Roundup: Historians' Take

Ivan Eland: Who Should Obama Look to for Advice? Jimmy Carter

[Ivan Eland is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute. He is author of the books, Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty, The Empire Has No Clothes: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed, and Putting “Defense” Back into U.S. Defense Policy.] At the request of President-elect Barack Obama, President George W. Bush convened an awkward meeting of all living former presidents at the White House to meet, an

Thomas Frank: George W. Is No Martyr

Ordinarily we are able to limit the comparisons to Harry S. Truman to the campaign season. That's when, by annoying tradition, the presidential aspirant who is down in the polls always finds that he bears a remarkable resemblance to the plainspoken Missouri Democrat who, famously, came from behind to win the election of 1948. But now we find that Truman has a second amazing historical quality: Not only is he the patron saint of floundering presidential campaigns, but he is the star

Walter Russell Mead: Why the recession bolstered America

[Walter Russell Mead is the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World. Lauren Gottlieb provided research assistance for this article.] Even before the Panic of 2008 sent financial markets into turmoil and launched what looks like the worst global recession in decades, talk of American decline was omnipresent. In the long term, the United States faces

John Steele Gordon: Obama isn't just our first black president. He's the first who doesn't come from Northwest Europe.

[Mr. Gordon is the author of "An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power" (HarperCollins, 2004).] Inaugurations of a new president are usually a blast. Ordinary people who supported the victorious candidate want to celebrate, while those acceding to real power are understandably in an upbeat mood. After all, as James Madison explained in the Federalist Papers, "Men love Power." And in Washington, D.C., that goes double. But the

Scott Kurashige: President Obama and the Work of Remaking America

[Scott Kurashige is an associate professor of American Culture, History, and Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies at the University of Michigan and currently a visiting scholar at Harvard University's Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. He is the author of The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton University Press, 2008), which received the American Historical Association's 2008 Albert J. Beveridge Award &

Daniel Franklin: How Could Bush (If He’s Interested) Recover His Reputation?

[Daniel Franklin is currently Associate Professor of Political Science at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia.] President Bush’s protestations notwithstanding, his presidency was a failure and is likely to be judged as such by future generations of historians. Bush likes to refer to the Truman presidency as a model for his own resurrection, but I don’t think the analogy applies. Truman reeled from one crisis to another, from the death of Roosevelt to the atom bomb, to the

Julian Zelizer: What Obama's 'best and brightest' should know

[Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He is completing a book on the history of national security politics since World War II, to be published by Basic Books. Zelizer writes widely on current events.] ... In many respects, the current White House is as impressive as the one that Kennedy and Johnson assembled. Obama has drawn on the nation's best universities, the most talented pool of campaign operatives and

Jay Winik: Lincoln's Lessons for a New President

[Mr. Winik, a presidential historian, is the author, most recently, of "The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World" (Harper, 2007).] Now that the grandeur of the inauguration is over, this morning is President Barack Obama's first in the Oval Office, and the hard work of governing finally begins. More than any president in memory, Mr. Obama has evoked Abraham Lincoln. He made his presidential announcement in Springfield, Ill., where Lincoln once served a

Henry Louis Gates Jr. and John Stauffer: What would Lincoln make of a black president?

[Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the editor of “Lincoln on Race and Slavery” and the producer of the forthcoming PBS documentary “Looking for Lincoln.” John Stauffer is the author, most recently, of “Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.”] ... Much has been written about what Mr. Obama thinks about Lincoln; but not much has been said about what Lincoln would think of Barack Hussein Obama. If his marble statue at the Lincoln Memorial could become flesh and sp

Jill Lepore: The day the newspaper died

The newspaper is dead. You can read all about it online, blog by blog, where the digital gloom over the death of an industry often veils, if thinly, a pallid glee. The Newspaper Death Watch, a Web site, even has a column titled “R.I.P.” Or, hold on, maybe the newspaper isn’t quite dead yet. At its funeral, wild-eyed mourners spy signs of life. The newspaper stirs! The last time the American newspaper business got this gothic was 1765, just after the first gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s “T

Henry Louis Gates: A new dawn of American leadership is at hand

[Henry Louis Gates is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University. He is the Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research.] We have all heard stories about those few magical transformative moments in African-American history, extraordinary ritual occasions through which the geographically and socially diverse black community—a nation within a nation, really—molds itself into one united body, determined to achieve one great

Annette Gordon-Reed: Jefferson's vision

[Gordon-Reed is the author of "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family," winner of the 2008 National Book Award.] On election night, addressing a huge crowd in Chicago's Grant Park, and millions more watching worldwide, the president-elect, with great calm and assurance, invoked America's Founding Fathers, claiming them for all Americans, white and black alike. His successful campaign and election, he said, showed that the "the dream of our Founders" was

James McPherson: Removing the Stain

[McPherson is the author of "Abraham Lincoln," "Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief" and "Battle Cry of Freedom," which won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize.] In November 1863 president Abraham Lincoln delivered a brief address at the dedication of the soldiers' cemetery in Gettysburg. The Union dead buried there had given the "last full measure of devotion" in the bloodiest battle of a "great civil war" that would determine w

Tom Engelhardt: Greater Than the Great Depression?

[Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the American Age of Denial. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Ver

Daniel Pipes: The Democrats and Israel

With Democrats now in charge of both the executive and legislative branches, what changes might one expect in U.S. policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict?Personnel appointments so far fit the center-left mold. On the plus side, as analyst Steven Rosen observes, this means that none of the team brings a"defined left agenda of dangerous delusions – indeed, many of them are sensible and intelligent, resistant if not immune to the nonsense that blinds the majority of academicians." Especi

Tom Palaima: MLK, Barack Obama and our hope for racial justice

[Tom Palaima is a classics professor who teaches war and violence studies and Emily Schenk is a senior in the School of Social Work, both at University of Teas at Austin.] If the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. came back to witness Barack Obama's inauguration, would he think that the people he led in peaceful pursuit of social justice had reached the promised land of racial equality? What could be more barrier-shattering in his eyes than our electing an African American president?

Ronald Radosh: Israel Must Defeat Hamas

[Ronald Radosh is an Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute.] As Israel goes deeper into Gaza, and intensifies its bombardment of Hamas in Gaza City, a chorus is beginning to be heard: Israel is now committing war crimes; the conditions of the people there constitute a humanitarian crisis; the only solution is negotiations with Hamas for a cease-fire that will give Gaza’s beleaguered and innocent population breathing space to begin rebuilding its shattered city. As awfu

Andreas Umland: The Unpopular Prospect of World War III ... The 20th Century Is Not Over Yet

[Dr Andreas Umland is editor of the book series “Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society” (www.ibidem-verlag.de/spps.hmtl) and co-editor of the Russian web-journal "Forum for the Contemporary History and Culture of Eastern Europe" (www1.ku-eichstaett.de/ZIMOS/forumruss.html). He also administers the website “Russian Nationalism” (groups.yahoo.com/group/russian_natio

Martin Kramer: A plan for surrender (to Hamas)

[Prof. Kramer, the author of Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America, was a full-time tenured academic at Tel Aviv University. He is now a senior fellow at the Adelson Institution of Strategic studies and a Senior Fellow at the Olin Institute at Harvard. Please correct the oversight.] Israeli Yossi Alpher today publishes a piece in the International Heral

Manan Ahmed: Failed imperial enterprises and the vocabulary we use to describe them

Yesterday, at her Senate confirmation hearing, Senator Clinton faced a number of questions about Pakistan and Afghanistan. Her most detailed conversation was with Senator Kerry - who will head the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Senator Kerry spoke about his trip to South Asia, in the immediate aftermath of Mumbai attacks. We do not live there. We don’t li