Roundup: Historians' Take

Jeffrey Wasserstrom and Kate Merkel-Hess: Five Things We Wish George W. Bush Would Read Before His Olympic Visit to China

[Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine. He is co-founder and regular contributer to The China Beat: Blogging How the East is Red. His books include China's Brave New World (2007) and the forthcoming Global Shanghai, 1850-2010. Kate Merkel-Hess is a graduate student in modern Chinese history at the University of California, Irvine. She is the Editor of The China Beat, and a contributor to the TLS] The most iconic pictur

Benjamin Reilly: Japan's Return to Guadalcanal

[Mr. Reilly is director of the Center for Democratic Institutions at the Australian National University in Canberra.] History has a funny way of repeating itself. In a little-reported development last month, Japan offered to contribute peacekeepers to the Australian-led stabilization mission in the Solomon Islands -- the site of some of the fiercest fighting between Japanese and Allied forces of the Pacific campaign in World War II. While the prospect of Japanese troops

Douglas A. Irwin and Amity Shlaes: Democrats Once Did Free Trade

[Mr. Irwin, an economics professor at Dartmouth, is co-author of "The Genesis of the GATT," just published by Cambridge University Press. This article is excerpted from "Cordell Hull and the Case for Optimism," a working paper published this week by the Council on Foreign Relations, where Ms. Shlaes is a senior fellow.] The failure of the Doha Round of trade negotiations seven years after its launch does not call for despair. The removal of trade barriers and the

Edward Luttwak: A Truman for our times

[Edward Luttwak is an American military strategist and historian who has published works on military strategy, history and international relations.] That George W Bush's foreign policy has been a total failure is now taken for granted by so many people that one usually hears it stated as a simple truth that need not be argued at all. It has happened before. When President Harry S Truman said in March 1952 that he would not seek re-election, most Americans could agree o

Jane Dailey: Why didn't Obama mention MLK's visit to Berlin when he was in Berlin?

[Jane Dailey teaches American history at the University of Chicago.] Looking out at the crowd of 200,000 that stood between him and the Brandenburg Gate last week, Barack Obama remarked on the difference between himself and other American leaders who had spoken in Berlin. Inviting his listeners to look beyond that difference, Obama emphasized, "I know that I don't look like the Americans who've previously spoken in this great city." This was not, strictly spea

Tom Engelhardt: Living Through the Age of Denial in America

[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

Julian Zelizer: Is the convention really a boost?

[Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the co-editor of “Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s” (Harvard University Press) and is completing a book on the history of national security politics since World War II.] Lamenting the decline of party conventions has become a favorite pastime of political pundits. Every four years, they fill newspapers and television screens with nostalgic paeans to the way real de

Julian Zelizer: Senator Ted Stevens and John McCain's "Two-Face" Problem

[Julian E. Zelizer is Professor of History and Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. He is the co-editor of Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Harvard University Press) and author of On Capitol Hill: The Struggle to Reform Congress and its Consequences, 1948-2000 (Cambridge University Press).] One of the most compelling figures in the Batman comic books is Two-Face, a character who was introduced in the 1940s who has two sides t

Ira Chernus: Will the Big Winner of 2008 Once Again Be a Conservative Culture-Wars Narrative?

[Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin. His email address is: chernus@colorado.edu.] While the Iraq war has largely faded from our TV screens, some 85% of all voters still call it an important issue. Most of them want U.S. troops home from Iraq within a couple of years, many of them

John Edward Philips: Believe it or not, Mugabe still has supporters

[John Edward Philips, a specialist in African history and politics, is professor in the Department of International Society at Hirosaki University. He has recently been working on the relative economic efficiency of slavery as opposed to wage labor. His e-mail address is philips@gol.com] The world can't understand how Robert Mugabe has support left in Zimbabwe. After violence and intimidation against his opponents he was able to steal a victory,

Daniel Pipes: May an American Comment on Israel?

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] May I, an American citizen living in the United States, comment publicly on Israeli decision making?

Chalmers Johnson: The Military-Industrial Complex

[Chalmers Johnson is the author of three linked books on the crises of American imperialism and militarism. They are Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2006). All are available in paperback

4 historians. 4 conventions. 4 turning points in history.

Nowadays, the Republican and Democratic conventions to nominate a presidential candidate are little more than coronation ceremonies—carefully choreographed political theater in which the outcome is preordained. Every detail is accounted for, from the text of the speeches to the number of balloons dropped on the red-white-and-blue-clad delegates. The overall goal is to project an image of party unity, a ritual coming together following an often divisive primary campaign. But there wa

Victor Davis Hanson: The '60s Won't Go Away

[Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the author of "A War Like No Other" (Random House).] What more can anyone say about the 1960s and all its legacies? Those who protested some 40 years ago often still congratulate themselves that their loud zeal alone brought needed "change" to America in civil rights, the environment, women's liberation and world peace. Maybe. But critics counter that the lar

Thomas Benton: A cartload of recent books suggests that it's time to reverse the customer-service mentality plaguing academe

[Thomas H. Benton is the pen name of William Pannapacker, an associate professor of English at Hope College, in Holland, Mich.] "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public," said H.L. Mencken in the era of Babbitt and the Scopes "monkey" trial. Several generations later, one might speculate that no publisher has ever lost money with a book accusing Americans — particularly young ones — of being stupid. The most inf

Ralph R. Reiland: Rewriting Reagan -- again

[Ralph R. Reiland is an associate professor of economics at Robert Morris University and a local restaurateur.] Barack Obama was way too pro-Reagan during an interview earlier this year with the Reno Gazette-Journal's editorial board, according to Paul Krugman, professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University and twice-weekly columnist at The New York Times.

Juliet Gardiner: Are historians like David Cannadine and Andrew Roberts an endangered species?

[Juliet Gardiner is the author of Wartime: Britain 1939-1945. She is writing a history of the 1930s for HarperCollins, to be published in 2009.] When President Bush came to Britain in June, a number of historians were among the dinner guests at 10 Downing Street. One, David Cannadine, was a mover in setting up a History and Policy Unit, in the hope that, when politicians are contemplating such weighty matters as regime change, knife crime or ID cards, they might call on a historian

Simon Sebag Montefiore: Holocaust by hunger ... The truth behind Stalin's Great Famine

[Simon Sebag Montefiore is the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of the bestselling books Young Stalin, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar and Catherine the Great & Potemkin.] The demented Roman Emperor Caligula once mused that if all the people of Rome had one neck he would cut it just to be rid of his troublesome people. The trouble was there were simply too many Romans to kill them all. Many centuries later, the brutal Soviet dictator Josef Sta

Daniel Pipes: Samir Kuntar and the Last Laugh

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] Israel has lived the past sixty years more intensively than any other country.Its highs – the resurrection of a two-thousand year old state in 1948, history's most lopsided military victory in 1967, and the astonishing Entebbe hostage rescue in 1976 – have been triump

Jonathan Zimmerman: Sports heroes have a tough time saying goodbye, and for good reason

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory," which will be published in the fall.] My wife and I have a sworn pact: As soon as she notices that I'm losing it upstairs – or not having fun – she'll force me to retire. And I'll do the same for her. That's the deal, anyhow. Retiring is hard. It's an admission – to the world and to yoursel