Roundup: Historians' Take

Victor Davis Hanson: Brave Old World

[Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the author of "A War Like No Other" (Random House).] Russia invades Georgia. China jails dissidents. China and India pollute at levels previously unimaginable. Gulf monarchies make trillions from jacked-up oil prices. Islamic terrorists keep car bombing. Meanwhile, Europe offers moral lectures, while Japan and South Korea shrug and watch - all in a globalized world tha

Timothy Snyder: History Does Not End, Nor Do Its Hard Lessons

[Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University. His most recent book is "The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke."] Americans find it easy to look around the world and see figures like Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden who remind them of Adolf Hitler. But do we remember Hitler's rise, and the rise of the Third Reich, in the right way? Germany, unlike Iraq, had been a leading democracy before Hitler, and the first lesson to take fr

Dominic Sandbrook: If you miss the Cold War, you weren't there

[Dominic Sandbrook is a British historian and writer.] John le Carré has a new book out in a month's time, and you have to admire the old fox's timing. It is almost 20 years since the end of the Cold War, the conflict that inspired The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and yet in the last week half-forgotten memories of Brezhnev, Andropov and Mutually Assured Destruction have been flooding back with a vengeance. Russian tanks rum

Daniel Burnstein: Seattle Bag Law Not a Threat to Freedom

[Daniel Burnstein, associate professor of history at Seattle University, is the author of "Next to Godliness: Confronting Dirt and Despair in Progressive Era New York City" (University of Illinois Press 2006).] Many people contend Seattle's new law requiring a 20-cent per bag fee is frivolous and exemplifies government's tendency to curtail individual freedom. But far from being frivolous, this innovative law will decrease the annual production of bags by 184 million - and

Francis Fukuyama: Iraq May Be Stable, But the War Was a Mistake

Sometime in May 2003, shortly after U.S. forces had taken Baghdad and President Bush landed on an aircraft carrier under the banner "Mission Accomplished," an old friend remarked that he thought the war was going pretty well so far. I shook my head and said I thought we were in for trouble. I bet him that day that Iraq would be a mess in five years' time, a mess being defined as "you'll know it when you see it." I mentioned this bet to Bret Stephens three years l

Victor Davis Hanson: Moscow’s Sinister Brilliance

Lost amid all the controversies surrounding the Georgian tragedy is the sheer diabolic brilliance of the long-planned Russia invasion. Let us count the ways in which it is a win/win situation for Russia. The Home Front The long-suffering Russian people resent the loss of global influence and empire, but not necessarily the Soviet Union and its gulags that once ensured such stature. The invasion restores a sense of Russian nationalism and power to its populace without the stin

Maurice Isserman: The Descent of Men

[Maurice Isserman, a professor of history at Hamilton College, is the co-author of the forthcoming “Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering From the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes.”] WILCO VAN ROOIJEN, a Dutch mountain climber, managed to survive the debacle this week that took the lives of 11 others in Pakistan on K2, the world’s second-highest peak. Describing the chaotic events that ensued when a pinnacle of ice collapsed and swept away fixed ropes that climber

Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez: Back to the USSR

As we write, reports are coming in that after a bombardment by Russia's aircraft, its tanks are advancing on the Georgian town of Gori - the birthplace of Iosif Djugashvili, better known as Stalin. This throwback to the heyday of the Soviet Union is more than symbolic. Historical analogies are never perfect, but our sense of déjà vu was acute as we watched Moscow's Soviet-style move to reassert its domination of the USSR's former fief. Moscow perceives a threat to its

William R. Polk: Rushing Toward War

[William R. Polk was Professor of History at the University of Chicago and a Member of the Policy Planning Council under President Kennedy. He is the author, among other books, of Understanding Iraq; Violent Politics, a History of Insurgency, Guerrilla Warfare and Terrorism; and, with former Senator George McGovern, Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now.] As the Bush Administration begins its final months in office, it has embarked upon two courses of action that will p

John Lewis Gaddis: Jefferson's hostility to tyranny should be our guiding light today

[John Lewis Gaddis is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University.] Presidential administrations tend not to be remembered in the same way they were regarded while in office. Proximity breeds weariness, disappointment and often contempt. Distance—if by that is meant the cooling of passions that comes with retirement, together with proximity to presidents who have followed and to mistakes they have made—tends to foster reconsideration, nostalgia an

David R. Stone: Blowback in South Ossetia

[Dr. David R. Stone is a professor of history at Kansas State University.] There is a great deal of blame to go around for the disastrous war over South Ossetia. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili deserves the greatest share, for starting a war to reassert control over South Ossetia that Russia can now finish on its own terms. The Russian government, with former President and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in the lead, has cynically taken the conflict Saakashvili began

Jonathan Stevenson: We Need a New Think Tank for the War on Terror

[Mr. Stevenson is a professor of strategic studies at the U.S. Naval War College. His "Thinking Beyond the Unthinkable: Harnessing Doom from the Cold War to the Age of Terror," will be published this month by Viking.] Shortly after 9/11, in an interview for a book I was writing on how to handle terrorism as a strategic threat, the pre-eminent nuclear strategist Thomas C. Schelling remarked: "What the government really ought to do is reverse-engineer the Rand Corporati

Mart Laar: Stalinism Was Just as Bad as Nazism

[Mr. Laar, a former prime minister of Estonia, is a founder of the Foundation for the Investigation of Communist Crimes.] Last week Russia furiously attacked President Bush for his proclamation on Captive Nations Week (July 20-July 26), which was established to raise awareness of countries living under communist and other oppressive regimes. Mr. Bush said that, "In the 20th century, the evils of Soviet communism and Nazi fascism were defeated and freedom spread around the world

Robert S. McElvaine: Paris Hiltons of Elections Past

[Historian Robert S. McElvaine is Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts & Letters at Millsaps College. His latest book is Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America . He is currently at work on a book titled Oh, Freedom! - America in the 1960s, which will be published by Norton.] "This man seeks the highest elective office in the world not primarily as a politician, but as a celebrity. He's the only politician a woman would read about while sitting" in a beauty salon.

Jonathan Zimmerman: To Change the Olympics, Change the Channel

[Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of history and education at New York University, is the author of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory," forthcoming from Yale University Press.] I love everything about sports: playing them, viewing them and writing about them. But when the Olympic Games start later this week in Beijing, I'm not going to watch. And neither should you. Call it the People's Boycott. Despite worldwide protests, ev

Jonathan Zimmerman: American Voters Should Beware the 'McNasty' in McCain

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He isthe author of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory,"which will be published next year by Yale University Press.] In November of 1986, the Arizona Republican Party held an election night celebration at a Phoenix hotel to toast its victorious candidates. The marquee attraction was a two-term congressman named John McCain, who won the Senate seat vacated by GOP icon Barry

Jim Castagnera: Anthrax Saga of 2001 Comes to Closure, Maybe

[Jim Castagnera is the Associate Provost and Associate Counsel at Rider University. He is writing a new book about terrorism’s impact on college campuses for Praeger.] Beginning a mere week after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, envelopes packed with anthrax spores started turning up in people’s mailboxes. Two of those people were sitting U.S. Senators, Daschle of South Dakota and Leahy of Vermont. The National Enquirer in Florida and TV network offices in New York als

Alvin Felzenberg: Choosing a Veep (Interview w/ Daniel Stone)

[Alvin Felzenberg is the author of "The Leaders We Deserved (And a Few We Didn't)"] Why has the vice presidency been largely brushed over by history? Well, when you go back to the country's founding and the constitutional convention, it was kind of an afterthought. They didn't know how to deal with the problem of succession, which is why they put it in. One vice president, Nelson Rockefeller called it standby equipment, which is not far from what it is. They want

Roger Fulvers: Lest We Forget, It's a Story that Cries Out for Telling and Retelling

What can be more chilling than the statistics of war? Tens of thousands dying in a single day on the Western Front in World War I. Millions perishing in World War II. India. Pakistan. Korea. Kenya. Vietnam. Cambodia. Rwanda. Iraq. And where next? Among all this immense bloodletting, one instance of human cruelty stands out as a portent of our future. At approximately 8:15 on the morning of Monday, Aug. 6, 1945, the world's first atomic-bomb attack was carried out

Lawrence S. Wittner: Nuclear ban? Start with U.S.

[Lawrence S. Wittner teaches at the University at Albany. He is author of "Toward Nuclear Abolition."] Wednesday is the 63rd anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and an appropriate time to reflect upon the persistence of nuclear danger. The world's nine nuclear powers continue to cling to some 27,000 nuclear weapons, almost all of them more deadly than that first atomic bomb, which annihilated an estimated 140,000 Japanese men, women, and children. They do so e