Roundup: Historians' Take

Juan Cole: Sunni Party Cuts off US in Iraq

The Iraqi Islamic Party, led by Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, said it was suspending further high-level contact with the United States on Saturday. The Sunni fundamentalist group is angry about a raid in Fallujah in which US troops killed a member of the IIP. The US military contends that the man opened fire on the American soldiers and that they found weapons and weapon-making materiel in his house, saying that he was a leader of Hamas al-Iraq, an offshoot of the 1920 Revolution Brigad

Mark Naison: Hard Times Ahead ... Let's Hope We Can Come Together After This Brutal Election

[Mark Naison is Professor of African American Studies and History, Fordham University.] The United States is heading into the most devastating economic crisis in the last 70 years with the worst of it's impact yet to be felt on the ground. As businesses shed jobs, soon to be followed by cash strapped governments and non profit organizations, millions, if not tens of millions of people, will be unable to pay their credit card bills, forcing a collapse in credit card companies and yet anothe

Victor Davis Hanson: The Obama Enigma

Lame-duck Republican President Bush's dismal poll ratings have descended to those of Harry Truman's when he left office. The Democratic majority in Congress will probably widen after the election. Republican nominee John McCain has not run a dynamic campaign. Gen. Colin Powell, George Bush's former secretary of state, has now enthusiastically endorsed Barack Obama. The country is in two unpopular wars -- amid the worst financial panic of the last 80 years. Not since prophet of chang

Andrew Bacevich: Petraeus Opts Out of Politics -- or Does He?

[Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His new book is The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.] In a recent exchange with a reporter, General David Petraeus volunteered the following: "You know, I made a private decision some years back when I was promoted to Major General that I was just going to stop voting. And I did that, again, not for public consumption, although it's subsequently become

Norman Markowitz: When Do We Say Oh Yeah to Bush and His Media Helpers?

[Norman Markowitz, Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1970."My work is in twentieth century U.S. political history. I write and teach from a Marxist perspective." ] In 1931, Edward Angly, a journalist who was no radical(not even so much of a liberal) published a book that became a bestseller. The book was titled"Oh Yeah." It really wasn't so much of a book but a compilation of all of the statements from the end of the 1920s to 1931 by President Hoover, members of his cabinet, business l

Robert Turner: Liberal assaults on the executive branch have made us vulnerable

[Mr. Turner is a constitutional scholar who served as acting assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs in 1984-85.] Twenty-five years ago today a terrorist truck bomb in Beirut, Lebanon, killed 241 Marines, sailors and soldiers, and wounded more than 100 others. Had it not been for crass political partisanship, and efforts by Sen. Joe Biden and other congressional liberals to usurp the constitutional powers of the president, the loss of life in Beirut may have been avoide

Tom Engelhardt: The Global War on Terror Report Card

[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. The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a co

Thomas Sowell: Believers in Barack

[Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.] ... Of the four people running for president and vice president on the Republican and Democratic tickets, the one we know the least about is the one leading in the polls — Barack Obama. Some of Senator Obama’s most fervent supporters could not tell you what he has actually done on such issues as crime, education, or financial institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — much less what he plans to do to stop

William E. Leuchtenburg: Bush Is No Hoover

[William E. Leuchtenburg is the author of In the Shadow of FDR: From Harry Truman to George W. Bush. Times Books/Henry Holt will publish his biography of Herbert Hoover in January.] At various points throughout his administration, George W. Bush has been likened to Abraham Lincoln and Harry Truman, to Teddy Roosevelt and William McKinley. But during his second term, a consensus has been forming on the president he most brings to mind. As early as the fall of 2006, historian Douglas

Jill Lepore: Writing campaign biographies

Biographers of Andrew Jackson used to be cursed. On January 8, 1815, the General led American forces in a stunning defeat of an invading British Army, winning the Battle of New Orleans at the end of the War of 1812. With a political career in mind, he cast about for a biographer to chronicle his exploits. He settled on David Ramsay, a sixty-six-year-old South Carolina legislator and physician and gifted historian whose books included a “Life of George Washington,” published in 1807. But, before

Jill Lepore: How we used to vote

On the morning of November 2, 1859—Election Day—George Kyle, a merchant with the Baltimore firm of Dinsmore & Kyle, left his house with a bundle of ballots tucked under his arm. Kyle was a Democrat. As he neared the polls in the city’s Fifteenth Ward, which was heavily dominated by the American Party, a ruffian tried to snatch his ballots. Kyle dodged and wheeled, and heard a cry: his brother, just behind him, had been struck. Next, someone clobbered Kyle, who drew a knife, but didn’t have a

Juan Cole: Iraq Moves Closer to Obama-Type Plan for early US Withdrawal

The debate between Senators John McCain and Barack Obama about a timetable for withdrawal of US troops from Iraq may have just been overtaken by events. Without a bilateral agreement on the rules governing US military actions in Iraq, US soldiers and officers would become liable to prosecution for acts committed in the course of battle. It is highly unlikely that any security agreement will be passed by parliament by January 1st, when the UN mandate for multinational troops

Maury Klein: Is it 1929 all over again?

[Maury Klein is professor emeritus of history at the University of Rhode Island. He is the author of 15 books, including "Rainbow's End: The Crash of 1929" and most recently "The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Made Modern America."] Friday marks the 79th anniversary of the day that launched the stock market crash of 1929. As an unprecedented wave of selling threw the floor of the New York Stock Exchange into pandemonium on a day t

Mike Davis: On Presidential Blindness and Economic Catastrophe

[Mike Davis is the author of In Praise of Barbarians: Essays Against Empire (Haymarket Books, 2008) and Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (Verso, 2007). He is currently working on a book about cities, poverty, and global change. You can listen to a podcast of Davis discussing why the New Deal isn't relevant as a solution today by

Philip Carl Salzman: Is peace normal?

[Philip Carl Salzman is Professor of Anthropology, McGill University.] In Israel, there is a political lobby group called “Peace Now,” as if peace were a circumstance that could be brought into being by the political will of one party. The same sentiment was expressed, somewhat less arrogantly, by Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, when he famously (or infamously) said that Israelis were tired of fighting and beating their Arab neighbors. The assumption appears to be that peace is

Ron Radosh: The Real Threat Posed by Bill Ayers

Paul Berman, one of the most influential political intellectuals writing today, has penned a searing indictment of former Weather Underground founder Bill Ayers. His essay is no surprise. Berman was the first activist/writer to tie SDS’s drift towards Leninism with its cadre’s decision at the Port Huron conference to admit to its ranks representatives of the American Communist Party. At its very start, SDS took the pose of “no enemies on the Left.” Writin

Paul H. Rubin: Obama is much more dangerous to economic freedom than FDR

[Mr. Rubin is a professor of economics and law at Emory University. He held several senior economic positions in the Reagan administration, and is an unpaid adviser to the McCain campaign.] In 1932, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president as the nation was heading into a severe recession. The stock market had crashed in 1929, the world's economy was slowing down, and all economic indicators in the U.S. showed signs of trouble. The new president's respon

H. W. Crocker: How Would Jefferson Davis Vote?

[H. W. Crocker III is the author most recently of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War.] "Who cares?" might be your first reaction; after that, sarcasm might take over: "We know how he would vote -- and it wouldn't be for someone named Barack Obama." First let's establish why you should care; then maybe we can knock away some of that sarcasm too. We venerate Lincoln, but in many ways Jefferson Davis was far the more interes

Sean Wilentz: A Tale of Two Fine Roosevelts

[Sean Wilentz, a Princeton historian and the author, most recently, of “The Age of Reagan: A History, 19742008,” is a NEWSWEEK contributing editor.] The Age of Reagan is over. Obama and McCain should recall the cousins who took on Wall Street panics and won. The traumatic financial crisis has emphatically ended the political age of Ronald Reagan. For more than 30 years, conservative ideas about small government and the unfettered free markets set the tone of American po

Jonathan Zimmerman: McCain has a new hero: Teddy, make way for Joe

[Mr. Zimmerman teaches history at NYU.] Here's a simple way to understand the Republican descent: The party of Teddy the Rough Rider has become the party of Joe the Plumber. Teddy the Rough Rider was Theodore Roosevelt, the GOP president who championed a strong central government and - surprise! - taxes on the rich. For many years, John McCain has identified Roosevelt as his political hero and role model. But McCain made no mention of Roosevelt during his f