Thomas Bender is a professor of history and university professor of the humanities at New York University. This essay is adapted from a talk at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association.

I want to pose a question to historians, as a profession: Did we make a decision in the past that has had consequences, presumably not positive ones, for our present and future? The question invites looking backward as a way to think about the future. Were there possibilities we missed? Did we lose part of ourselves sometime in the past?

The question is related to the plea recently made by the president and the executive director of the American Historical Association to consider nonacademic as well as academic careers as proper outcomes of doctoral education. This issue is forcing serious thinking not just in history, but in the humanities generally. And it affects not just our professional lives, but our lives as citizens.

The cultures of our departments too often discourage open discussion of nonacademic careers. One of the dirty little secrets discovered by the AHA Committee on Graduate Education, which I and others reported in The Education of Historians for the Twenty-First Century (2004), was that graduate students from various institutions were afraid to tell their advisers that Plan B, a nonacademic career, was for them Plan A. They preferred to pursue the profession of history in museums, historical societies, filmmaking, and the park service, among other possibilities. But they worried that if their advisers learned of that ambition, they could expect little or no future support from them.

Equally unsettling, the study reported that survey research covering thousands of doctoral students showed that graduate students in history, more than any other discipline except philosophy, entered graduate school to become teachers and left wanting to be researchers with as little teaching responsibility as possible. That really narrows the definition of our profession....

Mr. Roberts, a historian, is author most recently of The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War (Harper, 2011).

Queen Elizabeth II acceded to the British throne 60 years ago this week. The Commonwealth will mark the occasion with celebrations throughout the year, but many republicans claim that the queen has made no genuine difference to the history of her country. Is that so?

The past six decades haven't been easy for the United Kingdom, and were it not for the monarchy there is no telling what social and political unrest might have dominated. To celebrate the good times properly, it's important to recall the perilous ones, and what might have happened had the queen not been, in the words of the historian John Grigg, "a bastion of stability in an age of social and moral flux."

When the queen's father, King George VI, died in February 1952, Evelyn Waugh remarked that his reign had been the most disastrous since that of King Stephen in the 12th century. Appeasement, World War II and the transfer of power in India meant that Britain had slipped from great-power status—where Churchill could meet Stalin and Roosevelt on equal terms at Tehran and Yalta—to the position of a second-division power teetering on bankruptcy. Elizabeth II's reign saw Britain further shorn of any delusions of global grandeur and forced to readjust to a new, less exalted but more honest place in the world. That this was managed without severe internal dissension was largely due to the political stability and continuity personified by the queen.

In France, the decolonization of Algeria led to bloody riots on the streets and several attempts to assassinate President Charles de Gaulle. The British were spared such traumas as the queen visibly supported the post-imperial settlement...

Susana Ferreira is a freelance journalist based in Haiti.

On Jan. 30, more than a year after former "President for Life" Jean-Claude Duvalier returned to Haiti, a Port-au-Prince judge concluded his lengthy investigation into the ex-dictator's brutal, 1971-86 rule. Supreme Court Magistrate Carvès Jean had at his disposal reams of documents, human rights complaints, testimony from torture victims, copies of checks, international bank transfers and diary entries from former political prisoners at the notorious Fort Dimanche prison. Yet while Jean ruled that Duvalier should be tried on financial corruption charges — for the hundreds of millions of dollars allegedly plundered from Haiti's national coffers — he decided the statute of limitations on Duvalier's crimes against humanity had expired.

The U.K.-based Amnesty International spoke for most human rights groups worldwide when it called Jean's dismissal of the torture and murder charges against Duvalier "a disgrace." Some of Duvalier's alleged victims, including national soccer hero Bobby Duval and former U.N. Secretary-General spokesperson Michèle Montas, have vowed to appeal the ruling — citing, for one thing, Haiti's ratification of the American Convention on Human Rights, which puts the country under the jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Under international law, there is no time limit on crimes against humanity.

But other victims weren't so surprised by Jean's ruling. "I had no doubt, not even for a fraction of a second," says former parliamentary deputy Alix Fils-Aimé, who was held in solitary confinement by Duvalier's secret police for 16 months and then at Fort Dimanche before being exiled. "I have no faith in [Haiti's] justice system." And that's especially true, critics like Fils-Aimé fear, when it comes to the handling of Duvalier. Few countries, especially after the devastating 2010 earthquake that killed more than an estimated 200,000 people, have as troubling an image problem to solve as Haiti does. And the last thing the national re-brandingcampaign of President Michel Martelly needs is an ugly, protracted trial that would remind the world of the 30,000 Haitians abducted, tortured and killed by the regimes of "Baby Doc" Duvalier and his more ruthless father, François "Papa Doc" Duvalier, who ruled from 1957 until his death in 1971.

As a result, a big question is whether Martelly's efforts to market the idea of a new Haiti — one that is open for investment, tourism and modernization — include sweeping away the atrocities of the Duvalier dynasty like so much quake rubble. Another is whether otherwise well-intentioned U.S. celebrities like Haiti's new Ambassador-at-Large, Hollywood actor and humanitarian Sean Penn, have signed on with that controversial approach...

TUESDAY is the bicentenary of the birth, in Portsmouth, England, of Charles Dickens, literature’s greatest humanist. We can rejoice that so many of the evils he assailed with his beautiful, ferocious quill — dismal debtors’ prisons, barefoot urchin labor, an indifferent nobility — have happily been reformed into oblivion. But one form of wickedness he decried haunts us still, proud and unrepentant: the lawyer.

Lawyers appear in 11 of his 15 novels. Some of them even resemble humans. Uriah Heep (“David Copperfield”) is a red-eyed cadaver whose “lank forefinger,” while he reads, makes “clammy tracks along the page ... like a snail.” Mr. Vholes (“Bleak House”), “so eager, so bloodless and gaunt,” is “always looking at the client, as if he were making a lingering meal of him with his eyes.” Most lawyers infest dimly lighted, moldy offices “like maggots in nuts.” (No, counselor, writers dead since 1870 cannot be sued for libel.)

Dickens knew whereof he spoke. At 15, he was hired as an “attorney’s clerk,” serving subpoenas, registering wills, copying transcripts; later he became a court reporter. For three formative years he was surrounded by law students, law clerks, copying clerks, court clerks, magistrates, barristers and solicitors who (reborn in his fiction) uttered cheerful sentiments like “I hate my profession.”...

Emily Redman is a PhD candidate in the history of science at the University of California at Berkeley who, when not distracted by enviro-political issues of yore, studies the history of mathematics education reform in the twentieth-century United States.

The planet is in the spotlight somewhat literally these days. Arguably interchangeable locutions of global warming, climate change, or "solar variations" have made headlines in the past decades—yes, those same decades that brought us An Inconvenient Truth and extreme storms. The underlying science has effectively bisected Washington, with the left and right offering partisan legislation aimed at the decidedly nonpartisan climate. Yet despite circular debates on Capitol Hill, options are being proffered to Americans for their fight to protect the global environment.

Efforts from Capitol Hill, you say? Given American's conflicted relationship with the regulatory powers of Washington, this fight is unsurprisingly politicized. Where the battlegrounds lie, however, is at once surprising and historically awkward.

Recently, media channels have brought to our attention the efforts underway to provide Americans with alternatives—federally mandated alternatives, no less—to the good ol' familiar light bulb. Scientists and engineers, tasked with developing eco-friendly light sources that mimic Thomas A. Edison's (1847-1931) incandescent bulb aesthetically while improving on it technologically have unveiled an LED version of the original with all the federal subsidies and fanfare that Washington can offer. This past summer, Philips, the Netherlands-based producer of consumer electronics, collected $10 million in prize money for developing a highly efficient alternative to the standard sixty-watt incandescent. The award, familiarly known as the L Prize, was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy in the wake of George W. Bush-era legislation that requires light bulb makers to improve efficiency of bulbs by twenty-five percent. The L Prize, then, was instituted as a government-sponsored nudge to spur lighting manufacturers to develop higher efficiency alternatives to Edison-era products disparaged as "dated" on the prize website. And in a dangerous flirtation with the "nanny state," the Website promises the prize will drive market adoption.

Apparently, however, Edison's familiar glass-bulb-meets-metal-filament is near and dear to many American hearts. Despite those years of thoughtlessly tossing cardboard boxes of replacements into our shopping carts, we've become inextricably connected to these devices. Edison, we shout, championing for our American-scientist-hero who bore innovation. We are sure that there is some mistake, that Edison could not have led us astray; his light bulb seems irreplaceable and must be compatible with modern-day America....

Toby Lester’s new book, Da Vinci’s Ghost, is about the history behind Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man. You can read more of his work at tobylester.com.

In 1986, during a visit to the Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea, in Ferrara, Italy, an architect named Claudio Sgarbi called up an anonymous copy of the Ten Books on Architecture, written by the Roman architect Vitruvius. The only such treatise to have survived from antiquity, the Ten Books is a classic, studied by historians of architecture and antiquity alike. Early copies are of great interest to scholars, but few had any idea this one existed. Academic inventories made no mention of it, and the Ariostea catalog described it unpromisingly as only a partial manuscript.

When Sgarbi took a look at it, he discovered, to his amazement, that in fact it contained almost the full text of the Ten Books, along with 127 drawings. Moreover, it showed every sign of having been produced during the late 1400s, years before anyone was known to have systematically illustrated the work. “I was totally astonished,” Sgarbi told me. But then he made what he calls “a discovery within the discovery”: On the manuscript’s 78th folio, he found a drawing that gave him the chills. It depicted a nude figure inside a circle and a square—and it looked uncannily like Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.

Everybody knows Leonardo’s drawing. It has become familiar to the point of banality. When Leonardo drew it, however, he was at work on something new: the attempt to illustrate the idea, set down by Vitruvius in the Ten Books, that the human body can be made to fit inside a circle and a square....

Roger Cohen is a columnist for the NYT.

VILNIUS, LITHUANIA — The “double genocide” wars that pit Stalin’s crimes against Hitler’s are raging in wide swathes of Europe and every now and again along comes a gust from the past to stoke them. The 70th anniversary this month of the Nazi adoption at Wannsee of annihilation plans for the Jews provided one such squall.

Yes, the past is still treacherous beneath Europe’s calm surface. Memory swirls untamed in the parts of the Continent that the American historian Timothy Snyder calls “Bloodlands,” the slaughterhouses from Lithuania to Ukraine that Hitler and Stalin subjected to their murderous whim.

To mark the Wannsee anniversary, over 70 European Parliament members, including 8 Lithuanians, signed a declaration objecting to “attempts to obfuscate the Holocaust by diminishing its uniqueness and deeming it to be equal, similar or equivalent to Communism.” It also rejected efforts to rewrite European school history books “to reflect the notion of ‘double genocide.”’...

Walter Russell Mead is professor of foreign affairs and the humanities at Bard College and editor-at-large of The American Interest.

Writing about the onset of the Great Depression, John Kenneth Galbraith famously said that the end had come but was not yet in sight. The past was crumbling under their feet, but people could not imagine how the future would play out. Their social imagination had hit a wall.

The same thing is happening today: The core institutions, ideas and expectations that shaped American life for the sixty years after the New Deal don’t work anymore. The gaps between the social system we inhabit and the one we now need are becoming so wide that we can no longer paper over them. But even as the failures of the old system become more inescapable and more damaging, our national discourse remains stuck in a bygone age. The end is here, but we can’t quite take it in.

In the old system, most blue-collar and white-collar workers held stable, lifetime jobs with defined benefit pensions, and a career civil service administered a growing state as living standards for all social classes steadily rose. Gaps between the classes remained fairly consistent in an industrial economy characterized by strong unions in stable, government-brokered arrangements with large corporations—what Galbraith and others referred to as the Iron Triangle. High school graduates were pretty much guaranteed lifetime employment in a job that provided a comfortable lower middle-class lifestyle; college graduates could expect a better paid and equally secure future. An increasing "social dividend", meanwhile, accrued in various forms: longer vacations, more and cheaper state-supported education, earlier retirement, shorter work weeks, more social and literal mobility, and more diverse forms of affordable entertainment. Call all this, taken together, the blue model.

In the heyday of the blue model, economists and social scientists assumed that from generation to generation Americans would live a life of incremental improvements. The details of life would keep getting better even as the broad outlines of society stayed the same. The advanced industrial democracies, of which the United States was the largest, wealthiest and strongest, had reached the apex of social achievement. It had, in other words, defined and was in the process of perfecting political and social "best practice." America was what "developed" human society looked like and no more radical changes were in the offing. Amid the hubris that such conceptions encouraged, Professor (later Ambassador) Galbraith was moved to state, in 1952, that "most of the cheap and simple inventions have been made." If only the United States and its allies could best the Soviet Union and its counter-model, then indeed—as a later writer would put it—History would end in the philosophical sense that only one set of universally acknowledged best practices would be left standing.

Life isn’t this simple anymore...

Dominic Tierney is assistant professor of political science at Swarthmore College. He is the author of How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War.

On June 5, 1944, General Dwight Eisenhower wrote down a message, carefully folded it, and placed it in his wallet. It contained a public statement in case the D-Day invasion failed. Twenty-five years later, in 1969, Richard Nixon's White House drafted a speech to use if the moon landing was unsuccessful and the astronauts were trapped on the lunar surface. This is not alternate history. This is very real history, about leaders preparing for a contingency that never transpired. More than anything, the messages reveal the fine line between triumph and disaster.

Publicly, Eisenhower radiated confidence about the liberation of Europe. But privately, he was deeply worried that the Germans would push the invaders back into the sea. After all, the Allies could initially propel only five divisions by sea and three divisions by air against an area held by 58 German divisions. If the Allies had been defeated, Eisenhower planned to issue a statement.

Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based on the best information available. The troops, the air, and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.