Roundup: Historians' Take

Daniel Pipes: Obama Wins, Muslims Divided

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] Ali ibn Abi-Talib, the seventh-century figure central to Shiite Islam, is said to have predicted when the world will end, columnist Amir Taheri points out. A"tall black man

Beverly Gage: Do Rookies Make Good Presidents?

[Beverly Gage: Gage is the author of The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror, due in February. She teaches U.S. history at Yale University.] For 10 exhausting months, Americans worried that Barack Obama might be too inexperienced to serve as President. On Nov. 4, a majority of voters decided that he is in fact"ready to lead"--or at least that he had better be. This suggests that Americans know their history. When it comes to presidential success,

Niall Ferguson: 'A World War without War' (Spiegel interview)

[Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University.] SPIEGEL: Mr. Ferguson, were you moved when you saw the future president, Barack Obama, in Chicago? Ferguson: Yes, it was a very moving moment. It was similar to the release of Nelson Mandela. When Obama was born, in 1961, mixed marriages between blacks and whites were still illegal in one-third of the American states. SPIEGEL: Historically speaking, that was yesterday,

Julian Zelizer: What Obama should do with Biden

[Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He is the co-editor of "Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s" and is completing a book on the history of national-security politics since World War II, to be published by Basic Books.] ... [Joe] Biden has often said that his role model for the vice presidency is Lyndon Johnson, who served with John Kennedy from 1961 to 1963 before becoming p

Julian Zelizer: The Press Pack Turns on Obama

[Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He is the co-editor of "Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s" and is completing a book on the history of national-security politics since World War II, to be published by Basic Books.] The presidential honeymoon is like the Tooth Fairy—it doesn’t exist, even though some people insist on clinging to the concept. There is no chance that Presid

Abigail Thernstrom & Stephan Thernstrom: Racial Gerrymandering Is Unnecessary

[Ms. Thernstrom is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Mr. Thernstrom is professor of history at Harvard University. They are the co-authors of "America in Black and White: One Nation Indivisible" (Simon & Schuster, 1997).] The conventional wisdom among voting-rights advocates and political scientists has been that whites will not vote for black candidates in significant numbers. Hence the need for federal protection in the form of race-based districts that cre

Daniel Pipes: Foreword to Hamas vs. Fatah ... The Struggle for Palestine

Divisions among Palestinians generally do not receive their due attention, Jonathan Schanzer correctly points out, in the immense academic and journalistic coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Instead, an official, propagandistic, and inaccurate party line holds sway. To quote Rashid Khalidi, a former Palestine Liberation Organization employee now teaching at Columbia University,[i] a"uniform Palestinian identity" exists. The Palestinians are

Nathan Kozuskanich: How a search of Early Republic newspapers turned up evidence relevant to the Supreme Court gun case

The quest for original intent has dominated Second Amendment scholarship, a trend further solidified in the Supreme Court’s recent gun case, District of Columbia v. Heller. In the majority opinion, Justice Scalia insisted that the “normal meaning” of the words of the Second Amendment must be used to understand the Framers’ intent, not “secret or technical meanings that would not have been known to ordinary citizens in the founding generation.”1 But how can scholars (and justices, for that matter

Martin Gilbert: What might have happened if Haig had his way?

[Sir Martin Gilbert’s books include The Atlas of the First World War.] Imagine: in October 1918, Lloyd George’s Cabinet is planning for a prolonged struggle in 1919. Haig’s solution promises to avoid a confrontation even bloodier than the Somme or Passchendaele. The Government agrees. Germany’s main condition is to keep the vast swath of Russia that her troops have occupied since the Bolshevik revolution and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March. With peace made with Ge

Martin E. Marty: Base Rebuilding

If you trust the blunt instrument of exit polls, you will have followed up after the presidential election by reading somewhat contradictory observations by experienced columnists. To put an old cliché to work, Naomi Schaefer Riley in the November 7th Wall Street Journal sees the glass half full for those who notice "Evangelical" and "Catholic" cohorts "staying the course" and not deserting the Republican ranks. Looking at the same statistics but parsing them diff

Robert H. Zieger: 'Labor did it' again

[Robert H. Zieger is a distinguished professor of history emeritus at the University of Florida.] In 1948 when Harry Truman was asked to what he attributed his stunning upset victory over Republican nominee Thomas E. Dewey, he replied "Labor did it." He was referring to the unprecedented commitment of financial and manpower support to his candidacy contributed by the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial organizations (CIO), at that

Jim Sleeper: Swear Him in as 'Barack Hussein Obama'

Even as we all lurch from symbolism to substance now that Barack Obama is President-elect, I hope that he appreciates the symbolic and substantive rewards of being sworn in on January 20 as "Barack Hussein Obama." During the campaign, neo-conservatives such as Daniel Pipes and others of Obama's detractors thought it smart to highlight his paternal Muslim roots and associations. But now that he's won, anyone would have to be as naive as a neo-con to miss the nobility and wo

Ruth Rosen: Women Sealed the Deal

For the last two years, I've been writing and telling anyone who would listen that American women could elect the next president, if only they voted. Well, this time they did, and there is no doubt that women were a decisive factor in the election of Barack Obama. To listen to the pundits, however, you'd think that only youth (bless them!) and minorities turned out in overwhelming numbers to stand on endless lines to elect the first African American and liberal and bril

Julian Zelizer: Let's See That Audacity In Action

[Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He is the co-editor of "Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s" and is completing a book on the history of national-security politics since World War II, to be published by Basic Books.] Democrats in Washington are juggling their policy lineup. In preparation for January, President-Elect Barack Obama and the congressional leadership must decid

Richard Reeves: The Fifth 'Pivot Point' Election

"Do Elections Matter?" That was the title of a conference of historians, journalists and other interested parties sponsored by The New York Historical Society last week. The answer, of course, was "yes" — and this one matters a good deal more than most. The tone of the day's talk was set at the beginning by Akhil Reed Amar, a professor of law and political science at Yale. In a presentation I agreed with, Amar raised the possibility that the 2008 election could b

Shiben Krishen Raina: Terrorism in Kashmir ... Origin and Growth

[Dr. Shiben Krishen Raina, formerly Fellow, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Rashtrapati Nivas, Shimla, India.] Broadly speaking, when justice and right are denied to a person over a long period of time, the person is left with two options: bear the situation patiently, or the reaction is anguish, and that reaction, in the process can culminate in terrorism. Besides other things, spreading of communal hatred, religious frenzy, separatist tendency etc. are the tools which terrorists genera

Eric Alterman: A Liberal Supermajority (Finally) Finds Its Voice

[Eric Alterman is a Distinguished Professor of English, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and Professor of Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He is also "The Liberal Media" columnist for The Nation, a senior fellow and "Altercation" weblogger for Media Matters for America, (formerly at MSNBC.com) in Washington, DC, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC, where he writes and edits the "Think Again" column

Martin Gilbert: The British heroes after Kristallnacht

[Sir Martin Gilbert's book Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction, is published in paperback by HarperCollins.] No event in the history of the Third Reich provoked such immediate outrage outside Germany as Kristallnacht: the destruction of synagogues and prayer houses across Germany and Austria, the looting of Jewish homes and businesses, and the murder of as many as a hundred Jews in their homes and in the streets. This orgy of destruction was followed by the immediate deportation o

Sam Tanenhaus: Harnessing a Cause Without Yielding to It

The historic victory of Barack Obama contained many dramas, but none was more important than the climactic turn it symbolized in the present-day fortunes of two outsize forces in recent political history — the civil rights movement and the conservative movement. Together they have probably been the most powerful engines of political change during the past half-century, but they have also exacted large demands from the two parties and their leaders. And it happened again in this elec

Thomas Sugrue: Obama's election means ...

[Thomas J. Sugrue's new book, "Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North," has just been published. He is Kahn professor of history and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.] ON ELECTION NIGHT, Barack Obama addressed nearly 200,000 supporters in Chicago's Grant Park - the place where, just 40 years earlier, antiwar protesters, hippies, yippies and black radicals clashed with police during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Alt