Roundup: Historians' Take

Source: Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI)
May 1, 2008

Aaron David Miller: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace

[Aaron David Miller is a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.; his latest book is The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace (Mar. 2008, Bantam/Dell). Between 2003–06 Miller served as president of Seeds of Peace, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering young leaders from regions of conflict with the leadership skills required to advance coexistence and reconciliation. For the previous two decad

Source: Real Clear Politics
May 8, 2008

Victor Davis Hanson: Presidential Pariah

We are in one of the longest presidential campaigns in modern memory -- and haven't even started focusing on the general election. It's been enough to drive most of us mad, but if there's one person in particular suffering the most, it may be President Bush. It's been noted here before that we have not had an election since 1952 in which an incumbent president or vice president was not running in at least partial defense of an existing administration's record.

Source: AmericanThinker.com
May 7, 2008

Taru Taylor: The Wright-Obama Split in Historic Perspective

[Taru Taylor is Professor of English at Semyung University, Jecheon, South Korea.] Sen. Barack Obama's recent fallout with Rev. Jeremiah Wright transcends daily news. The gravity of their broken friendship commands larger perspective. Now that they have separated into opposing camps, it is possible to see their argument replaying Black America's central conflict: Booker T. Washington vs. Dr. W.E.B. DuBois. Every Black American is either Washington or Dr. DuBois. He eit

Source: National Post
May 6, 2008

Daniel Pipes: Israel's Predicament at 60 ... World's worst neighbourhood

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] Two religiously-identified new states emerged from the shards of the British empire in the aftermath of World War II. Israel, of course, was one; the other was Pakistan.They make an interesting, if infrequently-compared pai

Source: Special to HNN
May 8, 2008

Stephanie Coontz and Valerie Adrian: An Overdue Mother's Day Gift that would make a real difference

[Stephanie Coontz is a Professor of History and Family Studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. Valerie Adrian is a researcher at the Council on Contemporary Families.] Here's a thought for a Mother's Day gift that would go beyond the complimentary flowers passed out by restaurants and the complementary speeches churned out by politicians every May: Affordable child care that is operated in accord with high-quality national standards. It's a gift long over

Source: TomDispatch.com
May 6, 2008

William J. Astore: The Air Force Above All

[William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), has taught at the Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School. He currently teaches at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. He is the author of Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism (Potomac Press, 2005). He may be reached at wastore@pct.edu.] When I first joined the Air Force, its mission statement was straightforward: to fly and fight. The recruiting slogan was upbeat: the Air Force was"a great way of life,"

Source: TomDispatch.com
May 4, 2008

Tom Engelhardt: Selling the President's General

[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.] The last war won't end, but in the Pentagon they're already

Source: Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center
May 3, 2008

Barry Rubin: The AP explains why Israel shouldn't exist

[Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) 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). To

Source: TPM Cafe
April 27, 2008

Jim Sleeper: A Literary Prophet's Bad Faith

[Mr. Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale, is the author of The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York and Liberal Racism.] If Martin Amis is the self-styled bad boy of English letters, Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, is the rabbinic scourge of"fine" writers who stray into public intellection. No surprise, then, that in the April 27 New York Times Book Review

Source: Frontpagemag.com
April 29, 2008

Daniel Pipes: Barack Obama's Muslim Childhood

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] As Barack Obama's candidacy comes under increasing scrutiny, his account of his religious upbringing deserves careful attention for what it tells us about the candidate's integrity.Obama asserted in

Source: New Republic
May 5, 2008

Eric Rauchway: John McCain is dangerously contemptuous of the international system that has served the U.S.--and the world--so well

[Eric Rauchway is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, and the author of The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction, 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.] Seventy years ago, back when John McCain was a toddler babbling nonsense, the U.S. turned toward international cooperation on economic issues. With the An

Source: Informed Comment (Blog run by Juan Cole)
May 5, 2008

Juan Cole: Clinton on Iran Obliteration ... A Bush Clone?

Barack Obama criticized Hillary Clinton on Sunday for her threat to"totally obliterate" Iran if it attacked Israel. He said on Meet the Press, 'MR. RUSSERT: Hillary Clinton was asked about if Iran launched a nuclear attack against Israel, and this is the answer she gave. Let's listen.(Videotape)

December 31, 2069

Mark Naison: Who Are the Real Elitists? Michael Moore, Barack Obama, And The Resurgence of American Liberalism

[Mark Naison is Professor of African American Studies and History, Fordham University.] Ever since the late 60's, conservatives in the US have done a brilliant job in portraying liberals as self righteous elitists who are out of touch with hard working Americans who keep the country going and defend it from its enemies . George Wallace pioneered this approach in his two presidential campaigns in 1964 and 1968 . By attacking liberals as "pointy headed intellectu

Source: China Beat
May 3, 2008

Susan Brownell: Which previous Olympic Games provides the most useful historical precedent for understanding the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games?

[Susan Brownell is the author of Training the Body for China, which is widely recognized as the single best work by a scholar on Chinese sports.] For multiple reasons, I do not subscribe to the current fad for drawing parallels between the 1936 “Hitler” Games and the 2008 Beijing Games.If one is looking for actual historical connections, then I would argue that the 104-year connection between the U.S. and

Source: Perlstein in a review of Reclaiming Conservatism: How a Great American Political Movement Got Lost--And How It Can Find Its Way Back (WaPo)
May 4, 2008

Rick Perlstein: How conservatives are rewriting the past

[Rick Perlstein is the author, most recently, of "Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of the Nation."] Mickey Edwards is a decent and honorable man -- and not a bad writer. A Republican congressman from Oklahoma between 1976 and 1992 and a former chairman of the American Conservative Union, Edwards earned a reputation for upholding conservative principles even at the expense of party loyalty. But Edwards doesn't see much principle among today's conservati

Source: Ahistoricality (Blogger)
May 2, 2008

Ahistoricality (Blogger): Hillary's inappropriate Holocaust analogy

I've not been terribly vocal about the Democratic campaign -- neither Clinton nor Obama were my first choice, both have fairly similar policies (neither of which will be enacted in anything like their present form), both have a thin but adequate resume, both have substantial talents and drawbacks as pote

Source: Chicago Tribune
May 2, 2008

Leon Fink: Obama and the unmaking of America's working class

[Leon Fink is a history professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and editor of the academic journal "Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas."] When Al Gore unveiled a modest appeal to "working families" at the 2000 Democratic National Convention, he drew a sharp response. His Republican opponent, George W. Bush, immediately counterattacked, accusing Gore of unleashing "class war" on the country. The preferred ter

Source: Edge of the American West (blog)
May 2, 2008

Ari Kelman: So Pastor Wright Would Be Controversial If He Were White?

[Mr. Kelman is Associate Professor of History, University of California, Davis.] Yesterday, Ezra Klein had this to say about the uproar over Jeremiah Wright:If Jeremiah Wright were white, it would be a very different story, but a story just the same. The comments of Wright’s that have really driven the national conversation were not particul

Source: AlterNet
April 30, 2008

Ted Widmer: What We Can Learn From Woodrow Wilson

[Ted Widmer is author, most recently, of Ark of the Liberties: America and the World, forthcoming from Hill & Wang. He is director of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. This Audit is adapted from Widmer's January 2008 presentation at "The Liberal Foreign Policy Tradition," a conference cosponsored by CIS, the Woodrow Wilson Center, and the History and Democracy.] Wilson's idealistic vision of democracy and self-determination around the world should serv

Source: Huffington Post (Blog)
May 1, 2008

Julian E. Zelizer: Superdelegates and the rules of the game

[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.] With the explosive news surrounding Reverend Jeremiah Wright this week, it is even more likely that the so-called Super-Delegates are going to have an important role