Roundup: Historians' Take

Stanley I. Kutler: The False Comfort of War

[Stanley Kutler is the author of “The Wars of Watergate” and numerous works in American history and constitutional law.] George W. Bush appears in Israel, speaks to its parliament, and, in his familiar, muscular manner, reiterates his determination to use our military prowess to ward off aggressors. What a guy! His international cowboy act toppled Saddam Hussein, our onetime friend, who for more than 20 years stood as a surrogate counterweight to the ambitions of Iran. Now Israel, B

Debby Applegate: Two Can Make History

[Debby Applegate is the author of “The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher.”] OVER the last few months, the contest between Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination has been compared to the bitter feud between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass, two of the most famous progressive reformers of the 19th century. They had been colleagues and friends through two decades of public service — Do

Jonathan Zimmerman: American educators are paid as if our country were poor

[Jonathan Zimmerman, a resident of Pennsylvania and a professor of education and history at New York University, is teaching this semester at NYU's study-abroad program in Accra, Ghana (jlzimm@aol.com). He is the author of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory," which will be published in the fall by Yale University Press.] Last year, an international study confirmed what American teachers already know: They're

Sean Wilentz: Barack Obama and the Unmaking of the Democratic Party

[Mr. Wilentz is a professor of history at Princeton and the author of the HNN Book of the Month, The Age of Reagan.] With her overwhelming victory in Kentucky on May 20, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has completed her sweep of the crucial primary states adjoining the Ohio River -- and the fight for the Democr

Ronald Radosh: Dueling Redbaiters

[Ronald Radosh is an Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute.] As the Democratic primaries near their end, supporters of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have used a time-honored yet unexpected device to attack each other: old-fashioned redbaiting. At the Philadelphia presidential debate in April, George Stephanopoulos asked O

Randal Maurice Jelks: Obama, Wright, and Trinity

[Randal Maurice Jelks, American Studies and African and African-American Studies, University of Kansas.] The East Coast media establishment—both “conservatives” and “liberals”—continue to ask the same question about Senator Barack Obama: why did he keep his membership at Trinity United Church of Christ, where the Reverend Jeremiah Wright was the pastor? The question is asked as though Obama is naïve and Wright is a madman, neither of which is true

David R. Stokes: The Appeasement Chronicles

As President Bush continues to receive criticism about his recent remarks in a speech to the Knesset in Jerusalem, many are taking a fresh look at the personalities and politics of previous generations. Mr. Bush, speaking on a visit to mark the 60th anniversary of the creation of the modern state of Israel, told the Israeli parliament that, “some seem to believe we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all alo

Steven M. Gillon: "It's the 60s, Stupid"

[Steven M. Gillon is the resident historian of the History Channel and professor of history at the University of Oklahoma. His book, The Pact: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich and the Rivalry that Defined a Generation, will be published this June by Oxford University Press.] A few years ago, while doing research for my book, The Pact: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the Rivalry that Defined a Generation, I asked President Clinton to highlight his differences with Speaker Gingrich. "If you

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China's Inauspicious Year

[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.] Two thousand and eight was to have been an auspicious year for China. But the year has been anything but. In January, a wave of polite demonstrations over planned urban development washed over Sh

Steve Smith: Rumor and the Sichuan Earthquake

[Steve Smith is Professor of History at the University of Essex, UK and author of Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895-1927.] One of the intriguing aspects of the appalling crisis created by the earthquake in Sichuan on May 12—whose death toll as I write is over 40,000 and still rising—has been the role played by rumor. Just four days before the quake, the Sichuan provincial government issued a notice designed to quell “earthquake rumors.” Three days after

David Greenberg: An Obama-Clinton ticket could work

[David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers, has two new books out: Presidential Doodles and Calvin Coolidge.] For all the excitement he has generated, Barack Obama—should he maintain his delegate lead over Hillary Clinton—will be the Democratic Party's weakest standard-bearer since primaries became the necessary route to securing the presidential nomination. No candidate has ever concluded these preliminary contests with so many rank-and-file Democrats aga

Judith Apter Klinghoffer: What do the Saudis Want?

[Dr. Judith Apter Klinghoffer is the author of Vietnam, Jews and the Middle East: Unintended Consequences, the co-author of International Citizens' Tribunals: Mobilizing Public Opinion to Advance Human Rights and a History News Network blogger.] Slowly but surely it is beginning to dawn on a world mesmerized by the Democratic primary contest that an oil cartel has been picking our pocket with impunity by willfully failing to adjust its output to the additional needs of China and India. Mor

Nathan Thrall and Jesse James Wilkins: Kennedy Talked, Khrushchev Triumphed

[Nathan Thrall is a journalist. Jesse James Wilkins is a doctoral candidate in political science at Columbia.] IN his inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy expressed in two eloquent sentences, often invoked by Barack Obama, a policy that turned out to be one of his presidency’s — indeed one of the cold war’s — most consequential: “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.” Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Kennedy’s special assistant, called those sentence

John Brown: The Mind of Condoleezza Rice

[John Brown was a U.S. Foreign Service officer from 1981 to 2003.]"I tell my students that policy-making is 90 percent blocking and tackling and 10 percent intellectual."--Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, cited in Mary Beth Brown, Condi: The Life of a Steel Magnolia (Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, Inc, 2007), p. 180."When you never accomplish anything, your weekly summary of what you've done all week is just a bunch of 'accondishments' -- how you've filled

Jon Wiener: An Interview with Pico Iyer about Tibet

BORN IN Oxford, raised in California, a resident of Japan, Pico Iyer has captured his itinerant life with books and essays that document his journeys to Nepal, Cuba, and most recently, Tibet. He speaks with Dissent’s Jon Wiener (“The Weatherman Temptation,” spring 2007) about his new book, The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. ... ... J.W.: Since 1959 the Tibetan exile community has been based in Dharamsala, India. P.I.: Yes. A thriving Tibetan

Daniel Pipes: Is Turkey Reforming Islam?

[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.] Accounts from Turkey suggest that the government is attempting a bold re-interpretation of Islam. Its unusually named ministry of religion, the "Presidency of Religious Affairs and the Religious Charitable Foundation," has un

Victor Davis Hanson: The War Over the War

[Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the author of "A War Like No Other" (Random House).] The war in Iraq is in its sixth year — and we, the public, are in our sixth year of reading warring accounts about it. The most recent is Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez's "Wiser in Battle: A Soldier's Story." Gen. Sanchez, a senior ground commander in Iraq from June 2003 to June 2004, faults L. Paul Bremer, the t

Barry Rubin: Why Israel won't accommodate its critics and just disappear

[Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), with Walter Laqueur (Viking-Penguin); the paperback edition of The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan); A Chronological History of Terrorism, with Judy Colp Rubin, (Sharpe); and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley).]

Avi Shlaim: A deeply hidden diplomatic relationship between Israel and Jordan underpins the history of the search for peace in the Middle East

[Avi Shlaim is a professor of international relations at the University of Oxford and the author of "Lion of Jordan: the Life of King Hussein in War and Peace" (Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, £30)] ... The general picture that emerges of Israeli statecraft in the first 60 years of statehood is one of routine, often unthinking reliance on military force and a reluctance to engage in meaningful diplomacy to resolve the conflict with its neighbours. Another trait, common to L

Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley: The Chinese response to disaster has ancient echoes

[Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley is Associate Professor of History at San Diego State University. Her first book, Tears from Iron: Cultural Responses to Famine in Nineteenth-Century China, was published by the University of California Press this March. She is currently beginning a new research project on popular memory of the Great Leap Famine o