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Current 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1990s     November 2004Faking History THE EDITORMake no mistake, history is written by the victors. One need only observe the power exercised over popular imagination by the all-conquering secular humanists of our day, whose agnosticism and atheism currently underpin Western culture. A major part of reinforcing their secular status quo is the prevalence of studiously false, anti-Catholic depictions of epochal eras and events. Long debunked caricatures and clichés - from the so-called ‘Dark Ages’ to the Crusades to the Reformation and beyond - still dominate their revisionist films, documentaries, literature and texts....

‘There’s just too much anger, too much ruptured vanity, too much shock, too much identity crisis. And, worst of all, too much patriotism.” With this scathing analysis the great novelist Norman Mailer, self-appointed shrink to the American people, celebrates the first anniversary of the attack on the twin towers, adding for good measure that “we have a pre-totalitarian situation here now”. Mailer’s rumbustious rhetoric, displayed in an interview in today’s Sunday Times Magazine, is certainly undimmed by the years. Yet from my own modest travels in America and conversations with Americans since September 11, he might be describing a different...

Forget greasy burgers, a growing enthusiasm for good local food in the US is getting the nation salivating, says Simon Schama.Ask people in the UK what they think of American food and all too often their faces settle into the amused expression Mahatma Gandhi is said to have assumed when asked what he thought of Western civilisation. "It would," he replied, "be a very good idea." The same, many think, would be true of American food. For most people in Europe, I suspect, it seems not so much food at all as fuel. The burgers and fries shovelled down while...

Sally Field was widely ridiculed some years ago for gushing in her Oscar acceptance speech that: “You like me, you really like me.” Post-election analysis is split about the reasons President Bush won re-election. Immediate reaction focused upon exit polls that seemed to show moral values as the deciding issue; later commentary has rejected that conclusion as the result of a poorly drawn question. I don't know why Bush won, as people voted the way they did for any number of reasons. But one thing can safely be said about the election. To paraphrase Sally, the chattering classes hate people...

Less than two years ago, the American historian, Simon Schama, began The American Future: A History with the melodramatic lines: “I can tell you, give a minute or two, when American democracy came back from the dead because I was there: 7.15 pm. Central Time, 3 January 2008, Precinct 53, Theodore Roosevelt High.” Schama then went on to describe the presidential primaries in the nondescript town of Des Moines in Iowa and the silent upsurge that saw an unknown Senator Barack Obama edge past his better known Democratic Party rivals in Precinct 53. “It didn’t take a genius, much less...

In his toe-curling Guardian article today (sorry, can’t find a link) fawning over the Obama inauguration, the historian Simon Schama writes: Though Obama referred (without speaking specifically of Martin Luther King) to the dream that had been set before America decades ago on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial having been made reality, it was left to the veteran civil rights campaigner of that older generation, the Rev Joseph Lowery, to pluck the strings of the heart with his fabulously politically incorrect couplets: ‘If you're black don't give it back/if you're yeller, just be meller.’ ‘Fabulously politically incorrect’, eh? This...

A perceptive spot by my colleague Ben Brogan of a throwaway line by David Cameron in his FT interview with Obama-worshipping historian Simon Schama. Later, I would ask him what he thinks of American conservatism’s lurch to the libertarian extreme. “How shall I put this? We seem to have drifted apart… there is an element of American conservatism that is headed in a very culture war direction, which is just different. There are differences with the American right.” Of course, the question was framed by Schama in a tendentious way, tossing in the word “extreme” (in Schama’s world view, I...

London – Europe's gut reaction to President Bush's re-election was clearly displayed on the front page of the Daily Mirror, a London tabloid. "How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?" the headline asked. It's no secret that most Europeans do not consider Bush to be an intellectual giant, but now it seems they have grave doubts about the rest of us, or at least the 59 million of us who voted for Bush. Simon Schama, the eminent British historian and writer who now teaches at Columbia University, divides us into two nations. One America, he explains to the liberal readership...

Has Barack Obama just committed political suicide? By appearing to endorse the building of a mosque and Islamic cultural centre at the threshold of Ground Zero, has he set himself at odds with the majority of Americans who regard the idea as a desecration of “hallowed ground”? Beleaguered Democrats fighting a rearguard action in upcoming mid-term elections are shaking their heads at this new handicap with which the president has burdened them. Republican notables such as Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin, jostling for position in the wannabe president stakes, can scarcely contain their glee. But the critics are deluded. If...

Janette Turner Hospital is the author of Orpheus Lost and other books, and a professor at Columbia. She sent MFA students at her old school, the University of South Carolina, the following note about their inferiority. It is amazing. Hospital sent this note to all of the MFA students on the University of South Carolina listserv. More than one of them forwarded it to us. "We're all enraged," one MFA grad from USC tells us. "She is nuts!" says another. Indeed. What's your favorite part? The personal revelations? The breathtaking undertone of insult towards those in South Carolina? Her special...

THE UNLOVED AMERICAN by SIMON SCHAMA Two centuries of alienating Europe. Issue of 2003-03-10 Posted 2003-03-03 On the Fourth of July in 1889, Rudyard Kipling found himself near Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone with a party of tourists from New England. He winced as a "clergyman rose up and told them they were the greatest, freest, sublimest, most chivalrous, and richest people on the face of the earth, and they all said Amen." Kipling--who had travelled from India to California, and then across the North American continent--was bewildered by the patriotic hyperbole that seemed to come so naturally to the...

Columbia University professor Simon Schama made his Newsweek debut yesterday with a blog post that indirectly attacked Tea Party activists and conservatives for what Schama considers a historically illiterate ancestor worship of the Founding Fathers. "The Constitution’s framers were flawed like today’s politicians, so it’s high time we stop embalming them in infallibility," snarked the subheading for Schama's June 26 post.