Roundup: Historians' Take

David Greenberg: Friends, Romans, Countrymen, Lend Me Your Speech

[David Greenberg teaches history and media studies at Rutgers University and is the author of “Nixon’s Shadow” and “Calvin Coolidge.”] ON Feb. 9, 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed his place in the history books by telling a crowd in Wheeling, W.Va., that the State Department was full of Communists. “We are not dealing with spies who get 30 pieces of silver to steal the blueprint of a new weapon,” he said. “We are dealing with a far more sinister type of activity because it permi

Nicolaus Mills: Who Passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964?

[Nicolaus Mills is a professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and author of Like a Holy Crusade: Mississippi 1964—The Turning of the Civil Rights Movement in America and most recently, Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America s Coming of Age as a Superpower.] LIKE SO many of my generation who did voter registration work in the South during the 1960s, I have been saddened by the debate that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama sparked over whether Martin Luther Kin

Daniel Pipes: Resisting Islamic Law

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] Westerners opposed to the application of the Islamic law (the Shari‘a) watch with dismay as it goes from strength to strength in their countries – harems increasingly accepted, a church leader endorsing Islamic law, a jud

Victor Davis Hanson: Ivy League Populism

[Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.] The rhetoric of Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton about the sad state of America is reminiscent of the suspect populism of John Edwards, the millionaire law

Jon Wiener: Anti-Hillary Sentiment On The Rise Among Leading Feminists

More than 1,000 feminists have signed a statement criticizing Hillary Clinton and supporting Obama for president - evidence that Clinton's support among women activists continues to decline. The group,"Feminists for Peace", started out with 100 signers before the super-Tuesday primaries, and has 1,200 signers two weeks later.

Peter Kornbluh: The Day After Fidel

[Peter Kornbluh directs the Cuba Documentation Project and the Chile Documentation Project at the National Security Archive (www.nsarchive.org), a public interest research center located at George Washington University (Washington, DC). He is co-author of The Iran-Contra Scandal: The Declassified History (New Press) and author of a new book, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (New Press).] It is too soon t

Ari Kelman: First Black Communist President

[Ari Kelman is an associate professor of history at UC Davis.] About two weeks ago, a news producer for one of the television stations in Sacramento called to ask me, “Will Barack Obama be our first black president?” I didn’t write about this at the time, because I was a bit freaked out and didn’t want to make sport of someone I don’t know. But the time has come to tell the story. I was taken aback by the question

Peter Dreier: The History of Hope

[Peter Dreier is professor of politics and director of the Urban & Environmental Policy program at Occidental College. He is co-author of The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City (University of California Press, 2005) and Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century (2nd edition, University Press of Kansas, 2005) and co-editor of Up Against the Sprawl.] America seems to be holding its breath, trying to decide what kind of country we want to be. The current pres

Juan Cole: McCain's Holiday from History in Pakistan

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] Barack Obama's spectacular win in Wisconsin has the GOP frightened. The Democratic turnout was much, much better than the Republican. The Democrats and independents are energized.

Victor Davis Hanson: Kosovo Was Then, This Is Now ...

Quite apart from the undeniable merits of independence, in political terms Kosovo 2008 is not quite Kosovo of 1998. Let us count the post-9/11 ways: 1. The rise of radical Islam, especially in Europe, has made Western publics edgy about Muslim-identified states, especially inside Europe. 2. Russia is no longer a basket case, but rearming, aggressive, overflowing with petro-dollars, and eager to use oil — and more — as a weapon. 3. Milosevic is long dead.

Tom Engelhardt: The Million Year War

[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.] Think of the top officials of the Bush administra

Frederick W. Kagan, Danielle Pletka, Kimberly Kagan: Iranian Influence in the Levant, Iraq, and Afghanistan

[Frederick W. Kagan is a resident scholar at AEI. Kimberly Kagan is president of the Institute for the Study of War. Danielle Pletka is vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at AEI.] The conflict between Iran and the United States began in 1979 with the Iranian Revolution and the seizure of the American Embassy in Tehran. Born partly of ideological differences and partly of real and perceived differing national interests, it has continued, alternately hot and cold, f

Tyler Cowen: It’s an Election, Not a Revolution

[Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University.] ... To put it simply, the public this year will probably not vote itself into a much better or even much different economic policy. To be sure, the next president — whoever he or she may be — may well extend health care coverage to more Americans. But most of the country’s economic problems won’t be solved at the voting booth. It is already too late to stop an economic downturn. Health care costs will keep rising,

Sean Wilentz and Julian E. Zelizer: A Rotten Way to Pick a President

[Sean Wilentz and Julian E. Zelizer teach U.S. political history at Princeton University. Wilentz is the author of the forthcoming "The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008," and Zelizer is the co-editor of "Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s."] Something is seriously wrong with the way we pick our presidential candidates. But experts and pundits, caught up in the horse races, have been slow to point out the obvious -- or have come to accep

Martin Kramer: Imad who?

[Mr. Kramer, the author of Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America, was a full-time tenured academic at Tel Aviv University. He is now an Olin Institute Senior Fellow at Harvard. Click here for his blog.] As Hezbollah’s official funeral of Imad Mughniyah unfolded yesterday—Hezbollah’s leader eulogizied him over a coffin decked in Hezbollah’s flag—it was useful to recall the party’s denial of hi

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom: One, two or many Chinas?

[ 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 ge

Paula Sutter Fichtner: Austria, the Habsburg empire and Islam

[Paula Sutter Fichtner is professor of history emerita at Brooklyn College and Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of many books, including Protestantism and Primogeniture in Early Modern Germany (1997), Emperor Maximilian II (Yale University Press, 2001), and The Habsburg Monarchy 1490-1848: Attributes of Empire (Palgrave, 2003). Her latest book is Terror and Toleration: The Habsburg Empire Confronts Islam, 1526-1850 (Reaktion, 2008).] All twenty-seven m

John J. Pitney, Jr.: Airbrushing Reagan

[John J. Pitney, Jr., is the Roy P. Crocker Professor of American Politics at Claremont McKenna College, in Claremont, California.] The memory of Ronald Reagan looms large in the current presidential race. At the recent Conservative Political Action Conference, Senator McCain invoked him several times. Reagan was an even greater presence at the last Republican presidential debate before Super Tuesday – and not just because it took place at the Reagan Library. According a New York

Louis Fisher: Examining the State Secrets Privilege

[Louis Fisher is a Specialist in Constitutional Law with the Law Library of the Library of Congress. Earlier he worked for the Congressional Research Service from 1970 to March 3, 2006. During his service with CRS he was Senior Specialist in Separation of Powers and research director of the House Iran-Contra Committee in 1987, writing major sections of the final report. Fisher received his doctorate in political science from the New School for Social Research and has taught at a number of uni

Jim Sleeper: Obama, Crowds, and Power

[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.] As a political movement gathers what seems to be irresistible force, it rides currents of anger as well as affirmation. How it balances and channels those currents determines its fate. A movement can be fired up by outraged decency, but it will come to little -- or worse -- if its participants spend more time and energ