Former Czech president Vaclav Havel joins the 20th anniversary celebrations in Prague. Photo from AP

The now divorced Czechs and Slovaks are celebrating peacefully together.

When Mr Panek and his friends gathered to plan demonstrations against one of Europe’s most hardline communist states, they feared the battle would take years. “We didn’t expect change to happen so suddenly, although now that seems strange,” says Mr Panek . . .

His prize came in recognition of his work as a plant scientist developing a strain of dwarf wheat that did well in hungry countries such as Mexico and Pakistan, places that turned from net importers to net exporters of grain. His achievement was central to what was then being dubbed a “green revolution.”

The ideas and effects of the green revolution are justifiably criticized and Professor Borlaug was understandably defensive.  This scientific approach married the farm economy of  countries to a more capital- and chemical-intensive type of farming, which ignored most of  a country’s indigenous knowledge and neglected the plight of its poorest farmers. 

I’ve studied those harms more than most people, but still believe Professor Borlaug is underappreciated and deserves wider recognition. This article in The Atlantic by a right-leaning writer agrees for reasons with which I disagree (great portrait though). I have to admit, part of my sympathy stems from my fellow experience as an Iowa kid who went out for wrestling.

I also had the honor of  meeting Professor Borlaug when he spoke in Platteville around 1988.

from the New York Times

The blog Edge of the American West  rides on the shoulders of the towering TV feature “Schoolhouse Rock” (ask your parents) to tell part of the story, and adds the story of the final fight for passage in the state of  Tennessee.

I try to work into any relevant history class some mention of the lovable Luddites, the working-class radical movement that emerged in the North England area around Nottingham in the 1810s. The luddites were mostly a type of textile worker called a cropper who used giant scissors to trim the edges of woven cloth. It’s this trade that no doubt gave its name to what we call cropping a photogaph.

The luddites broke into factories with sledges and crowbars to destroy the new-fangled shearing frames that did the same job cheaper and faster. Besides being a fascinating story, the history of the luddite is useful because the term is still heard from time to time when someone is referring to a person resisting technological change. Like I used to be, many people are probably aware of the antni-technology meaning of the term and that it had some root in the past, but unaware of the actual story of the folks who signed their warning to factory owners with the fictitious name Neil Ludd.

Proof that “luddite” still pops up came in the New York Times where I see the term used in two places on the same Sunday. Here’s how it is used in the first case, a profile of musician M. Ward:

It’s not that he’s a Luddite — he buys songs on iTunes and does late-night YouTubing like everyone else — or a misanthrope who believes that art was better in someone else’s day.

This got me curious enough to type the term into google news where I found a page worth of entries for just the past two days.

I would theorize that the frequency of this metaphor from 200 years ago points to the fetishizing of electronic technology in our times, and the success that gadget makers enjoy in the corporate trick of “planned obsolescence”.  We are supposed to worry about being behind the times, or at least about being insulted by others for being behind the times. You’re not a luddite are ya?

A stricken U.S.S. Arizona at Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941.

 today in Hawaii focus on Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo that sought revenge for Pearl Harbor. I have met the daughters of fathers who flew on that raid. I also once befriended a National Parks worker who guided tours at the Pearl Harbor memorial in her native Hawaii for the winter half of the year. Not surprising, she said the many old men she saw overcome with grief during the tour made that job far from a typical National Parks position.

The last known photographs of Isaiah Oggins as a prisoner in the Soviet gulag, shortly before he was executed in 1947 by injection. Photo by C.J. Chivers of the New York Times

Robbin Oggins, a retired historian of Medievel Europe at Binghamton University, stands after a tragic chapter in his family’s history. The New York Times tells today of his father, the Jewish leftist Israel Oggins working as a spy for Stalin.

An aspiring American professor turned spy for the N.K.V.D., Stalin’s intelligence service, Mr. Oggins had been convicted of treason and espionage by the Soviet Union and completed an eight-year sentence in the gulag.

It was the summer of 1947. He was past due for release. A few months before in New York, his wife and young son had pleaded with George C. Marshall, then the secretary of state, to seek Mr. Oggins’s freedom from the Soviet Union’s grip.

By then a picture of frailty, Mr. Oggins was taken to a medical examination in a Moscow clinic, where a doctor prepared an injection. But this was not a treatment to dress up a mistreated inmate for display. It was a blacker art: the injection contained the neurotoxin curare.

The journalist Andrew Meier made a book about Israel Oggins called “The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin’s Secret Service” (W.W. Norton & Co., 2008). In my classes students read about the gulag through the eyes of Alexandr Solzhenitzyn in his short novel A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Those students who read about the fictional Ivan Denisovich — a willing soldier for the Red Army against the fascists who was sentenced simply for a mild joke in a private letter at Stalin’s expense — would not be surprised to hear in the case of Israel Oggins that the benefectors of Stalinism were also its victims.

Though largely forgotten, Woody Guthrie tried to honor the memory of the victims.