Roundup: Historians' Take

Nicolaus Mills: What Obama Can Learn from FDR

[Nicolaus Mills, a professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College, is author of Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower.] ... While 70 percent of voters say Clinton is tough enough to make the choices confronting a president and 71 percent say John McCain is, only 58 percent say that about Obama, according to a recent New York Times-CBS News Poll. Clinton’s challenge is sure to get the attention of Democratic party loyal

Leonard Steinhorn: Blue-collar fault line is not to blame

[Leonard Steinhorn, a professor of communication at American University, is the author of “The Greater Generation: In Defense of the Baby Boom Legacy” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006).] ... The American society is one of dynamic capitalism, cultural rejuvenation and technological change. Because the young are best at adapting to change and learning how to translate it into our daily lives, ours has become the first country in history to transfer cultural authority from its elders to its y

Ruth Rosen: We're Already Married

[Ms. Rosen is Professor Emerita of History, U.C. Davis, and Visiting Professor of History, U.C. Berkeley.] Four years ago, when Mayor Gavin Newsom began issuing marriage licenses for same sex marriages, I was still a political columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle. I rushed down to City Hall to bear witness to the historic events of those days. At the time, I thought Gavin Newsom would be remembered for his bold and courageous initiative. Some said to me, "But it's not a goo

Diane Eickhoff: Kansas Suffrage History A Lesson For Dems

[Diane Eickhoff is the author of “Revolutionary Heart: The Life of Clarina Nichols and the Pioneering Crusade for Women’s Rights.” She lives in Kansas City.] ... In February 1867, the Kansas legislature passed two amendments. One gave African-American men the vote, the other granted suffrage to all women. Both amendments needed a majority vote from the white male electorate to become law. The election was set for November. At first, prospects were bright for the passage

James E. Campbell: Superdelegates should be thinking about the electoral college

[James E. Campbell is a professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. ] We are just about 19 weeks into one of the wildest nomination seasons in several generations and things just keep getting wilder. Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive nominee of the Democrat

Bob Miller: What Obama should do with Clinton

[Mr. Miller is a historian at the University of Cincinnati.] In the May 13 New York Times, former Senator George S. McGovern outlined a plan for the Democratic candidates to implement to restore party unity before the convention meets in Denver this coming August. McGovern, of course, is speaking from experience as a presidential contender in not one, but three presidential campaigns (1968, 1972, and 1984). He c

Tom Engelhardt: Kiss American Security Goodbye

[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 been updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.] Once upon a time, I studied the Chinese martial art of Tai

Larry Bartels: Are Americans Egalitarians?

[Bartels, a Princeton political scientist, is author of the new book, Unequal Democracy.] They certainly sound egalitarian. For example, as I noted the other day, more than 85% of Americans say they agree that "Our society should do whatever is necessary to make sure that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed." That sentiment, if taken seriously, implies a quite radical policy agenda with respect to education, health care, and other forms of social support. It also

Julian Zelizer: Obama-Edwards ticket? Nah.

[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). He is currently writing a history of national security politics since World War II that will be published by Basic Books.] Yesterday John Edwards announced his support for Barack Obama. The endorsement arrived at a good time for Obama since the inevitable nominee was badly defeated in Wes

Simon Winchester: China should have been in a better position to handle the quake

[Simon Winchester is the author of “The Man Who Loved China.”] IT is a cruel and poignant certainty that the children who died in the wreckage of their school during the earthquake this week in Dujiangyan, China, knew all too well that their country once led the world in the knowledge of the planet’s seismicity. They would have been taught, and proudly, that almost 2,000 years ago an astronomer named Chang Heng invented the world’s first seismoscope. It was a bizarrely

Juan Cole: Is Obama the Apostate, or is Bush? A Reply to Luttwak

I've been traveling again and so only just saw Edward Luttwak's ridiculous column about Barack Obama being considered an"apostate" in the Muslim world.It is just so discouraging that such an ignorant and illogical comment was made by a prominent American pundit, and that the New York Times leant its pages to this complete drivel.Of course, this column is a stealth way of b

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China’s political colours ... from monochrome to palette

[Jeffrey N Wasserstrom is a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine. His most recent book is China's Brave New World-And Other Tales for Global Times (Indiana University Press, 2007), and his next will be Global Shanghai, 1850-2010 (Routledge, forthcoming).] A dramatic but largely unacknowledged shift has recently taken place in how the past is understood in China. One way to think about this Chinese transformation is to see it as a sort of "colour revoluti

Juan Cole: Clinton and Obama on Al-Jazeera

Last Wednesday morning, Al-Jazeera's Arabic service reported from Indianapolis on the split results of the North Carolina and Indiana primaries. For analysis, the anchor in Doha, Qatar, interviewed the network's Washington correspondent, Fady Mansour. "A state for each candidate, is that right?" she asked. Mansour replied that it might seem so from the outside, but in fact winning states was less important than winning delegates, and Barack Obama had bettered his lead over Clinton in t

Richard D. Kahlenberg: Barack Obama and Affirmative Action

[Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, is author of The Remedy: Class, Race, and Affirmative Action.] Even as Barack Obama became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee last Tuesday, his continuing failure to win white working-class voters clouds his prospects for November. The inability to connect with noncollege educated whites also undercuts his claim to being a truly transformative candidate — a Robert F. Kennedy figure — who could significan

Tom Engelhardt: Running Out of History

[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.] Already climate change--in the form of

Bernard A. Weisberger: The Super Problem

Though there are still primaries left, the Democratic Party may be headed for an August dilemma. Neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama is likely to enter the convention with a clinching majority of committed delegates chosen by voters in primaries and caucuses, but Obama is almost guaranteed to have more of them. So, barring a huge late turnaround, the deciding votes will come from the approximately 800 “superdelegates,” automatically seated ex officio and free to vote as they please.

Allan J. Lichtman: The Democratic Dream Ticket ... Obama / Clinton

[Allan J. Lichtman is a professor of history at American University in Washington, D.C. His six books include Prejudice and the Old Politics: The Presidential Election of 1928 and The Keys to the White House.] In 2002, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the Democratic nominee for governor in my home state of

Michael Klare: America Out of Gas

[Michael Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and author of the just-released Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (Metropolitan Books). A documentary film based on his previous book, Blood and Oil, is available from the Media Education Foundation and can be ordered at bloodandoilmovie.com. A brief vid

Meredith Fuchs: The White House: Off Limits to Historians?

[The author is the general counsel of the non-profit, non-governmental National Security Archive (the Archive) at George Washington University (www.nsarchive.org). The Archive was a plaintiff in American Historical Ass’n v. Nat’l Archives and Records Admin., Civ. No. 01-2447 (D.D.C.), which challenged Bush Executive Order 13,233 regarding the Presidential Records Act, resulting in invalidation of a portion of the executive order. It is also a plaintiff in National Security Arc

Jim Castagnera: The Global Species Shift

[Jim Castagnera is the Associate Provost and Associate Counsel at Rider University.] Since Darwin published Origin of Species a century and a half ago, biologists have puzzled over when incremental changes in a life form add up to a brand new species. Mother Earth… Gaia… poses the same challenge. “The Gaia hypothesis,” Wikipedia tells me, “is an ecological hypothesis that proposes that living and nonliving parts of the earth are a complex interacting system that can be thought o