Roundup: Historians' Take

Mark Naison: How the GOP's Racially Coded Rhetoric Hurts the Nation and May Lose the Election

[Mark Naison is Professor of African American Studies and History, Fordham University.] When John McCain nominated Sarah Palin for Vice President, many political hands viewed this choice as a brilliant strategy to woo working class voters away from the Democrats. Palin's "tough girl" persona and take no prisoners approach to political leadership, coupled with an appealing aura of domesticity flowing from her role as a "hockey mom" and mother of five children,

Robert English: Georgia ... The Ignored History

[Robert English is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California, and the author of Russia and the Idea of the West. (November 2008)] Zviad Gamsakhurdia, Georgia's first post-Soviet president, from 1991 to 1992, has been dead for fifteen years. But in view of his responsibility for initially provoking the South Ossetian campaign to secede from Georgia—the conflict that set off last month's war with Russia—his brief but tumultuous reign merits some f

Learning from Contemporary Conflicts to Prepare for Future War

by H.R. McMaster:

War is the final auditor of military institutions. 

Deborah Lipstadt: Learning to love Obama after Clinton's defeat

[Deborah Lipstadt, a leading Holocaust scholar and Hillary Clinton supporter, explains why she now is unabashedly backing Barack Obama.] I am one of those 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling. I was a Hillary supporter. I did not support Senator Clinton because she was a woman but because I liked her policies and record. But as is often the case in life, my hopes were not to be. Once that became clear I sat on the sidelines, watching and wondering. Now I am firmly in the Obama/Bid

Peter J. Katzenstein: Rethinking Japanese Security

[Peter J. Katzenstein is the Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor of International Studies at Cornell University and the President of the American Political Science Association. His research and teaching lie at the intersection of the fields of international relations and comparative politics. This is a revised and updated excerpt from chapter 1 of Peter J. Katzenstein, Rethinking Japanese Security: Internal and External Dimensions (New York: Routledge, 2008), with permission of the publisher.]

Juan Cole: Obama a socialist?

Is McCain a far Right extremist?When McCain calls Obama a"socialist," is he Red-baiting? Republicans back in the 1950s through the 1980s routinely accused Democrats of being"Communists" or hinted around that they were fellow travelers or 'soft on communism.' Richard M. Nixon, the grand dragon of dirty tricks, described the Democra

Shatha Almutawa: Propaganda, Islam, and the Election

[Shatha Almutawa is a PhD student in History of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity School. She is studying the interactions between Muslim and Jewish philosophy in the medieval period.] This Ramadan, Muslims and Arabs across the United States have come face to face with questions of identity and portrayal, as 28 million copies of the movie Obsession: Radical Islam's War against the West were distributed in fourteen swing states, in a blatant and large-scale misrepresentat

Eric Foner: Rooted in Reconstruction ... The First Wave of Black Congressmen

[Eric Foner, a member of The Nation's editorial board, is DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University and author, most recently, of Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction. Our Lincoln, a collection of essays he has edited, is just out from Norton.] A few months ago, an article in The New York Times Magazine portrayed Barack Obama's presidential candidacy as marking the"end" of traditional black politics and the emergence of a new generation of black lead

Joseph Lane: McCain Continues Down the Low Road: “Obama & Domestic Terrorism”

[Joseph Lane is the Hawthorne Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Emory & Henry.] I guess now I know what it is like to live in a battleground state. I got both of the calls transcribed below (you can listen to the audio at Talking Points Memo) this week. They came to my southwest Virginia home right before the dinner hour. “Hello. I’m calling for John McCain and the RNC because you need to know that Barack Obama and his fellow De

Ruth Rosen: What about Josephine the waitress?

[Ruth Rosen is Professor Emerita of History, U.C. Davis and Visiting Professor of History, U.C. Berkeley.] For months, women's groups across the country have been petitioning--practically begging--the moderators of the presidential debates to include questions that addressed, specifically, the problems that women face at work and in their families. As early as August 14, 2008, The Women's Media Center in New York launched "Show Me the Women," an email p

Andrew Meyer: Plumbing Joe the Plumber

[About Meyer: After living in mainland China and Taiwan for four years and in Japan for one year I returned to the U.S. and earned a doctoral degree in Chinese history, which I teach at the City University of New York. This blog reflects my belief that the study of the history and culture of other nations is indispensible to the conduct of modern politics.] At last night's debate, John McCain unveiled a new line of attack against Barack Obama, the "Joe the Plumber" offensi

Philip Carl Salzman: Self-induced Nakba

[This has been a guest post contributed by Philip Carl Salzman, professor of anthropology at McGill University.] The greatest Middle Eastern success in public relations opinion-shaping in the last forty years has been the Palestinian self-definition of themselves as a separate people and as victims of Israel and the West. The entire world, it appears, has been convinced. Europ

Juan Cole: Game Over

The third and final debate again went to Obama in the instant polls done by organizations such as CNN. Independents told CNN they generally thought Obama won. CNN's real-time tracking of opinion among viewers in its studio showed that independents especially disliked the smear tactic of attempting to link Obama to prominent Chicago educator Bill Ayers, who had had a radical youth but long since had become a mainstream figure. McCain came across as sarcastic and mean-spirited, though he was more

Mark Naison: Obama's Discipline, And McCain's Rage, Have Powerful Antecedents in US History

[Mark Naison is Professor of African American Studies and History, Fordham University.] As I watched Barack Obama maintain his poise in last nights debate, in the face of insults and patronizing comments from Senator McCain, and watched McCain get angrier and angrier when Obama refused to respond in kind, I thought of other moments in American history where African Americans achieved important victories by maintaining almost superhuman discipline in the face of extreme provocation.

Peter Lawler: 8 Elections that Shed Light on Campaign 2008

[Peter Lawler is Dana Professor of Government at Berry College in Georgia. He is the author or editor of a dozen books, including Postmodernism Rightly Understood, Stuck With Virtue, Aliens in America, and Homeless and at Home in America.] We can learn from comparisons with the past only if we approach them with some — but not too much — irony. Here are some descriptions of past elections. Each is spun in such a way as to heighten its relevance to the one going on right now and in order

Timothy Garton Ash: The freedom of historical debate is under attack by the memory police

[Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist.] Among the ways in which freedom is being chipped away in Europe, one of the less obvious is the legislation of memory. More and more countries have laws saying you must remember and describe this or that historical event in a certain way, sometimes on pain of criminal prosecution if you give the wrong answer. What the wrong answer is depends on where you are. In Switzerland, you get prosecuted for saying t

Christopher Jencks: Reinventing the American Dream

[Christopher Jencks is a professor of social policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. His books include Rethinking Social Policy: Race, Poverty, and the Underclass (Harvard University Press, 1992). This essay was adapted from a talk he gave at the most-recent meeting of the American Sociological Association.] The American Dream sounds like apple pie and motherhood. Everyone is for it. But when everyone endorses an ideal, whether it's the American Dre

Judith Stein: Crisis is the fruit of policies that encourage low wages

[Judith Stein is a history professor at City College of New York.] The volatile stock market and credit freeze focus the mind on crisis management. But this calamity is connected to 30 years of policies that encourage low wages. After World War II, it was believed that high wages were good for the economy as well as workers. But a new economic model came into favor after 1980. Its signatures were low taxation, deregulation and free trade. Its logic was that

Jonathan Zimmerman: Obama 101 ... Politics on campus is suddenly boring

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is author of Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century.] A few weeks ago, I was asked to speak about the presidential elections at a student dormitory. I said yes, of course, but only on the condition that some John McCain supporters showed up. They didn't. The discussion was OK, so far as it went, but it didn't go far. Everyone expressed some degree of disdain fo

Frederick Kagan: Obama's foreign policy is a muddle

[Frederick W. Kagan is a resident scholar at AEI.] Discerning Barack Obama's foreign policy in any detail is far from easy. The great majority of his statements on the subject consist of criticism of the Bush administration. Asked during the first presidential debate how he sees"the lessons of Iraq," Obama replied,"I think the first question is whether we should have gone into the war in the first place." Later he added:"The strategic question that the president has to ask is not whether