Roundup: Historians' Take

Victor Davis Hanson: The Half-Won, Half-Lost War

The gloomy election-year refrain is that America is mired in Iraq, took its eye off Afghanistan, empowered Iran and is losing the war on terror. But how accurate is that pessimistic diagnosis? First, the good news. For all the talk of a recent Tet-like offensive in Basra, the Mahdi Army of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr suffered an ignominious setback when his gunmen were routed from their enclaves. This rout helped the constitutional - and Shiite-dominated - gov

Jonathan Zimmerman: The other thing Wright gets wrong

[Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of history and education at New York University, is teaching this semester at the university's study-abroad program in Accra, Ghana. He is the author of "Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century."] A few weeks ago, I found myself in a fascinating conversation with a Ghanaian colleague about the ways that people learn. As she noted, most education at universities and secondary schools in Ghana occurs via rote: the teacher

Juan Cole: 5 Years after Mission Accomplished

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] 5 Years after George W. Bush's infamous speech aboard the USS Lincoln, the mission seems incomplete. Bush imagined that he could get rid of Saddam Hussein and install exiled businessman and bank fraudster Ahmad Chalabi in his place. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told Congress that the US would

Francis Fukuyama: China's problem is it isn't strong enough

[Francis Fukuyama is a philosopher, economist, and author who has played a role in American politics throughout his career.] ... Many people assume the problem is that China remains a communist dictatorship and that abuses occur because a strong, centralized state ignores the rights of its citizens. With regard to Tibet and the suppression of the religious movement Falun Gong, this may be right. But the larger problem in today's China arises out of the fact that the central Chinese

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Battle of the Beijing Boycotts

[Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, the author of China's Brave New World--And Other Tales for Global Times, is a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine.] To boycott or not to boycott, that is the question. Rather, that's just one of the questions activists are facing right now when it comes to China. At least four different Olympics boycott-related debates are currently taking place in print, online and broadcast media. Since 2001, when the news first broke

Jim Sleeper: Obama in the Wilderness

[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.] Now you can understand why I wrote Liberal Racism: After 20 years in inner-city Brooklyn, I'd had it watching too many black people and too many white liberals and radicals indulge self-styled"race men" like Jeremiah Wright.

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.] You simply can't pile up enough adjectives when it comes t

Jim Downs: The Democrats should blame history for the dilemma they face in having to choose between Clinton and Obama

In a crowded black church in Southern California in February 2008, President Bill Clinton announced, ‘I waited my whole life to vote for an African American for president. I waited my whole life to vote for a woman for president. And sometimes I look up at sky and say God you’re playing with my mind again.’ God may not be playing a trick on Clinton’s mind, but history seems to be.   Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, African Americans’ and women’s campaigns for equ

Stanley I. Kutler: Hunkering Down in Baghdad

During their recent congressional testimony, Gen. David Petraeus and Amb. Ryan Crocker refused to be pinned own on the goals, mission or even the meaning of success for U.S. forces in Iraq. But when Crocker talked abut the proposed “Status-of-Forces Agreement” he was clear. He promised that Congress would be “fully informed,” but, he said, there would be no “treaty” submitted for the Senate’s advice and consent. Crocker went unchallenged. The details of the proposed agreement are ap

David Greenberg: In Defense of Bill Clinton

Whenever Bill Clinton opens his mouth, he’s accused of saying something dishonest, self-serving, or at best politically unwise. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, I think this has less to do with any difficulty that Clinton has had in accommodating himself to the You Tube era--which is not, after all, such a quantum leap away from the 24/7 news environment in which he successfully conducted his presidency--than with a desire on the part of the Washington media panjandrums to exact some reve

Chester Finn, Jr.: Twenty-Five Years Later, A Nation Still at Risk

[Mr. Finn, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, is the author of "Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik," published in February by the Princeton University Press.] Today marks the 25th anniversary of "A Nation at Risk," the influential Reagan-era report by a blue-ribbon panel that alerted Americans to the weak performance of our education system. The report warned o

Allan J. Lichtman: Obama & the Battle Still to Come

[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. ] The Democratic contest goes on, but as I predicted in my post two months ago, it is essentially over (“

Frederick Kagan: How We'll Know When We've Won

[Frederick W. Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.] The president's nomination of generals David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno to take command of U.S. Central Command and Multinational Force-Iraq, respectively, was obviously the right decision. By experience and temperament and demonstrated success, both men are perfectly suited to these jobs. Given the political climate in Washington, however, their nominations are likely to be attacked with the same tir

Manisha Sinha: Is Obama Lincoln to Hillary's Seward?

[Manisha Sinha was born in India and received her doctorate in American History from Columbia University in 1994 where her dissertation was nominated for the Bancroft Prize. She is Associate Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. ] Political pundits have likened Obama's oratory, its style and content, to that of Abraham Lincoln. Most recently, Gary Wills has compared

David T. Beito & Ilya Somin: Battle over eminent domain is another civil rights issue

[David T. Beito is chairman of the Alabama State Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Ilya Somin is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.] Few policies have done more to destroy community and opportunity for minorities than eminent domain. Some 3 to 4 million Americans, most of them ethnic minorities, have been forcibly displaced from their homes as a result of urban renewal takings since World War II. The fact is that eminent-domain abuse is a cruci

Mark Naison: Columbia Forty Years After the Strike: A Multiracial Community "Cleansed" of a Working Class Presence

[Mark Naison is Professor of African American Studies and History, Fordham University.] Yesterday, I stopped by Columbia University to do an interview with Gabe Pressman of NBC TV News about the 1968 strike and building occupation that had occurred 40 years earlier. Because it was a beautiful day, I came about an hour earlier so I could walk around the Columbia campus, which unlike Fordham, allows anyone, student or not, to stroll through its gates or sit on the wide, manigificent con

Jonathan Zimmerman: The ghost of Kwame Nkrumah

[Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of history and education at New York University, is teaching this semester in Accra, Ghana. He is the author of "Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century."] 'It's time for Africa to step up." That's what Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told a news conference last week, speaking of Zimbabwe's post-election deadlock. President Robert Mugabe most likely lost the March 29 contest, but his handpicked elec

Steve Fraser: Our Gilded Age and The Other One

[Steve Fraser is working on a book about the two gilded ages. A Tomdispatch regular, he is the author of, among other works, the just published Wall Street: America's Dream Palace. He is Editor-at-Large of New Labor Forum magazine.] Google"second Gilded Age" and you will get ferried to 7,000 possible sites where you can learn more about what you already instinctively know. That we are living through a gild

Michael Fellman: Coded racism and faked populism. Can US politics ever pull free?

[Michael Fellman is an historian of U.S. politics and war and a cultural critic who lives in Vancouver. He will be writing for The Tyee from time to time about the 2008 U.S. elections.] ... [A]ll the candidates -- United States senators all -- come from a tiny elite at the very apex of American society. In class terms, they have nothing in common with the struggling masses. A nation in denial But American politics has long been grounded in class denial as w

Donald Ritchie: Bloggers Are Challenging the Rules of the Game

[Donald Ritchie, author of Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps, Our Constitution, and The Congress of the United States: A Student Companion, has been Associate Historian of the United States Senate for more than three decades. In the post below he looks at political resistance to changes in the press.] Reporters were not invited to the April 6th fund-raiser in San Francisco, where Senator Barack Obama answered a question by remarking that given the