[Glenn W. LaFantasie, the Frockt Family Professor of Civil War History at Western Kentucky University, is the author of Gettysburg Requiem: The Life and Lost Causes of Confederate Colonel William C. Oates.]

We too often forget that the generation that fought the Civil War lived in a world very different from our own. In our attempt to personalize the past, which all too often leads us into a romanticization of that past, we see the elements of human experience that unite us with the Civil War generation—how they, as individuals, loved and lost, laughed and cried, lived and died—but we tend, in the process, to overlook how these same people spent their lifetimes in a...

[Ralph E. Luker of Atlanta co-edited the first two volumes of "The Papers of Martin Luther King Jr." He is now preparing the Vernon Johns Papers for publication.]

Thirty-two million dollars and what do you get?

Fifty years ago, Tennessee Ernie Ford scored a hit with his recording of "Sixteen Tons," originally recorded by Merle Travis. The song's lyrics said:

"You load 16 tons and what do you get?" The answer was "Another day older and deeper in debt."

Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin may have reason to remember those words. Don't misunderstand me. I'm one of her biggest fans, and Atlantans should be grateful that she put together a coalition of institutions and resources that saved Coretta Scott King's collection of her husband's papers from auction and will bring them back to Atlanta.

As almost always, however, the devil's in the details and, in the rush to settlement, not many of the...

[Rebecca Solnit is the author of "Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities" and "River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West."]

The place where the teenage twins were murdered was beautiful, and the men who killed them and their uncle were to become among the most celebrated in the United States. But on that Sunday, June 28, 1846 -- 160 years ago -- the murder site just north of San Francisco was not in the United States. It, like the rest of California and the entire Southwest, was still Mexico, and this is why the two de Haro boys, Francisco and Ramon, were shot down in cold blood with their elderly uncle, Jose de la Reyes Berryessa.

The picture is clear to me, the three men standing up against the blue water of San Pedro Bay, wearing serapes, carrying saddles, startled, then stunned, then dead, one by one, as the gunman picked them off. There's something about those three figures against the water of...

Presidents come and go, but monuments are always with us. There's a reason Theodore Roosevelt is the only 20th century President whose face is carved into Mount Rushmore, the only one who could hold his own with Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson. Roosevelt not only remade America, but he also charmed the pants off everybody while he did it. And just short of a century after he left the White House, in 1909, the collective memory of his strength and intellect and charisma still lingers. How many times over the years since have Americans settled their affections on some thoughtful, vigorous man who reminded them a bit of Roosevelt? What was Ernest Hemingway if not a later edition of Teddy, without the burden of office but still equipped with T.R.'s literate machismo? And who could look at John F. Kennedy, scrimmaging with his clan at Hyannis Port, and not be reminded of another young President, tussling with his kids at Sagamore Hill? Is it any surprise when more recent Presidents try...

[Ainslie T. Embree is professor emeritus at Columbia University. This essay is based on his presentation to the History Institute for Teachers on “Teaching India,” held in Chattanooga, March 11-12, 2006. The conference was sponsored by FPRI’s Marvin Wachman Fund for International Education, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s Asia Program, and the University of Pennsylvania South Asia Center, and made possible by a grant from the Annenberg Foundation.]

Fifty years ago, when I began teaching American students about India, I would probably have begun a lecture on why it's important for Americans to know about India rather defensively and apologetically. Acknowledging the lack of interest at that time in India by the U.S. government, military, business world, media, and even academia, I would have argued that because of the greatness of its contributions to civilization in art, literature, history, and religion, India was worthy of sustained attention. That is still true,...

We are still a nation locked in denial. If you point out basic facts about the British Empire - that the British deliberately adopted policies that caused as many as 29 million Indians to starve to death in the late 19th century, say - you smack into a wall of incomprehension and rage.

The historian Niall Ferguson called me "Hari the horrible" for writing about this in my column last week. Another neo-imperi-alist historian, Lawrence James, accuses me in The Sunday Times of being a "twerp" who writes "twaddle". The Daily Mail says I should check my facts.

I have. Many times. And the truth is still there, no matter how much sound and fury is vomited at it. If you check the claims of the defenders of Empire against the historical record, it becomes clear there is a howling gap between them. For example, Lawrence James says the British imperial rulers of India "were humane men and, although hampered by inadequate administrative...

[Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse.]

In 1995, in Chicago, veterans of Silver Post No. 282 celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of their victory over Japan, marching around a catering hall wearing their old service caps, pins, ribbons and medals. My father sat at his table, silent. He did not wear his medals.

He had given them to me thirty years earlier. I can figure it exactly: March 8, 1965. That day, like every other, we walked to the newsstand near the dime store to get the LA Times. He was a
Times man. Never read the Examiner.

He looked at the headline: U.S. Marines had landed on the beach at Danang, Vietnam.

As a kid, I was fascinated by my dad’s medals. One, embossed with an eagle and soldiers under a palm tree, said “Asiatic Pacific Campaign.” It had three bronze stars and an arrowhead.

My father always found flag-wavers a bit suspect. But he was a patriot, nurturing this...

[Glenn W. LaFantasie, the Frockt Family Professor of Civil War History at Western Kentucky University, is the author of Gettysburg Requiem: The Life and Lost Causes of Confederate Colonel William C. Oates.]

Near the High Water Mark on Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg, a massive white building shaped like a drum sits flat on the eastern slope of the ridge, obscured partially by a grove of fruit trees. Almost exactly in the center of the lines that Major General George Gordon Meade’s Army of the Potomac occupied during the second and third days of the battle in July 1863, the ultra-modern building is called the Cyclorama Center. Designed by the famous architect Richard Neutra, it was completed in 1961 as the Gettysburg National Military Park's visitor center just in time to be open for the commemoration of the Civil War Centennial. Some people think the huge structure, which still houses the epic 1883 painting of Pickett's Charge by Paul Philippoteaux (now undergoing restoration), is a...

[Paul A. Kramer is an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and is currently a visiting professor at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States nd the Philippines (University of North Carolina Press, 2006). He can be reached at pakramer@jhu.edu.]

Speaking on May 4, 1902 at the newly-opened Arlington Cemetery, in the first Memorial Day address there by a U.S. President, Theodore Roosevelt placed colonial violence at the heart of American nation-building. In a speech before an estimated thirty thousand people, brimming with “indignation in every word and every gesture,” Roosevelt inaugurated the Cemetery as a landscape of national sacrifice by justifying an ongoing colonial war in the Philippines, where brutalities by U.S. troops had led to widespread debate in the United States. He did so by casting the conflict as a race war. Upon this “small but peculiarly...