Roundup: Historians' Take

Daniel Pipes: Bush Promotes a Palestinian "Right of Return"

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] The Palestinian"right of return" entered the lexicon of American policymakers in December 2006, when the Iraq Study Group Report urged the U.S. government to support Israel-Palest

Ed Blum: God in the White House

[Mr. Blum is Assistant Professor, San Diego State University 2007-present, and HNN's Top Young HIstorian (May 2007).] It is hard not to love a good pair. Two socks are always better than one; I still hope that Sonny and Cher will reunite in the afterlife; and who can imagine Clyde without Bonny. I guess this makes me a little like Noah; not the last righteous man or drunk and naked under a vine, but having a propensity for twos

Caroline Elkins: What's Tearing Kenya Apart? History, for One Thing.

[Caroline Elkins is an associate professor of African studies at Harvard University and the author of "Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya."] ... If you're looking for the origins of Kenya's ethnic tensions, look to its colonial past. Far from leaving behind democratic institutions and cultures, Britain bequeathed to its former colonies corrupted and corruptible governments. Colonial officials hand-picked political successors as th

David Greenberg: Why Obamamania? Because He Runs as The Great White Hope.

[David Greenberg is a historian at Rutgers University. He is at work on a history of spin in American politics.] Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's upset victory in the New Hampshire primary last week was every bit as impressive as Sen. Barack Obama's Iowa caucus breakout five days before -- if anything, more impressive, since his win was predicted and hers unforeseen. But the reactions to the two events couldn't have been more different. Obama's Jan. 3 triumph let loose a giddiness bord

Saul Cornell: The Second Amendment Goes to Court

Few issues in America public life are more emotionally charged than guns and no subject within this political maelstrom is more bitterly contested than the Second Amendment. Although it is hard to imagine this issue heating up any further, it is about to get red-hot. Earlier this year, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia struck down the District of Columbia’s local gun-control law on Second Amendment grounds. The D.C. Court is only the second Appeals Court to affirm th

Juan Cole: McCain owns the Iraq war -- for better or worse

John McCain campaigned in Michigan this weekend on national security issues and Iraq, insisting that the United States is closing in on victory in Iraq and needs time to complete the mission. He spoke about Iraq in the small town of Clawson, telling voters in Tuesday's Republican primary, "We are winning this. Let's pursue it to the end together and stop this bitter partisanship." Republican voters seem to trust the former prisoner of war on matters military. Ironically, t

Ira Chernus: Is Religion a Threat to Democracy?

[Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin.] It's a presidential campaign like no other. The candidates have been falling all over each other in their rush to declare the depth and sincerity of their religious faith. The pundits have been just as eager to raise questions that seem obvio

Sean Wilentz: To understand Hillary Clinton's "race problem," we must better understand the history of civil rights.

[Sean Wilentz is a contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (Norton).] In war, truth is the first casualty--but in politics, it appears that the first victim is history. The latest maiming of the historical record and elementary historical logic has come over Martin Luther King, Jr., Lyndon B. Johnson--and the presidential primaries of 2008. The media echo chamber is now booming with charges that Senator Hil

Eric Alterman, George Zornick: Iraq Isn’t Vietnam, but America Is Still America

[Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College, and a professor of journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. His blog, “Altercation,” appears at www.mediamatters.org/altercation. His seventh book, Why We’re Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America, will be published in March. George Zornick is a New York-based writer.] ...

Tracy Dove: Disinformation in the Persian Gulf Discredits US Navy 44 Years After Gulf of Tonkin

[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.] Ever since Iran presented itself as a qualified target in the War on Terrorism, the Bush Administration has orchestrated a silent campaign to draw lines in the sand and tempt the Islamic Republic to cross it. Speculation is running high that the Bush Administration in its

Ari Kelman: Hillary's top-down view of the civil rights movement

[Ari Kelman is an associate professor of history at UC Davis.]“Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Righ

Fred Siegel: The Globalization Election

[Fred Siegel is a contributing editor of City Journal and a professor of history at the Cooper Union for Science and Art.] The common thread that ties Mike Huckabee’s come-from-almost-nowhere victory in Iowa to Hillary Clinton’s unexpected resurgence in New Hampshire is a shared ability to speak to widespread middle- and lower-middle-class economic anxiety. In Iowa, Huckabee effectively disparaged Mitt Romney—who made a fortune at Bain Capital and outspent him 20 to 1—as someone who

Tom Engelhardt: The Bush Legacy (Take Two)

[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.] Consider

Juan Cole: 250,000 Civilians Dead in Bush's War?

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.]A new World Health Organization study estimates the excess numbers of civilians killed in violence in Iraq from April 2003 through June 2006 at between 101,000 and 224,000. They settled on 151,000 or so as the most likely number. Th

Joseph Lane ... More Fuzzy Math: Why the Primaries Mean Whatever We Want Them to Mean

[Joseph Lane is the Hawthorne Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Emory & Henry. ] This is not the post that I had planned for the day after New Hampshire. I had a brilliant little piece on the self-immolation of the Hillary Clinton campaign, and I can only thank the moderators for stopping me. I am probably in good company as most of the columnists in the country were wearing out their delete buttons or busy with re-writes. I will keep that p

Michael Oren: Bush's Mideast Muddle

[Mr. Oren is senior fellow at the Shalem Center and the author of "Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present" (W.W. Norton, 2007).] George W. Bush's visit to Israel today -- the first of his presidency -- has many Israelis confused. Is he coming to advance the peace process begun six weeks ago at the Annapolis Summit, that 83% of Israelis see as fruitless? Or is he aiming to fortify Israel against a mounting Iranian nuclear threat that Amer

Peter Fineman: Look to the past to see future of today's immigrants

[Dr. Fineman is on staff at the Institute of History, Archaeology, and Education in Purchase. When did the Irish become white? In the demographic analyses of the composition of the American population at present and for the future, there is no separate category for the Irish; they are included in the white population along with the English. That would be quite a surprise to both groups back when the Irish first began arriving in large numbers in the 1830s and 1840s. W

PBS Roundtable: Beschloss, Smith & Fitzpatrick on history behind the NH primary

JIM LEHRER: Now, a longer perspective on the events of this day, and to Jeffrey Brown for that. JEFFREY BROWN: And for that, I'm joined by our panel of presidential historians, Michael Beschloss, Richard Norton Smith, scholar-in-residence at George Mason University, and Ellen Fitzpatrick, professor of history at the University of New Hampshire. Well, Michael, last week on the program talking about Iowa you referred to the historical significance of the front-loading of

Daniel Pipes: Fascism's Legacy ... Liberalism

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] Liberal fascism sounds like an oxymoron – or a term for conservatives to insult liberals. Actually, it was coined by a socialist writer, none other than the respected and influential left-winger H.G. Wells, who in 1931 called on fellow progressives to become "liberal fa

Fouad Ajami: This U.S. president is the most consequential the Middle East has ever seen

[Mr. Ajami teaches at Johns Hopkins University. He is author of "The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq," (Free Press, 2006), and a recipient of the Bradley Prize.] It was fated, or "written," as the Arabs would say, that George W. Bush, reared in Midland, Texas, so far away from the complications of the foreign world, would be the leader to take America so deep into Arab and Islamic affairs. This is not a victory lap