Roundup: Historians' Take

Daniel Pipes: Ban Islam?

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] Non-Muslims occasionally raise the idea of banning the Koran, Islam, and Muslims. Examples this month include calls by a political leader in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, to ban the Koran — which h

David Michael Green: What's Bush's dad really think?

[David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. ] We'll never know whether Germanicus, the highly accomplished Roman general, was mortified by the actions of his spawn, the insane and insanely destructive emperor Caligula. Or whether he was even more humiliated that, on top of that particularly notable contribution to imperial history, his grandson Nero would later strive valiantly to best the family high-water mark for sheer degenerate

Juan Cole: Churchill on When to Throw in the Towel on Iraq

Glenn Greenwald once remarked that "the highest achievement to which one can aspire in the neocon universe it to be compared to Winston Churchill." So Churchill would advocate another surge and toughing it out forever in Iraq, right? Here is what he wrote in 1922, a couple of years after Britain was awarded Iraq by the Versailles Treaty as a 'mandate' (i.e. colony). [Britain was forced out as mandatory power in Iraq in 1932, when it became an independent country, though of

Tim Weston: The media's response to China's coal mine disaster--and ours

[Mr. Weston is an Associate Professor in the Department of History, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO.] Like many Americans, I watched with hope, apprehension, and finally with real sadness as the saga of the six miners trapped underground at Utah's Crandall Canyon mine played out earlier this month. Anybody in the United States who keeps even half an eye on the news is familiar with the broad outlines of the Utah mine story. But how many of these same Americans who

Edward J. Renehan: Larry Craig and Sumner Welles

[Mr. Renehan's latest book is COMMODORE: THE LIFE OF CORNELIUS VANDERBILT, due out in the Fall.] The predicament of conservative Republican senator Larry Craig brings to mind old Sumner Welles, FDR's brilliant, well-connected, and personally tormented undersecretary of state. Welles was far beyond being a closeted gay. He was a man who lived long years in personal denial of his sexual identity (a life of near-total repression), who drank secretly in order to help himsel

Johann N. Neem: When it comes to manufacturing, it's still a "Jungle" out there

[Johann N. Neem is assistant professor of history at Western Washington University in Bellingham.] When Upton Sinclair wrote "The Jungle" (1906) describing the horrendous conditions in Chicago's slaughterhouses, he hoped to convince Americans to improve labor standards for American workers. Instead, disgusted by Sinclair's descriptions of what entered their food supply, Americans passed the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Meat Inspection Act, wh

Robert Rabil & Walid Phares: The Lebanese Government and the US ... Allies Behind Doors?

[Dr Robert Rabil is a Professor of Middle East Studies at Florida Atlantic University and the author of Syria, the United States, and the War on Terror in the Middle East Dr Walid Phares is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the author of The War of Ideas: Jihadism against Democracies.] Blaming the United States for everything gone awry underneath the sun of the Middle East has become the fashion of the day. Interestingly enough, critics are not co

Douglas Brinkley: The Reckless Abandonment of New Orleans

[Douglas Brinkley is a history professor at Rice University and the author of "The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast."] ... New Orleans appears to be largely abandoned by the Department of Homeland Security, except for its safeguarding of the Port Authority (port traffic is at 90 percent of pre-Katrina numbers) and tourist districts above sea level, such as the French Quarter and Uptown. These areas are kept alive largely by the wi

Juan Cole: Bonaparte and Bush on Deck

[Juan Cole teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His most recent book Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) has just been published. He has appeared widely on television, radio and on op-ed pages as a commentator on Middle East affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com. He has written, edi

Mark Lilla: The Politics of God

[Mark Lilla is professor of the humanities at Columbia University. This essay is adapted from his book “The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West,” which will be published next month.] The twilight of the idols has been postponed. For more than two centuries, from the American and French Revolutions to the collapse of Soviet Communism, world politics revolved around eminently political problems. War and revolution, class and social justice, race and national identity

Stephen Mihm: America’s reliance on dubious credit goes all the way back to the country’s founding

[Stephen Mihm is the author of “A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men and the Making of the United States,” which will be published next month by Harvard University Press. He teaches history at the University of Georgia.] The recent rumbles and ruptures in the financial markets are finally making people reassess the dubious systems of credit that have arisen in the past few years. In retrospect, it seems clear that honest, tried-and-true ways of borrowing money were reckl

Juan Cole: Hillary develops Foot in Mouth Disease on Dumping al-Maliki

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com/.]PM Nuri al-Maliki responded to Senator Carl Levin's (D-Michigan) call for him to be unseated, and Bush's failure to support him on Tuesday by unwisely getting hot under the collar and saying he can find other friends in the world to support his ende

Manan Ahmed: Pakistan's supreme court decision is a good start

[Manan Ahmed is finishing up his dissertation on Islam in South Asia at the University of Chicago. His personal blog on South Asia and everything else is (http://www.chapatimystery.com) Chapati Mystery. He also hangs out at (http://hnn.us/blogs/2.html) Cliopatria - the Historian's Collective.] The Supreme Court decisions continue to change the landscape of Pakistan's history and politics. Since Ch

Michael H. Ebner: How comparable are Iowa and Staten Island?

[Michael H. Ebner is James D. Vail III professor emeritus of American history at Lake Forest College, Lake Forest, Ill.] Rudolph Giuliani invoked the specter of Staten Island in responding to Betty Schuler’s question about his experience as a former mayor of New York City now campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination in rural Iowa.Here is a handful of census data (2005), based upon Giuliani’s response to his questioner.

William Lambers: Surge of Humanitarian Aid Needed In Iraq

[William Lambers is an author and historian. His writings have been distributed by the History News Service and the History News Network. ] The hunger and poverty afflicting millions of Iraqis harm any peace efforts in the war-torn nation. In July, the charity Oxfam International released a report citing eight million Iraqis in desperate need of help. Iraqi children, in particular, are suffering. The Oxfam report showed that 28 percent of Iraqi children are malnourish

Juan Cole: The poisonous rhetorical legacy of Karl Rove

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com/.] On Fox News Sunday morning, Karl Rove played the victim. He told host Chris Wallace that in the wake of his resignation as White House deputy chief of staff, his enemies were on the hunt. Rove compared himself to a legendary monster whom the ancient Anglo-Saxon hero Beowulf sought to slay. "I mean

Bernard Weiner: Bush Bunker Crew's Legacy ... "Dangerous Losers"

[Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at universities in California and Washington, worked as a writer/editor for the San Francisco Chronicle for two decades, and currently is co-editor of The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org)] President Lyndon Johnson gave up his chance for re-election in hopes that the ongoing Vietnam War eventually would resurrect his political reputation and land him a place o

Daniel Pipes: Uniting to Exclude Saudi Arabian Airlines

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] Saudi Arabian Airlines (known as Saudia) declares on its English-language website that the kingdom bans"Bibles, crucifixes, statues, carvings, items with religious symbols such as the Star of David." U

Glenn C. Loury: Why Are So Many Americans in Prison? Race and the transformation of criminal justice

[Glenn C. Loury is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences in the department of economics at Brown University. He is the author of The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, and he was a 2002 Carnegie Scholar. ] The early 1990s were the age of drive-by shootings, drug deals gone bad, crack cocaine, and gangsta rap. Between 1960 and 1990, the annual number of murders in New Haven rose from six to 31, the number of rapes from four to 168, the number of robberies from 16 to 1,784—

Diana Muir: Risks in a Muslim Reformation

[Diana Muir is working on a book about the history of nations and nationalism. She is the author of "Bullough's Pond; Economy and Ecosystem in New England."] Salman Rushdie, Thomas Friedman, Nicholas Kristof and Mansour al-Nogaidan are among the well-intentioned people who have called for an Islamic Reformation. They should be careful what they wish for. The Protestant Reformation did precede the things these men admire about modernity in the West, including w