Roundup: Historians' Take

Daniel Galvin: History as a Guide to the Presidential Primaries? Nah…

[Daniel Galvin is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. His primary areas of research and teaching are the American presidency, political parties, and American political development. He is co-editor of Rethinking Political Institutions: The Art of the State. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University.] Is anyone else bothered by the seemingly constant reference to what “normally,” “usually,” “always,” and “never” happens in presidential primaries? N

Donald Ritchie: Women in the News

[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 mo

Gordon Taylor: Turkey's nationalist thugs

[Mr. Taylor is a former teacher in Turkey and the author of Fever and Thirst: An American Doctor Among the Tribes of Kurdistan. Academy Chicago Publishers, 2005.] As I write this, the good and decent people of Istanbul are marking the first anniversary of Disgust. This is not the ordinary disgust felt when people perceive the thousand injustices of daily life; it was the emotion they f

Darius Rejali: Why have modern democracies been such important innovators of torture?

[Darius Rejali is a professor of political science at Reed College. His latest books are Torture and Democracy, recently published by Princeton University Press, and Approaches to Violence, forthcoming this year from Princeton.] Americans were shocked at the photographs of tortured Iraqi prisoners incarcerated at Abu Ghraib. They were horrified by the assault on Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant molested with the broken end of a broomstick by New York City police officers in Augus

Juan Cole: MLK Taught Us War Cannot Achieve Even a Negative Good

Martin Luther King will be honored today throughout America as a champion of racial justice and racial harmony. That is a pivotal legacy for the United States of America, which for 87 long years was built on the lawful enslavement of one race by another, and for another century practiced the lawful Apartheid of Jim Crow.But he was not the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Prize only because of his work on civil rights and integration. He was also a profound thinker in

Juan Cole: Iraq is Still a Bad Bargain

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] Andrew Bacevich eviscerates the Iraq War party with this passionate and clear-sighted essay on 'the Surge to Nowhere' in WaPo. He points out that the real motivation behind last year's troop escalation w

Andrew Bacevich: Don't buy the hawks' hype. The war may be off the front pages, but Iraq is broken beyond repair, and we still own it

[Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His new book, "The Limits of Power," will be published later this year.] As the fifth anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom nears, the fabulists are again trying to weave their own version of the war. The latest myth is that the "surge" is working. In President Bush's pithy formulation, the United States is now "kicking ass" in Iraq. The gallant

Joseph Lane: Romney’s Big Government

[Joseph Lane is the Hawthorne Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Emory & Henry.] It is now conventional wisdom that the leading three candidates for the GOP nomination each represent one of the big three factions of the party - McCain represents the strong foreign policy hawks, Huckabee the evangelical social conservatives, and Romney the pro-business/corporate power. What is missing in all of this is the old idea of “small government” - unle

Tom Engelhardt: The "Success" Mantra in Iraq

[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.] The other day, as we reached the first an

Mary L. Dudziak: What a Constitutional Crisis Looks Like (Re: Kenya)

[Prof. Dudziak's new book, Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall's African Journey (about Marshall's involvement in Kenya constitutional development) will be out later this year.]"We are in a constitutional crisis," Kenya opposition leader

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: NIMBY Comes to China

[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.] Shanghai is famous for many things, from eye-catching architecture to its historic role linking China to the world. But within the People's Republic of China, the city also is revered for its central role in twentieth-century protests. In the early 1900's, Shanghai workers staged some of China's first strik

Tom Lutz: Hillary and Mitt follow a long line of political weepers--but their tears may reveal more than just campaign showmanship

[Tom Lutz is the author of Crying: The Natural & Cultural History of Tears and is currently the director of the MFA in Creative Writing and Writing for Performance at University of California Riverside's Palm Desert Graduate Center.] In 1788, the English jurist and philosopher Jeremy Bentham wrote that most people erroneously believed that "the emotions of the body" were "probable indications of the temperature of the mind." But he didn't buy it. "Oliver

Reidar Visser: Ashura, 1429/2008

[Reidar Visser is a research fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and editor of the website http://historiae.org which focuses on southern Iraq. He did his doctorate in Middle Eastern history at the University of Oxford on the subject of separatist movements in southern Iraq and has recently published the book

Daniel Pipes: Bush's Middle East Hopes

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] George W. Bush's policies toward the Middle East and Islam will loom large when historians judge his presidency. On the occasion of his concluding his 8-day, 6-country trip to the Middle E

Joseph Ellis: A promise of unpredictability

[Historian Joseph J. Ellis' latest book is "American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic."] The first time an American president's policies defied all the promises made during his campaign occurred in 1800. Thomas Jefferson's platform called for a reduction of federal, especially executive, power; fiscal austerity aimed at reducing the national debt; and strict interpretation of the Constitution. The opportunity to purchase the Louisiana Territ

Stanley Kutler: Huckabee and the Constitution

[Stanley Kutler is the editor of “The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War” (Scribner’s, 1995) and the author of “The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon” (Alfred A. Knopf). He is the E. Gordon Fox Emeritus Professor of American Institutions at the University of Wisconsin, and also professor of law.] Mike Huckabee is a master at using the clever quip to deflect tough questions. He toys with criticisms of his “fair tax” policy; at times he ignores the Sixteent

Tracy Dove: On Sovereign Wealth Funds, the 1980's and Austria's Kreditanstalt Bank, 1931

[Tracy Dove, editor of The Russia News Service, is a Professor of History and the Department Chair of International Relations at the University of New York in Prague.] It's another one of those jump out the window days on Wall Street again, where incompetence and outrageous irresponsibility are taking their toll on the cash reserves of our nation's leading banks. This time its Citibank's turn at the great confessional before the national conscience, and it looks like another $20 bil

Walter Lacqueur: The fate of fanaticism

[Mr. Laqueur, a historian, is the author, inter alia, of "A History of Terrorism" (Transaction, 2001).] It is not “the West against the rest.” All throughout human history, civilizations have coexisted and competed, and there is no good reason to assume that this will change in the foreseeable future. True, there is still considerable resistance to accepting such obvious facts as, for instance, the shrinking importance of Europe—demographically, economically, politically

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: East Meets West ... For centuries books were a major transport on the now busy route between

[Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is a professor of history at UC Irvine, a participant in the 2007 St. Petersburg Times Festival of Reading and the author, most recently, of China's Brave New World - And Other Tales for Global Times.] It was a bumper year in 2007 for newspaper reports about the flow of people and objects between China and America. We read about tainted toothpaste coming here, Hollywood film crews going there to film the latest Survivor and Yao Ming crisscrossing the Pacific

Barry Rubin: Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush (Middle East)

[Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center http://www.gloriacenter.org and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal http://meria.idc.ac.il . His latest books are The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan) and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley) .] Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of