Roundup: Historians' Take

Nelson Lichtenstein: The US writers strike proves that the new 'knowledge workers' of the 21st century still need to fight old battles

[Nelson Lichtenstein is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he directs the Centre for the Study of Work, Labour and Democracy.] Win, lose or draw, Hollywood's striking writers have written finis to one long-running episode in American cultural and intellectual history. For years the most sophisticated prognosticators writing about the global economy have assured us that in our creative, cyber-oriented world new forms of work and enterprise would

Jim Sleeper: Arthur Sulzberger's Cracked Kristol Ball

[Jim Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale and a writer on American civic culture and politics, is the author of The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York (W.W. Norton, 1990) and Liberal Racism (Viking, 1997). ]“The liberal blogosphere goes wild!” whooped conservatives, wildly, at widespread outrage over Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.’s desperate gift of a weekly Times op-ed page column to neo-conservative field marshal Bill Kristol. Surprisingly

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: The Biggest China Story of 2007

[Mr. Wasserstrom teaches Chinese history at the University of California, Irvine, and is currently completing work on “Global Shanghai, 1850-2010,” a book under contract with Routledge.] When historians of the future look back on 2007 from a decade or so down the road, what will they single out as the year’s big China story? They’ll certainly have plenty of options to choose from, since the international press has carried a dizzyingly wide range of China headlines lately, deali

Michael Novak: Is it ok to make an issue of Romney's Mormon religion?

[Mr. Novak is a professor of religion and public policy at the American Enterprise Institute.] When General Washington asked Charles Carroll of the Continental Congress what Catholics would want from a new independent state, Carroll replied without hesitation “No religious test for public office.” Jonathan Last was happywith most of

Fred Siegel: On Liberalism's alleged fascist roots

[Mr. Siegel is a professor at The Cooper Union in New York.] In 1932, H.G. Wells, the British socialist, gave a speech at Oxford urging the progressives of his time to become "liberal fascists." As the phrase suggests, Wells favored, to say the least, an authoritarian solution to society's problems. Not surprisingly, he admired both Mussolini and Stalin. He was also an intellectual hero for American liberals, including Franklin Roosevelt. Jonah Goldberg cites Wells's speec

Philip Ranlet: Icebergs, Scientists, and Global Warming

[Philip Ranlet teaches history at Hunter College. Among his books are Enemies of the Bay Colony, 2nd ed. (2006) and Richard B. Morris and American History in the Twentieth Century (2004).] As the temperature drops outside, it is time once again to return to that exciting topic, global warming. Scientists who prophesy the emergence of global warming can not be doubted by a mere historian. Research in Science relating to icebergs shows that scientists are always right. (For tho

Garrett Jones: Understanding Kenya

[Garrett Jones is a senior fellow of FPRI. A 1993 graduate of the U.S. Army War College, he served as a case officer with the CIA in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. He retired in 1997 and now lives in the northwestern United States.] While most Americans were preoccupied with the holidays, Bowl games, and the Iowa caucus, Kenya had a presidential election. As African elections go, it went off pretty well. There were long lines, and a record number of people were estimated to ha

Joseph Palermo: So political assassination in 2008 is an impossibility?

[Assistant Professor, History, CSUS. Bachelor's degrees in sociology and anthropology from UC Santa Cruz, master's degree in history from San Jose State University, master's degree and doctorate in American history from Cornell University.] The French philosopher Michel Foucault called the unfolding of history the "exteriority of accidents," which was his way of saying "shit happens." Any historian will tell you that political assassinations are not surprising or

Martin E. Marty: The "Roman" in Roman Catholic

[Martin E. Marty's biography, current projects, upcoming events, publications, and contact information can be found at www.illuminos.com. ] Friend and neighbor Father Andrew Greeley, sociologist, novelist, and columnist, reminded me in a recent e-mail that he liked to be called a "Catholic," not a "Roman Catholic." In his January 2nd Chicago Sun-Times column, he elaborates: "My crowd has been calling themselves 'Catho

William Dalrymple: Bhutto’s Deadly Legacy

[William Dalrymple is the author, most recently, of “The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857.”] WHEN, in May 1991, former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi of India was killed by a suicide bomber, there was an international outpouring of grief. Recent days have seen the same with the death of Benazir Bhutto: another glamorous, Western-educated scion of a great South Asian political dynasty tragically assassinated at an election rally. There is, however, an importa

Joseph Lane: The Iowa Caucus: Chicanery or Democracy?

[Joseph Lane is the Hawthorne Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Emory & Henry. ] Last week in Iowa, on election night, I was a neutral observer in a very polite little caucus. I stood at the back of a high school Spanish classroom with posters illustrating simple concepts and phrases en espanol. My favorite was a sketch of a thermometer with only a little tiny band of red crossing near zero. “Hace Frio,” it read, and wasn’t that the truth?

Daniel Pipes: Confirmed: Barack Obama Practiced Islam

[[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] In a recent analysis,"Was Barack Obama a Muslim?" I surveyed available evidence and found it suggests"Obama was born a Muslim to a non-practicing Muslim father and for some years had a reasonably Muslim upbringing under

Donald Ritchie: Follow the [Ad] Money

[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 more than three decades. In the post below he looks at the fall of newspapers.] In her end-of-the-year column, The Washington Post’s ombudsman, Deborah Howell, reviewed some dismal statistics: since she started in her job in 2005, the Post’s daily cir

Gary Leupp: Calls for Intervention in Pakistan

[Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.] "Al-Qaeda is

Tom Engelhardt: How Bush Took Us to the Dark Side

[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.] If you don't mind thinking about the Bush legacy

Barnett Rubin: Pakistan's Power Puzzle

[Mr. Rubin is the director of studies at New York University's Center on International Cooperation, and the author of "The Fragmentation of Afghanistan" (2nd edition, Yale University Press, 2002).] ... The Bush administration has decided that in the "Muslim world" a battle is going on between pro-American "moderates" and anti-American "extremists." According to them, the "Muslim world" has a two-party system organized around how Musl

Deborah Lipstadt: Ron Paul on Isolationism

I had no intention of devoting so much time -- or any at all -- to Ron Paul but this guy says things and does things which almost demand comment. Last month, The Washington Post reported, in an article entitled A History Lesson, that Ron Paul had responded to criticism of him by John McCain. McCain had compared Paul's opposition to th

Daniel Pipes: Palestinians Who Prefer Israel

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] Palestinians have a hidden history of appreciating Israel that contrasts with their better-known narrative of vilification and irredentism.The former has been particularly evident of late, especially since Israel's prime minister, Ehud Olmert, floated a trial balloon

John Anthony McGuckin: Does Santa still care about the poor?

[John Anthony McGuckin is a professor of religious history at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia.] ST. NICHOLAS was a super-saint with an immense cult for most of the Christian past. There may be more icons surviving for Nicholas alone than for all the other saints of Christendom put together. So what happened to him? Where’s the fourth-century Anatolian bishop who presided over gift-giving to poor children? And how did we get the new icon of mass consumerism in his place?

Garry Wills: Romney and JFK: The Difference

The situations are superficially the same—presidential candidates trying to remove an obstacle to their election arising from their church membership. But the obstacles are quite different. The objections some have to Mitt Romney's religion are twofold, theological and cultural. Those against John F. Kennedy when he gave his 1960 speech in Houston about his Catholicism were more solidly political. The theological problems with Romney come from evangelicals, who know that his Jesus is not a membe