Roundup: Historians' Take

Bruce Schulman & Julian Zelizer: Senator Sam's Challenge to Presidential Power

[Bruce Schulman, Boston University, and Julian E. Zelizer, Princeton University, are the editors of Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the Seventies (Harvard University Press).] During the past month, there has been some rumbling on Capitol Hill about reinvigorating investigations into the Bush administration. House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers warned that Karl Rove would face contempt of Congress if he did not appear before his colleagues to talk about the

Julian Zelizer: Veep choice ... A balancing act

[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.] ... The running mate selection is more important today than it was in previous decades, because the power of the office has vastly expanded. The transformation of the vice presidency began in the 1950s w

Jonathan Zimmerman: Memorize this!

[Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of education and history at New York University, is teaching this year at NYU's study-abroad program in Accra, Ghana. He is the author of "Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century."] My 12-year-old daughter recently asked me to help her prepare for a computer-science test for school. She produced a study sheet with several terms that she would have to define, including mouse, point, click and drag. I suppress

Robert S. McElvaine: America's 40 Years War at an End

[Historian Robert S. McElvaine is Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts and Letters at Millsaps College. His latest book, Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America, has just been published by Crown. He is currently at work on a new history of America in the 1960s, Oh Freedom! (Norton).] How fitting--even how poetic--it is that Barack Obama has clinched the Democratic presidential nomination during the week in which w

Harry Boyte & Steven Hahn: Obama picks up message that RFK popularized

[Harry Boyte is founder of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the University of Minnesota and author of the forthcoming "The Citizen Solution: How You Can Make a Difference." Steven Hahn teaches history at the University of Pennsylvania and is author of the forthcoming "The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom."] The furor over Hillary Clinton's remark about Robert Kennedy's assassination has obscured a deeper comparison between Barack Obama and the l

Jeremy Young: So You Want To Run A Third-Party Presidential Campaign?

Okay, so maybe you don’t. But some folks do. In the past month, America’s three largest third parties – the Libertarians, Greens, and Constitutionists – have chosen their presidential nominees. As someone who’s always been a bit of a third-party junkie, I thought it would be interesting to do a post on the history of third party presidential campaigns. The (rather lengthy) result follows.First of all, let’s look at the raw data. Below, I’ve compiled a table of every third-party

Juan Cole: The First Web 2.0 President?

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] The NYT leads this morning with "Obama Claims Nomination; First Black Candidate to Lead a Major Party Ticket." You can see from my headline that I put a different emphasis. I'm not one of those politically correct, color-blin

Daniel Pipes: Obama vs. McCain on the Middle East

[Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org), director of the Middle East Forum, is the Taube/Diller Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University during the spring semester.] How do the two leading candidates for president of the United States differ in their approach to Israel and related topics? Parallel interviews with journalist Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, who spoke in early May with Democrat Barack Obama and

Victor Davis Hanson: All About 'Me, Me, Me, Me'

[Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the author of "A War Like No Other" (Random House).] 1) Recently, George Bush went to Saudi Arabia to ask the ruling House of Saud to pump more oil. That request had about as much chance of success as the Democratic-led congressional effort to "sue" the Saudis in American courts for their selfish "price-gouging." The current U.S. energy debate has d

Martin Marty: The Idolatry of America

[Martin E. Marty's biography, current projects, upcoming events, publications, and contact information can be found at www.illuminos.com.] Let Damon Linker, author of The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege summarize Charles Marsh and his Wayward Christian Soldiers: Freeing the Gospel from Cultural Captivity: "A professor of religion at the University of Virginia and a devout evangelical, Marsh believes that the politicization of Christ

Robert S. McElvaine: McCain & the Rev. Wrongs

[Robert S. McElvaine is Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts & Letters at Millsaps College. This piece is partly adapted from his latest book, Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America, which has just been published by Crown.] Finally realizing that he has been burned by cynically playing with fire-and-brimstone, presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain has in quick-though-belated succession thrown to the wolves two of the wolves in sheep's clothing

Tom Engelhardt: The Movie-Made War World of George W. Bush

[Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has just been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.] Here's a memory for you. I was probab

Dick Howard: An International New Left? 1968 in retrospect.

[Dick Howard is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His many books include Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg (1971) From Marx to Kant (l985), The Birth of American Political Thought (1989), and The Specter of Democracy (2002).] I left the University of Texas to study in Paris during the summer of 1966 because I wanted to learn how to make a revolution—or at least to understand the Marxist theory that had been identifi

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: The Boycotts of ’08 Revisited

[Mr. Wasserstrom teaches at the University of California, Irvine, and is author of “China’s Brave New World: And Other Tales for Global Times” (Indiana University Press, 2007) and “Global Shanghai, 1850-2010," forthcoming from Routledge in the autumn. He is a regular contributor to The China Beat (www.thechinabeat.blogspot.com), a blog on China media coverage.] It was springtime in the eighth year of a young century and the Ol

Michael Burleigh: Some European Perspectives on Terrorism

[Michael Burleigh has held posts at New College, Oxford, the London School of Economics, Cardiff, Rutgers University, Washington & Lee University, and Stanford University before becoming a full-time writer and commentator for several national newspapers in the UK. His books include Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism (HarperCollins 2008). This essay is based on his presentation to FPRI’s Study Group on the West on April 7, 2008; the full-length paper will be published in Orbis.]

Niall Ferguson: The Jewish key to Henry Kissinger

To say that Henry Kissinger is the most controversial of twentieth-century American Secretaries of State would be an understatement. No other holder of that office has inspired opprobrium of the sort heaped on Kissinger by journalists such as Seymour Hersh and Christopher Hitchens. The latter’s polemic, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2002), for example, accuses Kissinger of having “ordered and sanctioned the destruction of civilian populations, the assassination of inconvenient politicians, the k

Juan Cole: John McCain's Arab-American problem

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] Not long ago, the John McCain campaign dropped a prominent Arab-American businessman from its Michigan state finance committee because of allegations that the man was an "agent" of Hezbollah. The charges, made by a right-wing blogger, were unsubstantiated, but fears of being associated with Ara

Juan Cole: Scott McClellan's misleading memoir

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.]Former White House press spokesman Scott McClellan has come to the realization that Bush's presidency veered badly off course and that the Bush White House was in"permanent campaign mode"-- by which he appears to mean that the honesty and transp

Victor Davis Hanson: Why International Borders Remain in Flux

[Victor Davis Hanson is a conservative military historian, as well as a columnist, author, and a former classics professor.] After the convulsions that followed the postwar collapse of European imperialism in Asia and Africa, we had once again become accustomed to the idea that the map as we knew it was static and fixed. The emerging global village was supposed to have transcended endless nineteenth and early twentieth-century squabbling, ethnic rivalry, and religious sectarianism t

David Shribman: Vietnam No Longer Contentious Issue in Our Politics

Have a kind of empty feeling? Sense that something has been missing these last couple of months? Me, too. Campaign 2008 is completing its fifth month, and we haven't had a vicious fight about the Vietnam War yet. Vietnam is the only war in American history never to end. The War of 1812 was contentious, especially in the Northeast, but no presidential election was fought over it beyond 1812. The Mexican War stirred great passions and slopped over into the 1848 election but has hardly