Roundup: Historians' Take

Thomas G. Palaima: Airlines' excuses just won't fly

[Mr. Palaima is Dickson Centennial Professor of Classics in the College of Liberal Arts at University of Texas at Austin.] In Mike Nichols' classic film "The Graduate," Mr. McGuire comes up to Benjamin Braddock, played by Dustin Hoffman, and says, "I just want to say one word to you. Just one word." The one word he says is "plastics." The word has been a kind of koan for more than 40 years. It is now time to replace it. Everything is swolle

Thomas Fleming: Post-Presidency With Grace

[Mr. Fleming most recent book is "The Perils of Peace, America's Struggle to Survive After Yorktown." He is a member of the Board of HNN.] One of the most memorable experiences of my life is the two weeks I spent in Independence, Mo., in 1970 talking to Harry Truman, which is why I reacted with special dismay to the recent story about the former president, William Clinton, making tens of millions of dollars as a speaker and business consultant since he left office.

Juan Cole: Iran Supported al-Maliki against Militias

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] George W. Bush and Dick Cheney initially rejected the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group report, which advised that Iraq coul

Garry Wills: Two Speeches on Race

Of the two speeches discussed here, Senator Barack Obama's speech at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008, is available at www.barackobama.com and Abraham Lincoln's at the Cooper Union in New York on February 27, 1860, is available at showcase.netins.net. Two men, two speeches. The men, both lawyers, both from Illinois, were seeking the presidency, despite what seemed their crippling connection with extremists. E

Dick Howard: Obama's appeal

[Mr. Howard, Ph.D., is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, SUNY at Stony Brook.] ...The attractiveness of the Obama candidacy lies in its post-racial nature. It is as if the call of the Civil Rights Movement for integration and equality among all Americans had been realized; the old coalition politics, in which African Americans had become merely another interest group wanting its share of the pie, could finally be transcended. While Hillary Clinton’s victory might break what s

John J. Pitney Jr.: Wishing for 1976

[John J. Pitney Jr. is the Roy P. Crocker Professor of American Politics at Claremont McKenna College.] Representative Tom Cole (R., Okla.), chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, made a revealing but little-noticed comment to the New York Times. He said of the presidential race: “I don’t need the nominee to win; I just need him to be competitive enough that we can win behind him in the places that should be ours. I need him to be Gerald Ford.” Conser

Rick Perlstein: All Aboard the McCain Express

[Rick Perlstein is the author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. His next book, Nixonland, is due out in May.] Back when the Republican presidential race was still competitive, the insults against John McCain from leading conservative voices were so extravagant they almost constituted a new literary genre. Rush Limbaugh said McCain threatened &q

Jon Wiener: Obama and the Palestinian Professors

[Mr. Wiener is a professor of history at UC-Irvine.] Ten years ago, Barack Obama went to a lecture by Edward Said, the prominent Palestinian intellectual. Should that be page one news now? The LA Times thinks so – they ran a story on their front page on Thursday on the event, headlined "Campaign '08: Allies of Palestinians see a friend on Obama." Obama's attendance at that speech is news today, of course, because of the Jewish vote. The Times made that clear w

Tom Engelhardt: 9 Propositions on the U.S. Air War for Terror

[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.] Let's start with a few simple propositions. F

Juan Cole: Petraeus, Iraq and the Lebanon Analogy

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.]Gen. Petraeus is clearly convinced that Iraq needs US troops to shore up the government and security. He has done the most responsible job yet seen by an American official in Iraq in trying to end the carnage. He ha

Zainab Bahrani: Desecrating history

[Professor Zainab al Bahrani holds the Edith Porada Chair of Ancient Near Eastern Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University in New York.] In the first few days after the end of the "shock and awe" campaign, from April 10-12 2003, Iraq's main museums, libraries and archives were looted and extensively damaged by fire. A Bradley tank and a number of US troops were in the area. At one point a curator from the Iraq Museum staff walked over and asked for assistance but

Frederick W. Kagan: Talking back to antiwar-party talking points

Losing wars is always bad. One of the major reasons for America’s current global predominance economically and politically is that America doesn’t lose wars very often. It seems likely, however, that the American people are about to be told that they have to decide to lose the Iraq war, that accepting defeat is better than trying to win, and that the consequences of defeat will be less than the costs of continuing to fight. For some, the demand to “end this war” is a reprise of the great triumph

Sean Wilentz: Why Hillary Clinton should be winning

[Professor Wilentz is a historian at Princeton.] The continuing contest for the Democratic presidential nomination has become a frenzy of debates and proclamations about democracy. Sen. Barack Obama's campaign has been particularly vociferous in claiming that its candidate stands for a transformative, participatory new politics. It has vaunted Obama's narrow lead in the overall popular vote in the primaries to date, as well as in the count of elected delegates, as the definitive wil

Kathy G.: How Hillary Clinton is like Richard Nixon (hint: it's not what you think)

[Kathy G. is a shrill feminist, bleeding heart liberal, hardcore policy wonk, political junkie, ardent cinephile, and lover of 19th century novels. She lives in Chicago with her husband and two loveable mutts, where she is attempting, amidst numerous diverting distractions, to complete a Ph.D. in the social sciences.] In a piece in the current New Republic, historian (and Nixon scholar) David Gree

Judith Apter Klinghoffer: Scary McCain?

[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.] With McCain you get the real thing while with Obama you may get an audacity of rhetoric based on nothing but political expediency and imagined racial grievances. Recent polls reveal that the American people are beginning to get it and tha

Michael Radu: Kosovo ... The Revenge of CNN and the Politics of Emotion

[Michael Radu, Ph.D., is Co-Chair of FPRI’s Center on Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Homeland Security. He recently completed a book manuscript on Islamism in Europe.] To paraphrase Talleyrand, the invention and recognition of a “state” called Kosovo by the United States and Brussels in February was worse than gross ignorance, it was a mistake. Every Western political delusion since the end of the Cold War was at the root of the disaster, and, to make matters worse, those delusions have

Fred Siegel, Jeff Herf & Thomas Cushman: Symposium on "The Unknown Obama"

In this special edition of Frontpage Symposium, we have assembled a distinguished panel to explore the “Unknown Obama.” Our guests today are: Fred Siegel: is a contributing editor of City Journal and a professor of history at the Cooper Union for Science and Art. Jeff Herf, a professor of modern European and German political and intellectual history at the University of Maryland in College Park. His most recent book is The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War

Jim Sleeper: Obama's Racial Wisdom vs. Holdouts Left and Right

In December, just before the presidential primary season, the conservative black writer Shelby Steele published A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win. The book proved instructive in ways he didn’t intend: It showed the dangers of trying to shoehorn recent developments into paradigms that may have illuminated circumstances of 15 years ago but obscure the real opportunities and challenges now before us. Academics and some belletrists are especially prone to

Andreas Umland: Is Putin’s Russia really “fascist”? A response to Alexander Motyl

[Dr. Andreas Umland teaches at the National Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv, edits the book series “Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society” (www.ibidem-verlag.de/spps.html), and compiles the biweekly “Russian Nationalism Bulletin” (groups.yahoo.com/group/russian_nationalism/).] In his articles “Is Putin’s Russia fascist?” published on the site of The National Interest Onlin

Jonathan Zimmerman: Africa has corner on teacher abuse

[Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of history 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" (Harvard University Press).] ACCRA, Ghana -- Mary K. Letourneau. Debra Lafave. Lisa Lynette Clark. Wherever you look, there's a U.S. teacher having sex with a student. Or so it would seem, if you read the tabloids or watch late-ni