Roundup: Historians' Take

Aziz Huq: It's time to recalibrate the checks and balances between Congress and the president

[Aziz Huq is the director of the Liberty and National Security Project at the Brennan Center for Justice and an adjunct professor at the New York University School of Law. He is also the co-author of Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror.] ... During the twentieth century, the executive branch of the federal government grew in ways the Framers could not have predicted. In 1830, the federal government had roughly 11,000 employees. In 1930, it had 608,915 em

Matthew Dallek: Why FDR's bottom-up brand of civic defense should inspire progressive plans for homeland security today

[Historian Matthew Dallek is a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a fellow at the Alicia Patterson Foundation.] ... A new vision for homeland security is desperately needed [given the failures of Bush's Homeland Security Department even to address the needs of the victims of Katrina]. The failure of progressives to offer such a competing vision has produced a shortsighted homeland security debate that ignores fundamental questions: How should domestic

Thomas J. Sugrue: Let's Not Hold Up Albert Shanker as a Model

[Mr. Sugrue is Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.] By the early 1990s, it had become axiomatic among mainstream Democratic pundits and politicians that liberalism had collapsed as the result of the supposed excesses of the 1960s. A slew of influential pundits--among them Jim Sleeper, Stanley Greenberg, Fred Siegel and Thomas and Mary Edsall, along with others who found themselves in the orbit of Bill Clinton--looked back wistf

Juan Cole: Republicans ... They Like this 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.] Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said Thursday that she has been surprised at the depth of support for the Iraq War among Republicans in the House of Representatives. AP writes: ' "They like this war. They want this war to continue," Pelosi, D-Calif., told reporters. She expressed

Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson: Viet Not

[Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson are, respectively, the Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a professor of strategic studies at the U.S. Naval War College.] ... The Vietnam comparison represents the culmination of a series of tendentious analogies waged by senior American officials to justify the continuing military presence in Iraq. General David Petraeus, commander of American forces in Iraq, repeatedly bruits about

Juan Cole: Ayatollah Huckabee's Fatwa

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] In Shiite Iran, only a Shiite may be president. Not a Sunni Muslim, not a Christian, and not a secularist. Article 115 of the current Iranian constitution says:' Article 115The President must be elected from among religious and political personalities possessing the follo

Daniel Pipes: That NIE Makes War against Iran More Likely

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] With the Dec. 3 publication of a completely unexpected declassified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE),"Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities," a consensus has emerged that

Greg Grandin: Death Squads, Disappearances, and Torture -- from Latin America to Iraq

[Greg Grandin is the author of a number of books, most recently Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism. He teaches history at NYU.] The world is made up, as Captain Segura in Graham Greene's 1958 novel Our Man in Havana put it, of two classes: the torturable and the untorturable."There are people," Segura explained,"who expect to be tortured and other

Lawrence S. Wittner: Portents of an anti-nuclear upsurge

[Dr. Lawrence S. Wittner is a history professor at the State University of New York/Albany and coeditor of the book Peace Action: Past, Present, and Future.] Superficially, it seems remote that a new wave of mass activism against nuclear weapons comparable to the vast outpouring of popular protest during the early 1980s will develop anytime soon. Despite the existence of vast nuclear arsenals and the ongoing danger of nuclear war, major civil society groups that played key roles in cal

Stanley Kutler: Romney's religious vision for all?

[Stanley Kutler is the author of Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes.] Mitt Romney's evangelical Christian friends and foes alike can only rejoice. His speech on his faith and religion has resounded in the public square and blown a heavy whiff of religion into our political life. He offered an impassioned account of his devotion to Jesus Christ, his Lord and Savior -- "of mankind." That is his inclusive vision for America. Romney predictably made a bow to John

Juan Cole: Giuliani flunks history (Re: Iran hostage crisis)

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] I just saw this campaign ad for Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign. He says that Iran held US embassy hostages for 444 days. Then they were released within one hour. That was the hour after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president, succeed

Juan Cole: The GOP's Iran option is off the table

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] The conclusions of the latest National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iran's lack of a nuclear weapons program will have a profound impact on the 2008 presidential campaign. The report may well prove a key element in throwing the election to the Democrats. Republicans have used the alleged nuclear threa

David Greenberg: What their books tell us about the presidential candidates

[David Greenberg teaches at Rutgers University and writes for Slate. His books include Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image and Calvin Coolidge.] ... Many writers have discussed the difference in tone between [Barack Obama's recent book, The Audacity of Hope and his] first book, Dreams from My Father (1995), which was written before his political career began and hurried back into print during his 2004 Senate run. As Andrew Ferguson wrote witheringly in the Weekly Standard: “Auda

Khalil G. Muhammad: White May Be Might, But It's Not Always Right

[Khalil G. Muhammad is an assistant professor of history at Indiana University and the author of the forthcoming "The Condemnation of Blackness: Ideas about Race and Crime in the Making of Modern Urban America. "] Recently I showed my college students a YouTube clip of Bill Cosby's and Alvin Poussaint's appearance on "The Oprah Winfrey Show." After hearing Cosby plead for poor blacks to embrace their parenting responsibilities, many of the students said they wish

Juan Cole: Can a secular person even win the Republican nomination?

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] Mitt Romney's speech in Texas on Thursday was supposed to be an attempt to fend off religious bigotry. Instead, it betrays some prejudices of its own (against secular people), and seems to provoke others to bigotted statements. It has been likened to the speech of John F. Kennedy on his Catholicism. But we

Ralph Harrington: China's future is not Europe's past

[Dr. Harrington, an independent scholar with a degree in history from Oxford, was a lecturer in history at the University of York (1999-2003).] In the current (3 December 2007) edition of In These Times, Slavoj Zizek of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, Essen, has an interesting article about the People’s Republic of China:

Jon Wiener: Arguing About Gitmo

Yesterday the Supreme Court heard arguments in what may be the most important constitutional case of the decade: whether the men detained at Guantanamo have a right to a fair trial before a real court. I spoke with Erwin Chemerinsky about the case – he's professor of law at Duke, and Dean of the new UC Irvine law school; and he represents one of the Gitmo detainees whose case is before the court, Salem Gherebi. At issue is the Military Commissions Act, passed by Congress in 2006. Ch

Eric Foner: Reading Lincoln in Pakistan

[Eric Foner, a member of The Nation's editorial board, is DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University and author, most recently, of Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction.] Every generation and every political movement, it seems, reinvents Abraham Lincoln in its own image. But rarely has he been invoked so cynically as on November 4, when President-General Pervez Musharraf quoted extensively from Lincoln to justify the suspension of the Pakistani Constitu

Kenneth S. Baer: Romney better pray he can be Jimmy Carter

[Kenneth S. Baer, the author of "Reinventing Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton," is a founder and editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.] On Thursday, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is headed to Texas to deliver a speech on "Faith in America" in order to dispel reservations voters may have about electing a Mormon president. While this clearly echoes the famous address that his fellow Bay Stater, John F. Kennedy, g

Barry Rubin: Annapolis: One Cheer, One Yawn, One Cynical Shrug

[Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center http://gloria.idc.ac.il and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (GLORIA) Center http://meria.idc.ac.il. His latest books are