Roundup: Historians' Take

Mark Naison: Involuntary Communalism in the Age of George Bush- How a Sixties Dream Became a Working Class Necessity

[Mark Naison is Professor of African American Studies and History, Fordham University.] " It's time we stop children, what's that sound Everybody look what's going round" During the late 1960's, those song lyrics served as an anthem for a youth based counterculture that emerged out of the civil rights and anti-war movements. Challenging individualism, consumerism and the ideal of the self-contained nuclear family, hundreds of thousands of youn

Juan Cole: A Social History of the Surge

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.]I want to weigh in as a social historian of Iraq on the controversy over whether the"surge""worked." The NYT notes:'Mr. McCain bristled in an interview with the “CBS Evening News” on Tuesday when asked about Mr.

Juan Cole: Obama is saying the wrong things about Afghanistan

Barack Obama's Afghanistan and Iraq policies are mirror images of each other. Obama wants to send 10,000 extra U.S. troops to Afghanistan, but wants to withdraw all American soldiers and Marines from Iraq on a short timetable. In contrast to the kid gloves with which he treated the Iraqi government, Obama repeated his threat to hit at al-Qaida in neighboring Pakistan unilaterally, drawing howls of outrage from Islamabad. But Obama's pledge to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan will n

Marc Bousquet: The Churchill Case Goes to Trial

[Marc Bousquet is an associate professor of cultural studies and writing with new media at Santa Clara University. His book How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation has just been released by New York University Press with a foreword by Cary Nelson.] Sometime in early 2009, the Denver District Court will begin to hear testimony in Ward Churchill’s lawsuit against the University of Colorado. It will be a very different national political climate than the one

Russell Jacoby: Why are some of the greatest thinkers being expelled from their disciplines?

[Russell Jacoby is a professor in residence in the history department at the University of California at Los Angeles. He is author, most recently, of Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age (Columbia University Press, 2005).] How is it that Freud is not taught in psychology departments, Marx is not taught in economics, and Hegel is hardly taught in philosophy? Instead these masters of Western thought are taught in fields far from their own. Nowadays Freud is found

Jim Sleeper: David Brooks is misguided

Occasionally people ask me why I'm so hard on New York Times columnist David Brooks, who some of them find quite insightful and others so irrelevant they can't understand why I get angry at all. At last, I've found a way to explain it. It's all there in his column of today, "The Culture of Debt." I'm sure that many of my correspondents will find the column reasonab

Milton Greenberg: The New GI Bill Is No Match for the Original

[Milton Greenberg is professor emeritus of government at American University, where he has served as provost and interim president. He is the author of The GI Bill: The Law That Changed America (Lickle Publishing, 1997), a companion book to a PBS production.] In June, Congress enacted the Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act, commonly called the GI Bill of Rights for the 21st Century. Supporters claim that it does for current veterans what was done for those who served in W

William J. Astor: Having the "Best Military" Is Not Always a Good Thing

[William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), taught at the Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School. He now teaches at the Pennsylvania College of Technology, and is the author of Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism, among other works (Potomac Press, 2005). He may be reached at wastore@pct.edu.] When did American troops become"warfighters" -- members of"Generation Kill" -- instead of citizen-soldiers? And when did we become so proud of declaring our m

Juan Cole: Der Spiegel Proves al-Maliki Story Correct

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] Senator Barack Obama is in Iraq for consultations with American military commanders and Iraqi leaders. Despite all the talk about Iraq being" calm," I'd like to point out that the month just befo

Neve Gordon: A West Bank Town’s Struggle to Survive

[Neve Gordon teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University. Read about his new book, Israel's Occupation (University of California Press), and more at www.israelsoccupation.info.] "Jerusalem bulldozer 'terrorist' kills 3 in rampage," read the headline of a CNN article describing the recent attack of a Palestinian construction worker that left three Israelis dead and scores wounded. A Google news search indicates that the brutal a

Robert Perkinson: Lessons from the history of the prison boom

In March 1965, at the height of his popularity and power, President Johnson launched a major offensive against crime, which he called a “malignant enemy in America.” Although violent crime had declined markedly since the Great Depression, it was starting to surge under Johnson’s watch, and his conservative critics—following the lead of Barry Goldwater, who had made fighting crime a centerpiece of his failed but galvanizing presidential bid—were eager to pounce. To outflank them, LBJ ordered his

Niall Ferguson: China’s war on nature

... Just as Americans have waged their War on Terror since 9/11, it seems the Chinese are now embroiled in a War on Nature. To grasp what is at stake in this strange war, it pays to travel away from the capital – indeed, away from the entire eastern region of China. The economic front line now lies in western China, in frenetically growing industrial centres such as Chongqing. Far up the River Yangtze, to the west of the Three Gorges Dam, Chongqing is probably the fastest growing ci

Eric Rauchway: John McCain styles himself as a Teddy Roosevelt Republican. But he's taken exactly the wrong lessons from TR

[Eric Rauchway is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, and the author, most recently, of Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America and Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America. He also blogs for The Edge of the American West.] "I count myself as a conservative Republican, yet I view it to a large degree in the Theodore Roosevelt mold," John McCain told The New York Times last Friday. The presumptive Republican nominee

Howard Zinn: Memo to Obama, McCain ... No one wins in a war

[Howard Zinn is author of 'A People's History of the United States.] BARACK OBAMA and John McCain continue to argue about war. McCain says to keep the troops in Iraq until we 'win' and supports sending more troops to Afghanistan. Obama says to withdraw some (not all) troops from Iraq and send them to fight and 'win' in Afghanistan. For someone like myself, who fought in World War II, and since then has protested against war, I must ask: Have our political leaders gone m

Frederick Kagan, Kimberly Kagan and Jack Keane: Victory means an opportunity to contain Iran and stabilize the Mideast

[Mr. Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Ms. Kagan is president of the Institute for the Study of War. Mr. Keane is a former vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army. All have just returned from their most recent visit to Iraq.] All of the most important objectives of the surge have been accomplished in Iraq. The sectarian civil war is ended; al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) has been dealt a devastating blow; and the Sadrist militia and other Iranian-backed militant

Daniel Pipes: Will Washington Betray Anti-Regime Iranians?

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] As the United Nations mandate that legitimizes the presence of U.S forces in Iraq expires on December 31, 2008, a humanitarian and strategic disaster is coming into view. The fate of about 3,500 anti-regime Iranians will be decided in the course of status-of-forces

Tom Engelhardt: A Short Till-Death-Do-Us-Part History of Bush's Wars

[Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site, has just been published. Focusing on what the mainstream media hasn't covered, it is an alternative history of the mad B

Michael Oren: What Israel--and the rest of the world--can learn from 18 years of war with Lebanon

[Michael B. Oren, a contributing editor to The New Republic, is a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and the author of Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present (Norton, 2007).] The Jerusalem theater lights came on, and no man between the ages of 25 and 35 moved. We had just watched Waltz With Bashir, Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman's animated documentary about Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the subsequent Sabra and Chatila massacre.

Dilip Hiro: The Energy Reality We Face

[Dilip Hiro is the author of numerous books on the Middle East. His most recent book,

Al Senn: Olympic Controversies Past and Present

[Mr. Senn is a historian at the University of Wisconsin.] The hot topic of this year’s Olympics seems to be “boycott.” Protesters argue that China’s human rights policies, especially in Tibet, make Beijing an unworthy host for the celebration of human athletic prowess in the Games of the XXIX Olympiad. Olympic officials, on the other hand, speak piously of keeping politics out of sports competition. I am frequently asked “Must politics be a part of the Olympic Games?” M