John R. McNeill is a professor of history at Georgetown University and a vice president of the American Historical Association.

My 94-year-old father and two of my uncles were among the 16.5 million men and women who served in the American armed forces during World War II. Both uncles, and another who served with the Canadian military in the war, are now dead. I have only snippets of information about their lives in uniform. At my urging, my father recently wrote the story of his life on active duty in the U.S. Army from 1940 to 1946....

Those stories are a form of national treasure. For years, historians, journalists and family members have been collecting letters, diaries, journals and interviews from a few of those 16.5 million. The Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress, created by an act of Congress in 2000, has materials of some sort from 48,000 World War II vets. University libraries, state historical societies, military units and other organizations have collected a few thousand more. No one knows exactly how many because there is no clearinghouse or coordination. But it is likely that fewer than 1 in 200 of these veterans’ stories are preserved in any fashion.

Of those that are preserved, a small share is digitized and easily accessible to the public. The Veterans History Project has put up 7,000 World War II vets’ stories on its Web site. The Rutgers Oral History Archives have an additional 469. The total in all digitized collections is well under 10,000. For the rest, one has to travel to a library or historical society....

Anthony Lock is an academic and freelance journalist based in Sydney. His current research is concerned with the relationship between the sciences and arts, with a particular focus on applying Orwell's work to memetic study.

As the editor of the papers of George Washington at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, I have the privilege of intersecting with many people who come bearing documents supposedly signed by the first president. More often than you might think, I have the unenviable task of informing them that their letter‚ often lovingly framed and passed down for decades in their family is a fake. An office file, which we've marked "Forgeries," overflows with dozens of similar examples. Individuals and families are not the only ones duped by what I've discovered has been a robust 150-year-old market in Washington forgeries. Recently a well-meaning alumnus sold a multipage letter apparently in Washington's handwriting to a major university library. The librarians placed the letter on display and trumpeted their acquisition to the media. Several months later, an astute visitor pointed out some strangely awkward flourishes in the letter's handwriting. Upon examination, the letter turned out to be the work of a prolific 19th-century forger.

Just as high demand for popular consumer goods today inspires the production of cheap imitations to satisfy the market, the demand for Washington letters in the mid-19th century inspired the production of thousands of forgeries. Ironically, these fakes are now often collector's items in their own right....

Like many villains throughout history, the British-born Robert Spring could turn on the charm. He immigrated to America as a young man in the 1850s, starting out as a Philadelphia bookseller. He quickly learned that success came by actively appealing to the interests of collectors. At some point he realized that true wealth lay in creating interest where it didn't already exist.

The clever bookseller purchased an armful of volumes that once had belonged to Washington, marked them up significantly, and sold them at a great profit. Pleased with the results, he pulled some dusty, 18th-century books from his back room and lied to customers that Washington had once owned them. They sold as fast as he could put them on display. Spring then began signing Washington's signature on the title pages of some old tomes that he had been trying to unload for years. Customers snatched them up....

William Cronon (Univ. of Wisconsin–Madison) is the president of the AHA.

...Given the immense public appetite for history, and the essential contributions history can make to public understanding of all manner of problems in the present, the risks associated with too narrow and academic a definition of "professional history" could not be more clear.

This is why, I would argue, we should keep a close watch on boredom if we want to make sure history continues to reach beyond our professional circles to a public that includes not just an educated citizenry, but intellectuals in other disciplines and historians in other fields. If professional history is sometimes boring, let's ask what it is about our professionalism that makes it so.

This is also why professional historians who work in the academy should be immensely grateful when they are joined in an organization like the AHA by professional historians who make documentaries, design web sites, post blogs, curate exhibits, teach school, and publish popular books. Only if we all gather together under the same big tent will we be able to learn from each other the ways good history can be more effective in reaching the many audiences that hunger for its insights. Forty million people watched Ken Burns's documentaries on The Civil War. Barbara Tuchman probably influenced more people's understanding of the First World War than any other historian of her generation. Public school teachers shape the historical consciousness of many millions more students (and citizens) than college teachers ever will. And so on and on.

How do we avoid professional boredom? By making sure we don't define "professional" too narrowly. By not talking only with each other. By welcoming into our community anyone and everyone who shares our passion for the past and who cherishes good history. By remembering that no matter what else we do, we are all teachers whose foremost responsibility is to share what we know in ways people can understand—and, more basic still, in ways that people will find interesting, even intriguing. By communicating as clearly and engagingly as we can. By telling good stories.

And: by never forgetting that our first and most important job—the one on which all others depend—is to make the past come alive for nonprofessionals who would otherwise find it dry, dead, . . . and boring.

Robert W. Merry is editor of The National Interest and the author of books on American history and foreign policy.

Of all the U.S. presidents since Franklin Roosevelt, none stands taller in history or exercises a greater lingering influence on American politics than Ronald Reagan. Republican politicians invoke his name as example and lodestar, and Democrats have granted him increasing respect as the passions of his presidential years have ebbed with time. Surveys of academics on presidential performance, initially dismissive, now rank him among the best of the White House breed. Even President Obama has extolled his approach to presidential leadership.

This veneration poses a dark danger—that Reagan will become associated with philosophies he never held and policies he never pursued. This is happening today with increasing force as neoconservative intellectuals and politicians seek to conflate Reagan’s Cold War strategy with their push for American global dominance in the name of American values. Their aim is to equate today’s Islamic fundamentalism with Russian Bolshevism and thus boost the argument that U.S. military actions in the Middle East are a natural extension of Reagan’s forceful—and successful—confrontation with Soviet Communism in the 1980s.

Back in 2002, when neoconservative war advocates were beating the drums for the Iraq invasion, William Kristol, editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard, told the Financial Times: "Americans see clearly which are democratic states and which are tyrannies in the world today, as they did when the Soviet Union was the main enemy." Writing in Kristol’s magazine, Reuel Marc Gerecht declared that George W. Bush’s "liberation theology" constituted a "Reaganesque approach." Bush himself, in declaring that the "advance of freedom is the calling of our time," invoked Reagan as a progenitor of his missionary drive. Some months later, Kristol noted admiringly that Bush’s foreign-policy advisers, nudging the country to war, were "all Reaganites."

More recently, these efforts to wrap Bush’s aggressive foreign policy in a Reagan blanket have been duplicated in the rhetoric of the now-dwindling field of candidates for this year’s GOP presidential nomination. Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich all identified Reagan as a model for the foreign-policy bellicosity they espoused with such zeal during the campaign.

This is all specious... 

Christopher Bantick is a Melbourne writer and senior literature teacher. He was formerly head of history at Trinity Grammar in Kew, where he taught Australian History and Revolutions.

BRITISH historian Simon Schama once observed of contemporary students, "What of history do they know?" It's a good question. A more immediate one is why don't Australian undergraduates want to know about their own country?

The blunt fact is that Australian history, once the gold standard of university history courses, is dying. This year, La Trobe University does not have any undergraduate Australian history subjects. The University of Melbourne is winding up its Australian Studies Centre. Why? Both La Trobe and Melbourne are universities with enviable records in the study of Australian history. So how can the decline in undergraduate demand be explained?

A lack of interest in Australian history undergraduate courses does not begin at university. It starts far earlier. Look no further than schools....

Schools killed Australian history. Reduced to a brain-deadening subject where nothing seemed to happen, it proved Henry Ford's assessment of history being "bunk".

Primary schools peacocked the past and hammered Ned Kelly's armour to the density of tin plate. Gallipoli became the rite of passage story and the First Fleet was a good place to start genealogy. Gold presented a rush of enthusiasm but Lola Montez's spider dance was edited out....

Ross Douthat is a columnist for the New York Times.

...In a 2011 Gallup poll on the greatest president, Eisenhower came in a lame 12th, in a tie with Jimmy Carter. He performs solidly in scholarly surveys, but he’s frequently ranked behind his prominent 20th-century rivals.

In part, this underestimation is a result of the political persona Eisenhower cultivated — an amiable, grandfatherly facade that concealed a ruthless master politician. In part, it reflects the fact that his presidency has always lacked an ideological cheering section. Liberals (who preferred Adlai Stevenson) generally remember the Eisenhower administration as a parenthesis between heroic Democratic epochs, while conservatives (who favored Robert Taft) recall a holding pattern before their Goldwater-to-Reagan ascent.

But ultimately Eisenhower is underrated because his White House leadership didn’t fit the template of “greatness” that too many Americans pine for from their presidents. He was not a man for grand projects, bold crusades or world-historical gambles. There was no “Ike revolution” in American politics, no Eisen-mania among activists and intellectuals, no Eisenhower realignment.

Instead, his greatness was manifested in the crises he defused and the mistakes he did not make. He did not create unaffordable entitlement programs, embrace implausible economic theories, or hand on unsustainable deficits to his successors. He ended a stalemated conflict in Korea, kept America out of war in Southeast Asia, and avoided the kind of nuclear brinkmanship that his feckless successor stumbled into. He did not allow a series of Middle Eastern crises to draw American into an Iraq-style intervention. He did not risk his presidency with third-rate burglaries or sexual adventurism. He was decisive when necessary, but his successes — prosperity, peace, steady progress on civil rights — were just as often the fruit of strategic caution and masterly inaction....

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University and lives in Narberth. He is the author of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory" (Yale University Press). He can be reached at jlzimm@aol.com.

In March 1942, a few months after America entered World War II, the U.S. Army issued its first official regulation designed to screen out gay men. The directive listed three supposedly telltale signs of homosexuality: "feminine bodily characteristics," "effeminacy in dress and manner," and a "patulous rectum." For those who don't have a dictionary handy, patulous means "expanded." And, yes, the Army regulation really said that.

I thought of this shameful history as I read a recent Inquirer story about the mass murderer Howard Unruh, whose case files were released by the Camden County Prosecutor's Office after persistent requests by the newspaper. Nobody will ever know what exactly led Unruh, a World War II combat veteran, to gun down 13 innocent people in East Camden on Sept. 6, 1949. But the case files confirm that Unruh was gay at a time when American culture attached a heavy stigma to homosexuality....

Between 1941 and 1945, roughly 9,000 soldiers and sailors were discharged from the U.S. military for being gay. Servicemen suspected of homosexuality were frequently forced to strip naked or submit to a "gag test" with a tongue-depressor; if you didn't gag, you were assumed to be gay.

Before they were discharged, gays were detained in "queer brigs" or "pink cells." Some of these brigs were outdoor pens where servicemen awaiting discharge were publicly humiliated by passersby. In private, meanwhile, they were sometimes forced to sexually gratify their guards.

If that sounds a bit like the Nazis' persecution of gays, it's because it was. Ironically, some American homosexuals were inspired to enlist in the armed forces after reading reports of German mistreatment of gays, only to find themselves under attack by their own military....