June 22, 2005
Annals of Incarceration

Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 11:20 AM

With military prisons very much in the news lately, it may be instructive to look back and see what American soldiers have had to put up with over the years. In the Revolutionary War, captured Continental troops were kept on rotting ships in crowded conditions approximating those in which slaves were transported. Unsurprisingly, most of them died of disease. The War of 1812 (and the French and Indian War) saw hundreds of Americans massacred after surrendering, usually by Indians. I'm sure you've heard about Confederate prison camps, like Andersonville. In World War II we had the Japanese camps and the Stalags. In the Vietnam War, the Communists decided that anyone who opposed them was fighting an illegal war and thus not entitled to prisoner status, which led to the infamous “Hanoi Hilton.” And we’ve seen how the anti-democratic forces in Iraq treat their captives today (not to mention what the Saddam regime did to its own people). Has there ever been a war in which American POWs were treated even halfway decently?

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June 21, 2005
The K.K.K. Conviction: So When does History End?

Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 4:20 PM

Remember the old line, “He’s so old, when he was in school they called history current events”? Running a magazine and Web site about history, we’re always trying to answer the serious question that that quip raises: What is the dividing line between history and the present? We thought of that question again today when word came that Edgar Ray Killen, an 80-year-old former Ku Klux Klan member, had been convicted in connection with the infamous slaying of three civil rights workers in Mississippi way back in 1964. And we found ourselves reflecting again that the answer is that history doesn’t end. It just changes and evolves. That long-ago time of legalized cruel racism and brutal violence is still with us, in justice still being served and in the slow-healing scars it all left behind. But at the same time, it all seems utterly remote. We continue to live with it, in memory and in the repercussions of events, but we have the comfort of knowing that there is no going back to where we were then. There can never again be segregated buses and restaurants or public lynchings. Today’s verdict is one more step in a march of history that has to, much more than some others, feel like undeniable progress.

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June 21, 2005
Jack Kilby: An Unsung Hero

Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 2:16 PM

Jack Kilby died today. Few Americans have ever heard of him. Some will now for a day or two, and then he’ll be forgotten by the great majority again. But that’s how it usually goes with the pioneers of modern life. The people who have built our physical world tend to be unknown, with a few rare exceptions—a Thomas Edison here, a Wilbur or Orville Wright there. Kilby was as important as any of them.

In 1958 he was a brand new employee at Texas Instruments. He spent his first summer working on miniaturizing electronics partly because he didn’t qualify for any summer vacation yet. Transistors were making computers possible, but individual transistors in any number were an unwieldy mess. Kilby went against the grain by figuring that the solution would lie in making all the individual components of a circuit out of the same material. Resistors, made of carbon, were dirt cheap; in his scheme, they’d have to be made of much more expensive silicon or germanium. But he perceived that costlier components meant matching components that could eventually be manufactured all in a piece. In August 1958 he built a circuit with all its transistors and capacitors and resistors made of silicon. In September he did even better, making a circuit from a single piece of material, this time germanium. It was about the size of a paper clip. In the words of the computer pioneer Gordon Bell, it eliminated "a whole floor full of little ladies wiring computers." But it did much, much more than that. It was the first integrated circuit, a huge step in the development of the information world of today. We have Jack Kilby (and his successors who built on his invention, like Robert Noyce and Marcian T. Hoff) to thank for every one of our computers, scanners, smart cards, iPods, cell phones—the list is almost infinite. He should be remembered.

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June 18, 2005
Did JFK Borrow His Greatest Words?

Posted by Richard F. Snow at 12:42 PM

The New York Times has just reported on yet another controversy over John F. Kennedy’s ever-restless memory. Two scholars have produced books with diametrically opposed conclusions about his most famous line. In Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the Speech That Changed America, Thurston Clark insists it was JFK alone who wrote, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” In Sounding the Trumpet: The Making of John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address, Richard J. Tofel says it was supplied by Kennedy’s speechwriter Ted Sorensen.

But whatever JFK’s immediate inspiration (which might well have included his old school dictum that what matters is “not what Choate does for you but what you can do for Choate“), Hugh Rawson and Margaret Miner point out in the American Heritage Dictionary of American Quotations that “the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations found a similar exhortation in the funeral oration for John Greenleaf Whittier in 1892,“ and that in an 1884 Memorial Day address Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., said “We pause…to recall what our country has done for each of us, and to ask ourselves what we can do for our country in return.”

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June 1, 2005
Play It Again, Uncle Sam

Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 2:30 PM

We’ve all read about how the interrogators at Guantanamo kept prisoners awake by playing Christina Aguilera. Back in the early 1990s, during the invasion of Panama, GIs blasted heavy-metal music to force Manuel Noriega to surrender. We also often read about store owners who play classical or big-band music to shoo teen-agers away from their parking lots. But the scheme actually goes back at least as far as 1961, when the Billy Wilder film “One, Two, Three” showed East German security forces playing “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” over and over to get a suspect to confess.

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