The Archivist

Afghanistan, Yesterday and Today

By Jeff Kisseloff

After reading this week's special issue on Afghanistan, and in particular the story about Great Britain bombing the country back in the 1920s, I wondered if I could find any references to it from that period. I did, in a fascinating piece by T. H. K. Rezmie from 1929. Not only does Rezmie mention the bombing, but he also essentially foretells many of the issues confronting Afghanistan today. It was also a fascinating surprise to see who was partially responsible for implementing Great Britain's policy -- Lawrence of Arabia. Now the United States is repeating so many of Britain's sorry actions. Will we ever learn? Here's the piece.

Have a question about any aspect of The Nation's archives or its history? Drop me a line at jeff.kisseloff@gmail.com To be notified of new posts to this blog, follow me on twitter @jeffisme.

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October 26, 2009

These Literary Hoaxers Were Also Full Of Hot Air

By Jeff Kisseloff

Granted, they probably wouldn't garner the cable ratings of the balloon boy shenanigans, but a good literary hoax often comes with its own special intrigue. The Nation has covered a few of them in its arts pages. I've got two here. The first was the story of Thomas Chatterton, an eighteenth-century writer who claimed to have discovered the literary works of a fifteenth-century poet priest named Thomas Rowley. The problem was there was no Thomas Rowley (or there may have been in England, but he wasn't a poet). Chatterton was Rowley, although not for very long. Chatterton killed himself with an arsenic cocktail a few months before he turned 18 -- more than two hundred years before he could have confessed his sins on Larry King.

Like the balloon boy story, Clifford Irving turned out to be full of hot air. His fake autobiography of Howard Hughes was set to be published by McGraw-Hill, until Hughes himself briefly stepped out of seclusion to denounce the book as a fraud. This was a huge story in 1972, featuring as it did a reclusive zillionaire, a secret Swiss bank account, even your basic bikini-clad blonde, Nina Van Pallandt. Irving ended up in jail, but at least he got a book deal out of it, and he didn't even have to cry his eyes out on Oprah.

Have a question about any aspect of The Nation's archives or its history? Drop me a line at jeff.kisseloff@gmail.com To be notified of new posts to this blog, follow me on twitter @jeffisme.

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October 23, 2009

The Nation and Israel

By Jeff Kisseloff

After reading this week's cover story about American Jews and Israel, I was curious about how The Nation covered Israel's story, especially in its formative years. Not surprisingly, it has been consistently thoughtful and thorough. Here are just three examples. The first is a report and analysis of the 1917 proclamation by the Right Honorable Arthur James Balfour, the First Earl of Balfour and Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (the Brits may be clueless when it comes to fine food and dentistry, but they sure know how to come up with titles), which put a semi-official imprimatur on Zionism and set the stage for what has been nearly a century of conflict. When Israel was born in 1948, The Nation's editor, Freda Kirchwey, was a sympathetic witness. Kirchwey was a marvelous reporter, and she traveled to Israel in the midst of the war to see what was going on for herself. She ended up filing a remarkable five-part series on the nascent country's struggle to survive against incredible odds. Part two was Kirchwey's report on why the Arabs fled Jaffa in 1948, a question that remains highly contentious today. Since so many of Israel's current troubles have arisen from its treatment of the Palestinians, I also took a sampling of the magazine's coverage of the Six-Day War, when Israel's territorial gains soon became a millstone. Stanley Wolpert was in Tel Aviv after the war, and he filed this prescient report, predicting many of the political and military challenges that still haunt Israel, and really the entire region.

Have a question about any aspect of The Nation's archives or its history? Drop me a line at jeff.kisseloff@gmail.com To be notified of new posts to this blog, follow me on twitter @jeffisme.

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October 20, 2009

Death and Taxes — Minus the Taxes

By Jeff Kisseloff

When my daughter was four, the subject of Ted Williams' alleged decision (it has strongly been disputed by family members) to have his head frozen somehow came up in conversation. I explained to her that before they died, many people would express their wishes about what they would like to have done to their bodies. Some chose cremation, others chose burial, or in the case of Williams, it was (according to his son anyway) to be frozen. She was fascinated by this and for weeks afterward upon being introduced to an adult she would ask, "What's your choice?"

Fortunately, in our society even if someone chooses to freeze his head so that one day it will thawed out and attached to a body that will hit .410 in a season, they can. As ridiculous as that is, however, relatively few can choose how to end their own lives, even when all hope of any kind of a quality existence is gone.

How did this happen? A big reason is that whenever anyone puts forward a serious proposal about end-of-life counseling or the right-to-die, someone like Sarah Palin starts screeching about Nazi-like death panels, (as if she even knew anything about World War II history; she probably thinks the Final Solution is a way to break a tie at the top of the final college football rankings).

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October 13, 2009