." And third, a decision in the Ienaga Saburo textbook suit recognized the existence of the "Nanjing Massacre."

In this way the theories denying the Nanjing Massacre were totally discredited, but they were prominently touted again in the late 1990s. That is, by repeatedly emphasizing the denial theories, proponents hoped to persuade people that no massacre had occurred, or if it had, it wasn't so bad. Treating surviving witness Li Xiuying as a fake and filing the current "hundred heads" libel suit can be seen as part of this effort. These developments are deeply connected to the intensification of reactionary attacks since the beginning of the 1990s.

Japan has become increasingly reactionary since the passage of the PKO International Peace Cooperation Law [1992] and the dispatch of troops abroad at the time of the first Iraq War (Gulf War) in 1991. As if in parallel with these currents, there has arisen a camp aiming to remake Japan into a country capable of waging war, with the formation of Fujioka Nobukatsu's Liberal View of History Association [sic] (Jiyushugishikan Kenkyukai) and the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform (Atarashii Rekishikyokasho wo Tsukuru Kai). Also, 1999 saw preparation of the infrastructure for war in earnest with the passage of laws making Kimigayo and the hinomaru the official national anthem and flag, and laws related to establishing new guidelines for Japan-U.S. Defense Cooperation.

Nowadays not just the Liberal-Democratic Party (LDP) but also the major opposition Democratic Party is advocating constitutional revision in its party manifesto, under the rubric of "constitution creation". And, if the dispatch of the SDF to Iraq becomes a reality, it will be the first time since defeat in World War Two that Japan has sent troops into a battle zone. [Trans. note: SDF units were dispatched to Iraq to provide "reconstruction assistance" in January 2004.]

The current "hundred heads" libel suit is one prong of an attack that ought to worry the democratic forces that have resisted the militarization of the Japanese state. By rehashing the "hundred head" issue that ought to have been settled, they are trying to plant among the people a view of history that glorifies and affirms aggression in Asia.

We ought to lay bare the truth that most of the victims who lost their heads in this "hundred head contest" were unresisting prisoners in an atrocity that was a murderous game to see who could kill the most. But rather than condemn the two officers who wielded swords in this atrocity, we should reveal and broadcast the truth that the core problem was in the Japanese militarist education that fashioned this kind of soldier. Doing so will also serve to foster trust and friendly relations for Japan in Asia and the world.

1. Shishime Akira, "Nitchu senso no tsuioku -- 'hyakunin giri kyoso'" (Remembering the Sino-Japanese War -- the "Hundred Head Contest"). Chugoku (Tokuma Shoten: December 1971).

2. Uno Shintaro, "Nihonken enkonbu" (Japanese Sword Record on Hate). In Pen no inbo, (Conspiracy of the Pen), edited by Honda Katsuichi. Ushio Shuppan, 1977.

3. Suzuki Jiro, "Watashi wa ano 'Nankin no higeki' wo mokugeki shita" (I Witnessed that Nanjing Tragedy). Maru (November 1977).

5. Tanaka Masaaki, ed., Matsui Iwane taisho no jinchu nisshi (Field Diary of General Matsui Iwane). Fuyo Shobo, 1985.

Suzuki Chieko is a member of the Nanjing Research Association (Nankin chosa kenkyukai). This article appeared in Shukan Kinyobi 488, 12 December 2003): 50-51.

Translated for Japan Focus by James Orr, Associate Professor and Chair of the East Asian Studies Department at Bucknell University. His research interests center on communal memory and political identity. He is the author of The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan. He may be contacted at jamesorr@bucknell.edu.

Will Fitzhugh, founder of the National History Club, in a newsletter (Aug. 9, 2004):

The College Board is about to add a writing test to the SAT, making the new possible score 2400 instead of 1600. The writing part will provide thirty minutes for the candidate to give an opinion in response to a prompt, and these responses will be scored at the rate of thirty an hour, or no more than two minutes each.

This is the sequel to the SAT II writing test, for which students have in the past spent up to six hours preparing a generic essay with which they can respond to any prompt, for instance with the help of tutors at the Chyten organization in Boston, who charge about $165 an hour.

The new test will add pressure to students already working on their micro-mini autobiographical “personal” essays which they need to submit to many college admissions officers when they apply to college.

These writing exercises then have to be added to the creative and personal and journal writing so highly preferred by many educators over the traditional old-fashioned term papers.

One result of all this attention to short, superficial, and nonacademic writing efforts is that about 30 percent of college freshmen now need remedial writing courses, and most professors complain that practically all of their students seem to understand very little about reading for and writing a research paper of any kind.

An additional consequence is the likelihood that the great majority of U.S. high school students now graduate without ever having read a single nonfiction book. College reading lists, of course, look even more forbidding to students who have never read that sort of book.

Educators offer many excuses for this superficial approach to writing. They say that they fear plagiarism (although it is just as easy to plagiarize a five-paragraph essay as a 25-page one). They say they don’t have time to plan, coach, and correct research papers (and many don’t). They say that, for some reason, while high school students can take calculus and honors physics, they shouldn’t be asked to move beyond the seventh-grade challenge of the five-paragraph essay. And naturally there are those who feel that any academic expository writing will permanently damage the creative potential of the young persons in their care.

It is frustrating for me, because I have published 649 history research papers by high school students from 34 countries since 1987, and they are as serious and as well-written as one could wish, so I know that high school students can read and write, if they are not actively prevented from doing so, as the majority are in U.S. high schools at present.

...By coincidence I had a ringside seat at the ensuing drama of America's only presidential resignation on August 9, 1974. That summer I was the house guest of a well-known Georgetown hostess, Kay Halle. Kay's basement was occupied by a White House aide, Frank Gannon, and his girlfriend Diane Sawyer. She is now a CBS television presenter but in those days she worked for Ron Ziegler, Nixon's press secretary.

Four days before the resignation Gannon invited me to lunch in the White House mess. The place was as gloomy as a funeral parlour, but as a newly elected British MP who knew and admired Nixon (I had met him while working as private secretary to the former British foreign secretary, Selwyn Lloyd), I was welcomed and introduced to various departing aides to the president including Alexander Haig, Ziegler, Don Rumsfeld and Bob Finch.

Rose Mary Woods, the president's secretary, was weeping as she shoved papers into packing cases for the flight into exile at San Clemente. Nixon was in seclusion on the verge of a mental and physical breakdown.

We now know that what was troubling him most were demands for the granting of presidential pardons to key aides such as Bob Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, Charles Colson and John Mitchell. It was even suggested that Nixon should grant a pardon to himself. "Unthinkable ... I'll take my chances," he said, later adding defiantly in the days before his successor President Gerald Ford pardoned him: "I don't think prison would be so bad. All I'd need would be a good supply of books and a hard table to write on. Some of the best writing in history has been done from jail -look at Gandhi and Lenin."

I made one minuscule contribution to the final days of the Nixon presidency. Over lunch that day in the White House I offered the opinion that the historians of the future would treat Nixon more kindly than the journalists of the present. "Do you really think that?" said the excitable Ziegler. "Would you write it in a letter and I'll give it to 'the Man'?"

So, using House of Commons notepaper, I duly penned a British-style valedictory note of sympathy to Nixon. Ziegler later told me that he had handed it to the president aboard Air Force One just before 12 noon -the hour at which his resignation took effect. Nixon appreciated the gesture, for he told me so many years later when I became his biographer.

Thirty years on, Nixon continues to fascinate. Ancient speculations surfaced again last week after the death of Fred LaRue, a White House aide who many suspect could have been "Deep Throat" -the Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward's inside source on Watergate. But it is getting easier to make an objective assessment of the man and his record. Most of Nixon's White House tapes are now in the public domain. More importantly, the hate-filled passions that he exacerbated because of Vietnam and Watergate have diminished with time.

Nixon's greatest strengths were his political resilience and his foreign policy prescience. Both were at work even at the nadir of his disgrace. He started to run for ex-president on the day he ceased to be the president. Minutes after finishing his final resignation speech to his staff he was helicoptered off the White House lawn towards Andrews air force base where Air Force One was waiting to fly him into exile. Anyone else would have been in the depths of despair. Not Nixon. "As the helicopter moved on to Andrews I found myself thinking not of the past but of the future. What could I do now?..."

... Having done not much else for years except read historical books about the 20th century, I am in awe at the scholarship and industry of the many authors I have read, but, in general, I am less impressed by their sense of perspective, by their take on events. Neither the dons nor the popular historians weighing in at 700 pages know much about distillation. Even clever writers seem to be terribly insensitive to the sheer appallingness of the lives thatmost human beings, thanks to politicians and Fate, have lived in the 20th century. I turn for consolation to Geoffrey Hill, who is more and more not just my favourite modern poet but favourite poet.

Historians strike attitudes and posture. They make a lot of noise and they cover a lot of pages, but they don't very often give me a sensation of the drill touching the nerve. Hill's poetry does this to me all the time. He does not give us History as Journalism, making points. He gives us history as felt life, history as. Take an impressive volume, Mercian Hymns. The only other author I know who has quite so vivid a sense of England's past - the here and now, the Second World War, and the medieval past, stretching back into mist - is our own Michael Wharton in this newspaper, aka Peter Simple.

Hill, however, is a great poet, who again and again evokes "coiled, entrenched England". His Mercian Hymns take us back to the friend of Charlemagne who built the dyke - Offa. But they are seen through the layers of Hill's own personal memories - the coronation of George VI, or of his grandmother, "whose childhood and prime womanhood were pent in the nailer's darg". Hill's own childhood in the West Midlands, and that of his children, even their play, turn up the past. "We have a kitchen-garden riddled with toy-shards, with splinters of habitation."

Anglo-Saxon poetry was not written out in verse, you felt, but in lines and rhythms. So here. This, it strikes me, is what history ought to be able to do and almost never does. Before history was the new gardening, it was an Enlightenment invention designed to set the past in order. It is always in danger of making the past in the image of the present, or using the past to make points. The first writers who evoked the past were not enlightenment historians but poets; and Hill's Mercian Hymns remind us of why the poets are sometimes surer guides than the historians, however admirable their research and however paradoxical their prose.

In 1961, historian Fritz Fischer shocked Germany with his book, "Germany's Grasp for World Power," which asserted that Kaiser Wilhelm II was largely responsible for the outbreak of World War I. To a population that had grown up viewing the war as defensive, Mr. Fischer's book was widely rejected.

Now, public opinion is beginning to shift. And new theories that test old notions about World War I are surfacing.

Already this year, there have been over a dozen books published on the subject, as well as countless television specials, and a six-issue series by the prominent newsmagazine "Der Spiegel."

The change is also making its way into German schools and universities. More and more students are showing an interest in World War I courses.

"I have noticed that World War I has definitely become more interesting to my students," says Torsten Kittler, a tenth-grade teacher from the German state of Lower Saxony who was recently in Berlin to take his class to the current World War I exhibit at the German History Museum. "We have been trying to show the connections between the two wars and with the 20th century as a whole. The students really like that."

Katherina Mueller, a student of Kittler's, agrees. "We have really learned that World War I was the first and defining catastrophe of last century."

To be sure, the 90th anniversary of the Aug. 1, 1914, start of WWI has played a role in its growing popularity. But observers say this is more than just a media phenomenon. It's a new German understanding of their 20th-century history - dominated for so long by the horrors of the Holocaust. And the ongoing discussion about whether one can be "proud" to be German has raised questions about how far Germans can go in detaching themselves from the country's World War II guilt.

"There is a feeling that we are in a new era," says Rainer Rother, curator of the German History Museum exhibit.

Much discussed among historians in Germany and the rest of Europe is a theory that sees the period between 1914 and 1945 as a single continuation of violence. Rather than examining the distinctions between the two violent episodes, the similarities - such as the global and industrialized character of both wars as well as the continuity of German desires to expand eastward - are emphasized.

Some critics say this conflation of the two wars is a dangerous step toward minimizing the Holocaust. Mr. Rother says that reducing World War II to a small part of a larger era takes the spotlight away from Nazi crimes. "There is a risk," he says, "of putting World War I too closely together with the break from civilization represented by the Nazis. It minimizes that break."

Rather than seeking to relativize World War II, the current discussion of World War I has focused on recognition that German aggression was a defining feature of much of the 20th century. The so-called "Short 20th Century" - a historical interpretation that combines World War I, World War II, and the cold war into one era from 1914 until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 - places guilt for World War I on German shoulders.

First articulated by British historian Eric Hobsbawm in his 1994 book, "The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991," this school of thought is finding particular resonance in Germany this year. The country is hoping this year's political union with Poland and other eastern European countries will be the optimistic closing chapter of a painful century....

[Colin White is one of Britain's leading experts on Nelson. He is director of Trafalgar 200 for the National Maritime Museum and will be publishing two books in 2005, Nelson: The New Letters' and Nelson: The Admiral']

Where is Trafalgar? When visitors to the Royal Naval Museum's Tra- falgar Experience' in Ports-mouth are confronted with this question in a multi-choice computer quiz, a surprising number of them select The Channel.

Or perhaps it is not surprising at all. For,
Napoleon had spent months of planning, and had expended millions of francs, on the creation of a special "Army of England", and a huge flotilla of transports to get it across the Channel. But in the end he was outmanoeuvred by the Royal Navy, skilfully blocked at every turn, when he tried to unite his fleets of battleships and push them into the Channel to cover his army's crossing.

Finally, in late August 1805, even he could see that his plans were not going to work. So, when he heard that Austria was mobilising an army, he turned with evident relief to the sort of warfare he understood best and struck there before the country was fully prepared.

That left the Combined Fleet under Vice Admiral Pierre de Villeneuve, sheltering behind the fortifications of Cadiz, an ever-present threat to Britain. So, to deal with it, the British Admiralty sent their star player - the victor of three battles and acknowledged leader of his profession, Horatio Nelson.

He had with him a battleplan that he hoped would help the British to win a wipe-out victory. He even had a name for it: in a letter to his beloved mistress, Emma Hamilton he called it "The Nelson Touch".

Another of the Trafalgar myths is that this plan was new and revolutionary, involving tactics that no one had thought of using before.

In fact, the individual elements of the plan - such as breaking through the enemy's line or attacking in divisions, instead of in a single line - were not at all revolutionary. They had been tried out, by both British and French admirals, in the latter half of the 18th century. Indeed, we now know that Villeneuve actually predicted to his captains, days before the battle, almost exactly the tactics that Nelson would use.

What was different was that Nelson had worked on his plan well in advance and shared it with his subordinates.

In 2001, a rough sketch was discovered in the archive of the National Maritime Museum, clearly drawn by Nelson to demonstrate his ideas to a colleague weeks before the battle while he was on leave in England.

Labelled "the Holy Grail of naval history" by historian Andrew Roberts, it will form the starting point for a dramatic new examination of the battle at the very centre of the National Maritime Museum's "blockbuster" exhibition for summer next year, Nelson & Napoleon.

The two fleets sighted each other at about 6.00am on 21 October but the wind was light and so the first shots were not fired until midday. Less than four hours later it was all over.

Eighteen of the 33 French and Spanish battleships had been captured or destroyed, four escaped only to be captured a fortnight later, and the remainder struggled back into Cadiz, very badly damaged.

It was a knockout blow to both the Spanish and the French navies from which neither really recovered.

However, for the British, triumph at this extraordinary result was overshadowed by the news that Nelson was dead. Shot on his quarterdeck of his flagship, HMS Victory, at about 1.15pm he was carried down to the cockpit where, having been told of his great victory, he died at about 4.30pm.

Even his protracted death-scene, painstakingly recorded by three eyewitnesses has become the subject of myth.

The Victorians, who hated the fact that the great hero actually asked another man to kiss him, invented the ludicrous fiction that the desperately wounded admiral suddenly broke into Turkish: "Kismet, (fate) Hardy!" In fact all the eyewitness accounts agree that the kiss was both asked for and given.

Indeed, almost as if to ensure that there should be no doubt about it, Hardy kissed his friend twice - once on the cheek and then again after a short pause on the forehead.

Nelson's response set the seal on this wonderfully poignant exchange: "Now I am satisfied. Thank God I have done my duty."

Trafalgar may not have saved England from invasion but it has acquired symbolic significance that sets it apart from any other naval battle.

It was the last great battle of the sailing era - the next time two great fleets clashed again in European waters they were the steam-powered dreadnoughts of the First World War. It confirmed Britain's command of the seas and steadied her on the course that was leading her to a far-flung Empire that depended almost entirely on sea communications. It gave the Royal Navy an unmatched tradition of victory that is still potent, 200 years later....

Before the nineteenth century was more than a couple of decades old, certainly by the fiftieth anniversary of 1776, the United States had come to regard the veterans of its revolution with a sort of wistful romanticism. An emerging American popular culture developed a vision of the common soldier of that war which more or less reflects ours: citizen-soldiers—farmers, laborers, men of the middling sort, young and old—minutemen who picked up their muskets and fell in with their militia units to defend home and community from invading Redcoats. The enemy driven from the field, the fighters returned to the plow, or anvil, or hearth, alert for the next threat. As the years drew on, and more and more of the old soldiers mustered for the march to the grave, the nation's veneration of them only advanced. A sort of pantheonic mythology grew.

In 1837, for example, Ralph Waldo Emerson's elegy "Concord Hymn" celebrated the "embattled farmers" who "fired the shot heard round the world." In a speech a year later, young Abraham Lincoln spoke of "the generation just gone to rest," and the War for Independence. In part, he said:
At the close of that struggle, nearly every adult male had been a participator in some of its scenes. The consequence was, that of those scenes, in the form of a husband, a father, a son or a brother, a living history was to be found in every family—a history bearing the indubitable testimonies of its own authenticity, in the limbs mangled, in the scars of wounds received, in the midst of the very scenes related—a history, too, that could be read and understood alike by all, the wise and the ignorant, the learned and the unlearned. But those histories are gone. They can be read no more forever. They were a fortress of strength; but what invading foemen could never do the silent artillery of time has done; the levelling of its walls. They are gone....
Who, exactly, were these embodiments of history?

In Soldier of Liberty, Russell Fenton is a boyish recruit, just as were many of the men of '76. Some served the entire war.

The colonies required militia service, generally, of males between sixteen and sixty, excepting clergy, college students, slaves, and, often, free blacks. In Virginia, service by Catholics was forbidden. The militiamen came from the civilian ranks of tailors, mechanics, small farmers, bootmakers, smiths, gentry, common laborers, shopkeepers, clerks, lawyers, tutors, carpenters. The units roughly mirrored the laity of free white male colonial society.

In theory, the militia system provided a deep reservoir of men ready to be put under arms, and, indeed, during the Revolution the number of men who served in militia units far outnumbered that in the Continental Army. Militia was sometimes used effectively by Continental officers to reinforce and support regular forces, or to hold fortifications and fieldworks. Pitched battles were fought solely by militia at such engagements as the Battle of King's Mountain in 1780, but they were exceptions. Sometimes, as the next year at Cowpens, militia units were arrayed in advance of Continentals, taking the initial British attack, firing a volley, and falling back. The regulars moved forward to surprise the enemy with a body of more effective regular troops. Most militias saw action within their home regions, being called to duty as the contending armies moved from theater to theater. Using the militia as a benchmark, Lincoln's statement that "nearly every adult male had been a participator" in the Revolution seems accurate.

But should the occasional participant—the militiaman—be viewed as the most typical, the most reliable American soldier of the conflict?

As important as the militiamen were, and though they were the most numerous American participants in the war, Continental forces were the backbone of the struggle almost from the beginning....

"The virgins are calling you," Mohamed Atta wrote reassuringly to his fellow hijackers just before 9/11.

It has long been a staple of Islam that Muslim martyrs will go to paradise and marry 72 black-eyed virgins. But a growing body of rigorous scholarship on the Koran points to a less sensual paradise - and, more important, may offer a step away from fundamentalism and toward a reawakening of the Islamic world.

Some Islamic theologians protest that the point was companionship, never heavenly sex. Others have interpreted the pleasures quite explicitly; one, al-Suyuti, wrote that sex in paradise is pretty much continual and so glorious that "were you to experience it in this world you would faint."

But now the same tools that historians, linguists and archaeologists have applied to the Bible for about 150 years are beginning to be applied to the Koran. The results are explosive.

The Koran is beautifully written, but often obscure. One reason is that the Arabic language was born as a written language with the Koran, and there's growing evidence that many of the words were Syriac or Aramaic.

For example, the Koran says martyrs going to heaven will get "hur," and the word was taken by early commentators to mean "virgins," hence those 72 consorts. But in Aramaic, hur meant "white" and was commonly used to mean "white grapes."

Some martyrs arriving in paradise may regard a bunch of grapes as a letdown. But the scholar who pioneered this pathbreaking research, using the pseudonym Christoph Luxenberg for security reasons, noted in an e-mail interview that grapes made more sense in context because the Koran compares them to crystal and pearls, and because contemporary accounts have paradise abounding with fruit, especially white grapes.

Dr. Luxenberg's analysis, which has drawn raves from many scholars, also transforms the meaning of the verse that is sometimes cited to require women to wear veils. Instead of instructing pious women "to draw their veils over their bosoms," he says, it advises them to "buckle their belts around their hips."

Likewise, a reference to Muhammad as "ummi" has been interpreted to mean he was illiterate, making his Koranic revelations all the more astonishing. But some scholars argue that this simply means he was not "of the book," in the sense that he was neither Christian nor Jewish.

Islam has a tradition of vigorous interpretation and adjustment, called ijtihad, but Koranic interpretation remains frozen in the model of classical commentaries written nearly two centuries after the prophet's death....

Earlier this year Sen. John Kerry caused a stir by saying that the Democratic party “always makes the mistake of looking South… . Al Gore proved he could have been President of the United States without winning one Southern state, including his own.”

Kerry was lamenting the party’s perennial efforts to woo back the Southern states that once reliably stood in the Democratic column. For 70 years Republicans were effectively shut out of the “solid South,” a result of their having been the party of Lincoln, abolition, and Reconstruction. But over time, as the Democratic party emerged as a champion of black civil rights and then embraced the rights revolutions of other groups—women, gays, lesbians—white Southern voters shifted their support to the GOP.

Jimmy Carter gained the Presidency in 1976, but no other Democratic presidential candidate has won more than four Southern states; in 1972, 1984, 1988, and 2000 the Democrats lost the entire South. At the heart of this defection was not just a white backlash against civil rights but a sense that the party had embraced the social excesses of the late 1960s.

Many writers trace this rift to the disaster of 1968, when at its convention in Chicago the Democratic party simply imploded. That famously explosive week saw party regulars and antiwar insurgents trade vicious barbs while Mayor Richard Daley’s riot police—12,000 strong, augmented by 11,000 federal and National Guard troops—fought in the streets with upward of 10,000 protesters. The Democratic party entered the 1968 fall campaign badly divided and dispirited, and when Hubert Humphrey lost the November election to Richard Nixon, it was the start of a long decline. Since 1968 Democrats have lost six out of nine presidential elections.

Yet the woes of the Democratic party didn’t originate in Chicago, or even in 1968. They can be traced back to another convention, in another city, in another year. Forty years ago this summer, the Democratic party met in Atlantic City to nominate the incumbent President, Lyndon Johnson, for another term. Nobody knew it then, but that 1964 Democratic National Convention would be a turning point for the party. It was Atlantic City that sowed the seeds of the internecine wars that tore apart the Democratic coalition four years later in Chicago and that have left it wounded ever since. ...

As many as 72 wartime forced labor compensation lawsuits were filed between the 1990s and January 1, 2004). In March the Niigata District Court returned a landmark judgment, for the first time ordering the Japanese state to pay compensation in a case concerning the draconian conditions of World War II forced laborers

This is a very busy year for the still unresolved issue of postwar compensation, especially for wartime forced labor. Although the Sapporo District Court dismissed the claims of the Chinese forced laborers' Hokkaido Lawsuit on 23 March, three days later the Niigata District Court returned a landmark judgment in a suit brought by ten Chinese and the bereaved relatives of an eleventh against the Japanese state and the Hong Kong Transportation Company (Rinko Corporation, based in Niigata City), ordering the payment of 8 million yen per person, with a total award of 88 million yen.

A ruling on a similar case involving former forced laborers is slated for 24 May at the Fukuoka High Court. In this case, a lower court decision was returned by the Fukuoka District Court in April 2003 against Mitsui Mining.

It has been estimated that during the war some 38,000 Chinese were forcibly brought to Japan to supplement domestic labor. These people were forced to work under draconian conditions at 135 locations throughout Japan, such as coal mines, metal mines, construction sites, and ports. Of these, just under 7,000 died. Those who survived have been dying one after another in the 59 years since Japan's defeat, so that less than one-tenth of the total number of forced laborers is still alive. They and the bereaved relatives of others strongly desire swift and complete settlement of the issues.

One point of contention is the existence of a report that the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs is alleged to have produced entitled, Investigative Report into Working Conditions of Chinese Workers. This report scrupulously recorded the names, numbers of deaths, causes of death etc. of persons forcibly brought to Japan, but the state insists on making the farfetched claim that it cannot confirm the Report's existence despite the fact that it existed in a Ministry of Foreign Affairs document. During a series of court proceedings it became clear that the government had falsely testified at Diet briefings, claiming that "all copies of the report were incinerated." Representatives of the state have been forced to acknowledge this fact in court and to offer an apology.

The Niigata District Court clearly recognized the realities of forced migration and forced labor. It severely criticized institutional mendacity over wartime reports on workplace conditions, and the continued cover-up of the existence of the Foreign Ministry's Investigative Report as "extremely malicious" and reflecting a "disingenuous attitude."

Another point concerns whether to recognize the prewar legal doctrine of "state immunity" that held the state not liable for unlawful acts. The Niigata District Court rejected claims to "state immunity" as "being inimical to fairness and justice."

Moreover, it rejected all arguments put forward by the state to the effect that "the statute of limitations has expired" or that "right of claim has been abandoned," very clearly recognizing the state’s legal liability.

Concerning resolution of the postwar compensation problem, the opposition Communist and Social Democratic Parties support the victim claims. In addition, the Democratic Party’s Human Rights Research Council (Haraguchi Kazuhiro, chair) has put forward the opinion that, like the kidnapping of Japanese by North Korea, it should be solved as a human rights problem that cannot be ignored, and that damages should be awarded on the basis of facts....

Richard A. Best, Jr., Specialist in National Defense, Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Trade Division, in a new report by the Congressional Research Service (July 29, 2004):

Proposals for the reorganization of the United States Intelligence Community have repeatedly emerged from commissions and committees created by either the executive or legislative branches. The heretofore limited authority of Directors of Central Intelligence and the great influence of the Departments of State and Defense have inhibited the emergence of major reorganization plans from within the Intelligence Community itself.

Proposals to reorganize the Intelligence Community emerged in the period immediately following passage of the National Security Act of 1947 (P.L. 80-253) that established the position of Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Recommendations have ranged from adjustments in the DCI’s budgetary responsibilities to the actual dissolution of the CIA and returning its functions to other departments. The goals underlying such proposals have reflected trends in American foreign policy and the international environment as well as domestic concerns about governmental accountability. In the face of a hostile Soviet Union, early intelligence reorganization proposals were more concerned with questions of efficiency. In the Cold War context of the 1950s, a number of recommendations sought aggressively to enhance U.S. covert action and counterintelligence capabilities. The chairman of one committee charged with investigating the nation’s intelligence capabilities, Army General James H. Doolittle, argued that sacrificing America’s sense of “fair play” was wholly justified in the struggle to prevent Soviet world domination.

Following the failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, the unsuccessful results of intervention in Vietnam, and the Watergate scandal, investigations by congressional committees focused on the propriety of a wide range of heretofore accepted intelligence activities that included assassinations and some domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens. Some forcefully questioned the viability of secret intelligence agencies within a democratic society. These investigations resulted in much closer congressional oversight and a more exacting legal framework for intelligence activities. At the same time, the growth in technical intelligence capabilities led to an enhanced — but by no means predominant — leadership role for the DCI in determining community-wide budgets and priorities. With the end of the Cold War, emerging security concerns, including transnational terrorism, narcotics trafficking, and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, faced the United States. Some statutory changes were made in the mid-1990s, but their results were not far-reaching. In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks and the Iraq War, some observers, as well as the 9/11 Commission, argue that there is a need to reconsider the organization of the Intelligence Community. Current intelligence organization issues can be usefully addressed with an awareness of arguments pro and con that were raised by earlier investigators. Specific bills aimed at reorganizing the nation’s intelligence effort have been introduced in the 108th Congress and will be addressed in future CRS products. This report will be updated as circumstances warrant....

Richard Byrne and Richard Monastersky, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (Aug. 3, 2004):

It is rare that literary research begins at a rock-music show, but Claire A. Culleton's work on the FBI and its interest in prominent literary figures began at a concert by David Baerwald, a Los Angeles musician whose 1986 album, Boomtown (made with David Ricketts under the name David and David), is a cult classic in rock circles.

Ms. Culleton, a professor of English at Kent State University, attended a Cleveland performance by Mr. Baerwald and signed up for his mailing list. A year later, she says, the singer sent Ms. Culleton information that included a "tirade" about "political corruption and subterfuge" and the FBI's role in it. Mr. Baerwald urged his fans to file Freedom of Information Act requests on themselves with the FBI.

"Conveniently," writes Ms. Culleton, "two FOIA forms were included in the packet."

On a whim, the scholar used one of the forms to request information on James Joyce. Three years later she received 20 pages of heavily redacted material. Her interest piqued, she requested more files on authors, publishers, and politicians connected with Ireland or literary modernism, or both.

"I thought about writing a small article," says Ms. Culleton. But her hunt in the records of the bureau turned into Joyce and the G-Men: J. Edgar Hoover's Manipulation of Modernism (Palgrave Macmillan). The book is a sprawling look at how the longtime head of the FBI and his agents monitored literary and political movements and, at times, harassed left-leaning and politically active artists, including Theodore Dreiser, John Steinbeck, and Langston Hughes. In essence, Ms. Culleton says, Hoover and the FBI were trying to "eliminate opportunities to publish or speak," and thus control and shape the political message in those writers' works.

"When we think of modernism, we think of the modernism of style," she observes. The efforts by the FBI to monitor and harass politically inclined members of the movement, Ms. Culleton argues, shaped literary modernism profoundly. "These authors couldn't get their political message out." ...

Just exactly when the readers of The New York Times first heard about the double helix is a mystery, and there is a lesson in that.

If journalism is the first draft of history, as the saying goes, then it’s often a terrible draft. A case in point happened in 1953, when Francis Crick, a graduate student at Cambridge University, and Dr. James D. Watson, a young biochemist, published a short paper in the journal Nature proposing that DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, the molecule seemingly responsible for heredity, had a double helix structure.

By suggesting that DNA could split into complementary strands, the two men had established the first plausible physical basis for the encoding and transmission of genes, literally the secret of life. It was biology’s biggest moment in the 20th century.

One might expect that such an accomplishment would be trumpeted in newspaper headlines around the world. But this was before the days when every advance in science, marginal or not, was preceded by a drumroll of missives from press agents. In fact, the double helix was a dog that did not bark, at least not at first, in this or any other newspaper.

The two men made their discovery on February 28, 1953. Their paper appeared on April 25. Major newspapers in Britain did not notice until May 15, when Sir Lawrence Bragg, the director of the Cavendish Laboratory, where Watson and Crick did their work, gave a talk in London. That occasioned an article in The News Chronicle of London.

The news reached readers of The New York Times the next day -- maybe. Victor K. McElheny, in researching his new biography, Watson and DNA: Making a Scientific Revolution, found a clipping of a six-paragraph Times article written from London and dated May 16, with the headline “Form of ‘Life Unit’ in Cell Is Scanned.”

Yet a search of The Times’ databases could find no trace of it. The logical, if galling, conclusion is that the article ran in an early edition and was then pulled to make space for news deemed more important.

On June 13 The Times did run an article that called DNA “a substance as important to biologists as uranium is to nuclear physicists.” Datelined London, the article missed the fact that Watson had given a double helix talk a week before only a train ride from New York, at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, McElheny pointed out.

Although Crick was asked to be on a BBC program that fall, the double helix received scant mention for the rest of the year, according to McElheny.

Biologists hardly did any better at recognizing that their universe had changed. Of 20 articles on DNA that year in Nature, only seven mentioned the double helix, according to an analysis published last month in the journal by Dr. Robert C. Olby, a historian at the University of Pittsburgh....

IT IS hardly the Wild West -in fact the site used to be a part of the East and the only natural sand comes from a gravel pit 30 miles away. But tomorrow Silver Lake City will be inaugurated as a place where Germans can feel at home on the range.

Nowhere in the Western world, outside of America itself, is the cult of the cowboy so firmly entrenched as it is in Germany. Doctors, lawyers, car mechanics, teachers and civil servants, sober people who bind themselves to Teutonic rules during the week, throw off their inhibitions on Friday nights to play cowboys and Indians.

It is charades on a grand scale: there are hundreds of clubs dotted across the country with tens of thousands of members. Silver Lake City opens its doors this weekend at Templin, north of Berlin, to cater for the urban cowboy crowd from the reborn capital.

There is a main street with a saloon with swinging doors, a general store, a jail at the back of the sheriff's office and a horse trough. There is a bank that can be robbed to order and a hotel to sleep off one shot of rye too many.

Silver Lake City was inspired by Karl May's Winnetou and Old Shatterhand books: 1920s German pulp fiction about a cowboy and an Indian chief in a place and a time far from the drab, depressed Fatherland of the day.

Even Adolf Hitler was a fan and before conquering vast tracts of the world he read himself to sleep in the early days of the Nazi movement with a May book every night.

Psychologists say that it is precisely the formality and the order of German society that draws people to escape from it, even if only for weekends and in clothing that most people left behind in the toy-box at the age of ten.The Wild West boom is one of the few growth industries in a country with high unemployment and a collective depression about the future. Silver Lake City is a theme park for the family, but the family had better like its leisure served up in boots, Stetsons and spurs. It cost £12 million to build, as a venture of private and public capital, in a region north of Berlin with double-digit unemployment.

This toy town sprawling over 70,000 square metres is the grandest realisation of a tradition that even pre-dates the May books. Germans have been setting up Native American hobby clubs, Wild West towns, festivals and fairs celebrating Americana for more than a century.

At special events German frontiersmen and would-be Indian braves flock to ride bareback horses, shoot bows and arrows, cook around a campfire and drink in the large clubhouses that are decorated as western saloons.

A Germanic seriousness lies behind the weekend escapism. "We don't play cowboys and Indians," said Peter Timmermann, historian and curator at the Munich Cowboy Club. "Europeans have received a very distorted image of Indians. We do this properly. Of course it is a hobby, but we really try to take it seriously."

Ekehard Koch, an expert on relations between Native Americans and Europeans, has said hardly any other people have the same sympathy towards the Indians as the Germans. Dr Koch believes that the "myth of the noble savage", the discontent with civilisation, the "restricted freedom caused by modern life and the wish to escape from the narrowness of German life" have all contributed to Germany's fascination with the Hollywood ideal of the West.

LONG considered an ugly Nazi relic, a half-destroyed concrete fortress in Berlin has become an unlikely addition to the German capital's tourist map. Since April, regular guided tours have taken curious visitors into the vast World War II structure to see the turret interiors and the effect of two failed attempts to blow it up after the war.

It is a part of a growing trend in Germany to show a broader view of the war and include German suffering after years of sole attention on the evils of the Nazis. Tours pass thick walls that resisted bombs and Russian artillery, bare halls and staircases where civilians sheltered and deep shafts which carried anti-aircraft shells from the basement to the rooftop guns seven floors above. Visitors can also marvel at technology well advanced for its time. The gun steering, for example, was fully automated. A radar tower 300m away tracked enemy aircraft and fed signals along cables still clinging to the walls.

The fortress is one of six Adolf Hitler ordered to be built in the German capital to defend it from air attack. His command in September, 1940, came just days after Berlin came under a three-hour barrage from Allied planes.

Hitler sketched the form the 70sq m defences should take, with 40m-high turrets and guns at each corner.

Financial constraints eventually limited the number to three fortresses, completed by April, 1942, although two further structures were built in Hamburg and Vienna.

Each complex could hold around 15,000 civilians and their 2.6m walls were deemed impenetrable. The post-war Allied occupiers in Berlin decided to destroy most military structures. The British and Russians managed to bring down two of the complexes after several failed attempts. However, the French were unable to destroy the fortress in their northern Berlin sector, leaving two towers and 1.6 million cubic metres of debris. The latter was partly landscaped, but the remaining structure has been largely untouched for 50 years....

Roundup: History Being Talked About