Roundup: Historians' Take

James S. Robbins: ON the differences between Obama's race speech and Kennedy's religion speech

[James S. Robbins is the director of the Intelligence Center at Trinity Washington University, and author of a forthcoming book on the Tet Offensive.] Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times stated Thursday: “Barack Obama this week gave the best political speech since John Kennedy talked about his Catholicism in Houston in 1960.… It was not a sound bite, but a symphony.” Effusions of this sort have been common in the last few days, so in that respect the comment is not particularly n

Todd Gitlin: Echoes of 1968

[The author is a professor of journalism and sociology and the author of 12 books including The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage and Letters to a Young Activist.] [HNN Editor: This spring marks the 40th anniversary of the Columbia University sit-in that ended in violence.] ... Anyone who wants to change the world needs to appraise the world lucidly and think of militancy as a means, not an end. The insurgent, communal moments of 1968 were giddy, moving, indelible.

William Polk: Iran .. Danger & Opportunity

[William R. Polk was the member of the Policy Planning Council responsible for North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia from 1961 to 1965 and then professor of history at the University of Chicago where he founded the Middle Eastern Studies Center. He was also president of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs. His most recent book is Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism Guerrilla Warfare from the American Revolution to Iraq (New York: HarperCollins, 2007).

Lawrence S. Wittner: Possibilities for a Nuclear-Free World

[Lawrence S. Wittner is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany and the author of The Struggle Against the Bomb (Stanford University Press).] In an opinion piece, which appeared in the March 20, 2008 issue of the Asahi Shimbun, Jayantha Dhanapala—the distinguished former Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs at the United Nations—not only makes the case for a nuclear-free world, but argu

Martin Shaw: My Lai to Haditha ... war, massacre and justice

[Martin Shaw is professor of international relations and politics at the University of Sussex. A historical sociologist of war and global politics, his books include War and Genocide (Polity, 2003), The New Western Way of War (Polity, 2005), and What is Genocide?

Tom Engelhardt: Blowing Them Away Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry

[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 thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.] Imagine, for a moment, that you live in a small

Michael Nelson: Bush lacks persuasive powers, so how has he amassed so many other kinds?

[Michael Nelson is a professor of political science at Rhodes College and, this spring, a visiting professor of political science at Vanderbilt University. His books include The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1776-2007 (5th edition, with Sidney Milkis, CQ Press, 2008).] The most influential sentence in the most influential book about the presidency of the past 50 years is seven words long. "Presidential power," the political scientist Richard Neustadt declar

Howard Zinn: Beyond the New Deal

[Howard Zinn is the author of “A People’s History of the United States,” “Voices of a People’s History” (with Anthony Arnove), and most recently, “A Power Governments Cannot Suppress.”] We might wonder why no Democratic Party contender for the presidency has invoked the memory of the New Deal and its unprecedented series of laws aimed at helping people in need. The New Deal was tentative, cautious, bold enough to shake the pillars of the system but not to replace them. It created ma

Andrew Meyer: Obama, Race, and History

[About Meyer: After living in mainland China and Taiwan for four years and in Japan for one year I returned to the U.S. and earned a doctoral degree in Chinese history, which I teach at the City University of New York. This blog reflects my belief that the study of the history and culture of other nations is indispensible to the conduct of modern politics.] In today's Washington Post,

Yong Chen: The election in Taiwan and its impact on the US

[Yong Chen is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine] As American attention is captivated by the war in Iraq and, more recently, our own upcoming national election, another important event is about to take place on the other side of the Pacific Ocean: the presidential election of Taiwan on March 21 (March 22 local time). This event is of great importance to the United States for a number of reasons. First, there is the economic significance of Taiwan, which has

Barry Rubin: Iraq, 5 years later, no easy answers

In November 2002, the Chronicle of Higher Education asked a number of scholars this question: “What will the world be like five years after a war with Iraq?” To mark the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, MESH asked all of the respondents to revisit their predictions. This week, MESH is posting the responses it has received. Barry Rubin is a member of MESH. In 2002, he wrote: “A post-Saddam Iraq seen as reasonably democratic, independent of American control, and improving its people

Joseph Lane: Ok, There’s Jeremiah Wright, but What About John Hagee, Pat Robertson?

[Joseph Lane is the Hawthorne Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Emory & Henry.] Jonathan Martin writes in The Politico that some Republican operatives think that the discovery of Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s inflammatory sermons suggest that Barack Obama may be a much easier candidate to defeat in the general election than they first suspected. In Martin’s interviews with the Republicans who orchestrated the attacks on Harold Ford and Max Clel

Nick Turse: The Golden Age of the Military-Entertainment Complex

[Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com. He has written for Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Adbusters, The Nation, the Village Voice and regularly for Tomdispatch. His first book, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, has just been published in Metropolitan Books' American Empire Project series

Julian E. Zelizer: How Democrats can lose in November

[Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University and co-editor of Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, published this month by Harvard University Press.] There was a moment last year when Democrats believed that winning the White House was inevitable. The Republican Party was in disarray; there were ongoing laments that the "Reagan Coalition" could not be rebuilt. President Bush's popularity had reached rock bott

Victor Davis Hanson: Obama's speech ... Untruth upon untruth—our new Nixon?

Almost everything Barack Obama has said about his relationship with Wright is untrue. He is hardly ‘not particularly controversial’. No one needs to “cherry-pick” his sermons to find in them hatred; in some speeches that venom is the entire theme. Obama mentions Wright’s AIDs work—never that Wright blamed America for the AIDs epidemic. Obama mentions Wright’s positive work on apartheid, not that Wright claimed the U.S. put Mandela in jail. And on and on. Obama knew of his extremisms

Claire Robertson: Violence and Politics in Kenya

[Historian Claire Robertson has published numerous books and articles on women and small business in Kenya and is chief fundraiser for two Kenyan development projects focused on women entrepreneurs: micro-lending to urban traders and infrastructure construction (water tanks and a dam) for women farmers in a dry rural area. She lived in Kenya with her family in 1987-88 while on a Fulbright grant and has visited Kenya annually since 1998.] The explanations given in the Western media f

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom: China's Olympic Delusion

[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.] Karl Marx famously observed that history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce. But when it comes to the periodic clashes between Tibetan protesters and China's authorities, tragedy is all one can see. As in 1959 and 1989 a familiar story is now unfolding in Lhasa. Once again, crowds of Tibetans ang

Juan Cole: Five years of Iraq lies

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] Each year of George W. Bush's war in Iraq has been represented by a thematic falsehood. That Iraq is now calm or more stable is only the latest in a series of such whoppers, which the mainstream press eagerly repeats. The fifth anniversary of Bush's invasion of Iraq will be the last he presides over. Sen

Bruce J. Schulman & Julian E. Zelizer: The origins of the conservative movement in the 1970s help us understand contradictions in today's Republican Party

[Bruce J. Schulman is a professor of history at Boston University, and Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. They are editors of Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the Seventies, to be published this month by Harvard University Press.] ... The shift to the right ... was anything but inevitable, even if previous accounts suggested that it was. After 1970, the New Right found its secret to success; it constructed its organ

Shelby Steele: The Obama Bargain

[Mr. Steele, a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the author of "A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win" (Free Press, 2007).] Geraldine Ferraro may have had sinister motives when she said that Barack Obama would not be "in his position" as a frontrunner but for his race. Possibly she was acting as Hillary Clinton's surrogate. Or maybe she was simply befuddled by this new reality -- in which blackness could co