Roundup: Historians' Take

Stanley I. Kutler: The Decriminalization of Corporate Crime

[Stanley Kutler is the author of “The Queendom of Passports,” in his “The American Inquisition: Cold War Political Trials.”] With our economic and financial crises deepening, government insiders reportedly are debating whether we need to restore some regulation—or not. Given the state of things, we can expect further woes and no regulation. Why have regulation when JPMorgan can gobble up Bear Stearns for peanuts, with the backstage encouragement and acquiescence of the

Tom Engelhardt: Why the Testimony of General Petraeus Will Be Delusional

[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.] Yes, their defensive zone is the planet and they patrol it r

Ruth Rosen: Give the Freedom Riders Honorary Degrees!

[Ruth Rosen, a journalist and historian, teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. She is author of The World Split Open: How the Women’s Movement Changed America (Penguin 2006).] Many people remember the courageous civil rights activists who in the early 1960s risked their lives to challenge Jim Crow laws by riding racially integrated buses into the South. But few people know that southern universities expelled dozens of these young people for participating in what are now

Frederick Kagan: Iraq's Benchmarks

[Historian Frederick W. Kagan is a resident scholar at AEI.] As the reduction in violence in Iraq has become incontestable (the insistence of early critics that no such reduction was possible notwithstanding), war opponents have fallen back on their next line of defense--that the military progress has not been matched by the political progress it was supposed to enable. This talking point, however, is also outdated and invalid. The Bush administration, commanders and ambassadors in

Juan Cole: Why al-Maliki attacked Basra

Why did Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki attack the Mahdi army in Basra last week? Despite the cease-fire called Sunday by Shiite leader Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr, leader of the millions-strong Sadr Movement, last week's battles between the Mahdi army and the Iraqi army revealed the continued weakness and instability of al-Maliki's government. Al-Maliki went to Basra on Monday, March 24, to oversee the attack on city neighborhoods loyal to al-Sadr. By Friday, the Iraqi minister of

Howard Zinn: What the Classroom Didn't Teach Me About the American Empire

[Howard Zinn is the author of A People's History of the United States and Voices of a People's History of the United States, now being filmed for a major television documentary. His newest book is A People's History of American Empire, the story of America in the world, told in comics form, with Mike Konopacki and Paul Buhle in the American Empire Project book series. An animated video adapted from

Eric Alterman: The death and life of the American newspaper

... Journalism works well, Lippmann wrote, when “it can report the score of a game or a transatlantic flight, or the death of a monarch.” But where the situation is more complicated, “as for example, in the matter of the success of a policy, or the social conditions among a foreign people—that is to say, where the real answer is neither yes or no, but subtle, and a matter of balanced evidence,” journalism “causes no end of derangement, misunderstanding, and even misrepresentation.”

Neil Maher: It’s Time for A New and Improved CCC

[Mr. Maher is the author of Nature's New Deal. He teaches at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.] Seventy-five years ago today Franklin Roosevelt asked Congress to create the Civilian Conservation Corps, one of the New Deal’s most popular programs. In his address to Congress, Roosevelt was obviously concerned with the twenty-five percent unemployment rate then gripping the nation. Yet a second crisis also worried the President. Noting severe flooding occurring along the Ohio an

Daniel Pipes: Will Europe Resist Islamization?

[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.] Some analysts of Islam in Western Europe argue that the continent cannot escape its Eurabian fate; that the trend lines of the past half-century will continue until Muslims become a majority population and Islamic law (the Shari‘a) reigns.

Victor Davis Hanson: Nothing Succeeds Like Success

[Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author most recently of A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War (Random House).] Americans have regularly changed their minds in the midst of their ongoing wars—and not just once, but often. War is a volatile enterprise. Tactics, strategies, and commanders must be sorted out amid death and destruction before the proper combination is found to defeat the enemy. In the me

Frederick W. Kagan & Kimberly Kagan: Basra ... what we know and don't know

[Frederick W. Kagan, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of The End of the Old Order: Napoleon and Europe, 1801-1805. Kimberly Kagan, the president of the Institute for the Study of War, is the author of The Eye of Command. Her reports and analysis of the Iraq war are available at understandingwar.org.] MUCH OF THE DISCUSSION about recent Iraqi operations against illegal Shia militias has focused on issues about which we do not yet know enough to m

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom: The perils of forced modernity: China-Tibet, America-Iraq

[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). He writes for a wide range of academic and general interest periodicals and is a founding member of a new group blog on Chinese issues, The China Beat: Blogging How the East Is Read.]

Willard Sterne Randall: Let's kick religion off the campaign trail

[Willard Sterne Randall, author of George Washington, A Life and Thomas Jefferson, A Life, is a distinguished scholar in history at Champlain College, in Burlington, Vt.] NO PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION since 1800 has taken place without an attempt to damage at least one candidate’s reputation by innuendo, rumor or ridicu

Sean Wilentz: Obama was the first to play the race card

[Sean Wilentz is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus professor of history at Princeton University.] Quietly, the storm over the hateful views expressed by Sen. Barack Obama's pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, has blown away the most insidious myth of the Democratic primary campaign. Obama and his surrogates have charged that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has deliberately and cleverly played the race card in order to label Obama the "black" candidate. Having injected rac

Stephen Kotkin: Russia was not a liberal democracy under Yeltsin, and neither has it reverted to totalitarianism under Putin

[Stephen Kotkin is director of the programme on Russian and Eurasian studies at Princeton University.] What is it about Russia that drives the Anglo-American world mad? Soviet communism collapses, the empire is relinquished. Then come the wild hopes and failures of the 1990s—including the 1993 half-coup and the tank assault on Russia's legislature, the results-adjusted referendum on a new constitution (still in force), the dubious privatisations, the war in Chechnya and the financia

Tom Engelhardt: Rebuilding the American Economy, Bush-style

[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.] No one was prepared for the storm when it hit. The levees

David Greenberg: The return of doughface liberalism

The issue of negative campaigning and its proper bounds is now dominating the Democratic campaign. In recent weeks, the neck-and-neck race has degenerated into a miasma of trivial flaps--the source of that photo of Barack Obama in Somali garb, the "gaffes" of Samantha Power and Geraldine Ferraro, and so on--only tenuously related to the question of whether Obama or Hillary Clinton would be a better president. Each side, angling for any edge, gins up pseudo-controversies. In response, e

Victor Davis Hanson: Where We Stand on Iraq and the Election

[Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the author of "A War Like No Other" (Random House).] (Nationally syndicated columnist, classicist, and military historian Victor Davis Hanson gave the following speech to the Wednesday Morning Club on Thursday, March 20, at the Four Seasons Hotel in Santa Barbara, California. The Wednesday Morning Club regularly invites conservative speakers to speak in the Hollywood area.) I saw a

Thomas Sowell: The Audacity of Rhetoric

It is painful to watch defenders of Barack Obama tying themselves into knots trying to evade the obvious. Some are saying that Senator Obama cannot be held responsible for what his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, said. In their version of events, Barack Obama just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time -- and a bunch of mean-spirited people are trying to make something out of it. It makes a good story, but it won't stand up under scrutiny. Barac

Martin E. Marty: Public Preaching

[Martin E. Marty's biography, current projects, upcoming events, publications, and contact information can be found at www.illuminos.com.] Public Pulpits by friend Steven M. Tipton of Emory is a timely, historically-informed analysis of "Methodists and Mainline Churches in the Moral Argument of Public Life." The "pulpit" is largely metaphoric here, because Tipton's accent is on policy-making and headquarters' involvements i