Roundup: Historians' Take

William Marina: Who Speaks for the American Military on Iraq?

[William Marina is Professor Emeritus in History at Florida Atlantic University, a Research Fellow of the Independent Institute, Oakland, CA, and Executive Director of the Marina-Huerta Educational Foundation. He lives in Asheville, NC.]The bias in the way in which the Media has covered the emerging presidential campaign has been evident for some months now.The implication has been that a hawk like Rudy Giuliani speaks for the American soldiers and other military members

Thomas Sowell: Military Victory, Political Failure

[Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. ] Historians in the future will undoubtedly find many and varied lessons from the war in Iraq. But we in the present do not have the luxury of waiting for all the evidence to be in before we start to understand what has gone wrong and what has gone right in Iraq. What has gone right is that the Iraq war is already over. Our troops won it. But our politicians ma

Michael B. Oren: The president isn't selling out Israel or relaxing his call for Palestinian democracy

[Mr. Oren is a fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and the author of "Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present" (Norton, 2007).] Newspapers in Israel yesterday were full of stories about President Bush's call on Monday for the creation of a Palestinian state and an international peace conference. While Israeli officials were quoted expressing satisfaction with the fact that "there were no changes in Bush's policies," comment

Catherine Allgor: The Power of the Pedestal Lady Bird Stood on

[Catherine Allgor writes for the History News Service and is a professor of history at the University of California at Riverside. She is the author of A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation (2006).] Claudia Alta Taylor "Lady Bird" Johnson was a lady. A great lady, as my Republican mother has said. But "Lady" is a term many of us are uneasy with. Originating in an older, patriarchal world, "Lady" conferred a certain fema

Gary Leupp: Cheney Urges Bush to Strike Iran

[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

Jonathan Zimmerman: The Myth of America's rags-to-riches presidents

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of"Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century."] Rudy Giuliani received $11 million last year in speaking fees alone. John McCain is worth between $20 million and $32 million, most of it earned the old-fashioned way: he married into it. John Edwards, a former trial lawyer, has assets of about $62 million. But they're all paupers compared to Mitt Romney, founder of a priva

Daniel Pipes: Red Mosque in Rebellion

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.]Imagine that an Islamist central command exists — and that you are its chief strategist, with a mandate to spread full application of Shariah, or Islamic law, through all means available, with the ultimate goal of a worldwide caliphate. What advice would you offer your comrades

Stanley Kutler: The Surgeon General's Commissars

[Mr. Kutler is the author of The Wars of Watergate.] The Constitution's Framers, who naïvely believed their grand experiment would eschew partisan politics--they did not even anticipate the formation of parties--might have had their checks and balances unhinged had they heard the Congressional testimony of former Surgeon General Richard Carmona, who served in George W. Bush's Administration for one term, from

Robert Spencer: Keith Ellison and the "Reichstag"

[Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of six books, seven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith and the New York Times Bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad.] Upon assuming office, United States Congressmen swear to “support

Ted Widmer: JFK's prescient call for freedom in the Middle East

[Ted Widmer is the director of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University and recently edited the Library of America's two-volume "American Speeches." ] FIFTY YEARS AGO this month [in 1957], a young senator from Massachusetts with his eye on the White House took a big gamble. On the Senate floor, before his astonished colleagues, John F. Kennedy gave a controversial speech that questioned nearly all of the assumptions of American foreign policy and delved deeply int

Stanley Fish: History is at center of the court's ruling in the school race cases

[Mr. Fish is a Times guest columnist.] On its face, the affirmative action case decided on June 28 by the Supreme Court turns on whether two school districts in Washington and Kentucky violated the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection guarantee when they assigned children to schools on the basis of race. But the underlying issue is whether the court should be attentive to history and the societal consequences of its decision, or should turn a blind eye to those consequence

Barnett R. Rubin: Will Bin Laden Win?

[Barnett R. Rubin is Director of Studies and Senior Fellow at the Center on International Cooperation of New York University, where he directs the program on the Reconstruction of Afghanistan. Dr Rubin received a Ph.D. (1982) and M.A. (1976) from the University of Chicago and a B.A. (1972) from Yale University. He also received a Fulbright Fellowship to study at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris in 1977-1978. He is currently chair of the Conflict Prevention and Peace Foru

James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn: The 'Kitchen Cabinet' of one ... Dick Cheney

[JAMES MACGREGOR BURNS and SUSAN DUNN teach at Williams College. Burns is author of "Leadership." They are coauthors of "The Three Roosevelts: Patrician Leaders Who Transformed America" and "George Washington."] EVEN MANY Republicans today recognize Franklin D. Roosevelt as the greatest president of the last century. The anti-Franklin Roosevelt, however, is George W. Bush.

Johann N. Neem: The Jeffersonian tradition and American philanthropy

[Johann N. Neem is assistant professor of history at Western Washington University.] "The earth belongs in usufruct to the living; . . . [and] the dead have neither powers nor rights over it," proclaimed Thomas Jefferson in 1789. Jefferson's claim is a radical one: the wealth and power of past generations should not determine present and future ones. To maintain democratic equality across generations, Jefferson argued, private fortunes must be broken up by eliminating prim

Victor Davis Hanson: Blissfully Uneducated

[Victor Davis Hanson is professor emeritus at California State University, Fresno, where he initiated the classics program.] Is “ho”—the rapper slang for the slur “whore”—a bad word? Always, sometimes, or just when an obnoxious white male like Don Imus says it? But not when the equally obnoxious Snoop Dogg serially employs it? Is the Iraq war, as we are often told, the “greatest mistake” in our nation’s history? Because Israel and the United States have a b

Tom Engelhardt: The Time Has Come for an Honest Discussion of Air Power

[Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters (Nation Books).] The first news stories about the most notorious massacre of th

Gary Leupp: The Napping President

[Gary Leupp is a Professor of History, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion at Tufts University, and author of numerous works on Japanese history. He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu.] "He is taking the entire month of August off! Well, who among us hasn’t needed 30 straight days off after working six whole months?"– Jay Leno, August 2001 I read somewhere that while George W. Bush was governor

Mike Davis: What Our Grandparents Can Teach Us About Saving the World

[Mike Davis is the author, most recently, of Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb. He is working on a new book on the geopolitics of climate change.] The World War II home front was the most important and broadly participatory green experiment in U.S. history. Is it a model we should use today? Does this generation of Americans have the "right stuff" to meet the epic challenges of sustaining life on a rapidly warming planet? Sure, the mainstream media

Manan Ahmed: The significance of Musharraf's crackdown on the Mosque

[Manan Ahmed, who is writing his dissertation in the history of South Asia and Islam at the University of Chicago, is a member of the HNN group blog Cliopatria and Juan Cole's Informed Comment Global Affairs.] Just a few weeks ago, General Pervez Musharraf's regime seemed in severe trouble. Chief Justice Chaudhry had strangely emerged as a

Mary Kupiec Cayton: The Commodification of Wisdom

[Mary Kupiec Cayton is chair of the department of history and a professor of history and American studies at Miami University.] ... Trained as a historian of American intellectual and religious history, I increasingly find myself also a student of the market. I work with spreadsheets that transform teaching and learning into quantifiable units, and with advertising strategies that try to brand what my university offers as distinctive, even as market pressures move us toward standard