Roundup: Historians' Take

Frederick W. Kagan and Kimberly Kagan: The New Strategy in Iraq

[Frederick W. Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Kimberly Kagan is executive director of the Institute for the Study of War.] The new strategy for Iraq has entered its second phase. Now that all of the additional combat forces have arrived in theater, Generals David Petraeus and Ray Odierno have begun Operation Phantom Thunder, a vast and complex effort to disrupt al Qaeda and Shiite militia bases all around Baghdad in advance of the major clear-and-ho

Rick Perlstein: How the chief justice misconstrued history in the school race cases

[Mr. Perlstein is the author of BEFORE THE STORM: BARRY GOLDWATER AND THE UNMAKING OF THE AMERICAN CONSENSUS.] Justice Roberts, "restricting the ability of public school districts to use race to determine which schools students can attend," wrote for the plurality of Scalia, Thomas, and Alito that, "Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin." If I were a high school teacher and

Michael Kazin: Bloomberg Might Want to Think Hard About Running as an Independent

[Mr. Kazin teaches history at Georgetown University and is the author of many books including, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan.] The historian Richard Hofstadter once wrote that third parties in

Jonathan Zimmerman: In a Free-Speech Ruling, Justice Thomas Misstates the Purpose of Education

[JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN wrote "Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century."] WHAT ARE schools for? For the last decade, I've taught a history course with that title at New York University. My students and I examine the different purposes that Americans hav

Rick Perlstein: Will the Progressive Majority Emerge?

[Mr. Perlstein is the author of BEFORE THE STORM: BARRY GOLDWATER AND THE UNMAKING OF THE AMERICAN CONSENSUS.] For as long as I can remember, there's been a generally accepted story about the recent history of Democratic Party fortunes, a neat little morality tale that goes something like

Stanley Kutler: Who's Afraid of History?

[Stanley I. Kutler is the author of The Wars of Watergate (Norton) and Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes (Touchstone Start with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Senator Carl Levin (D-MI), Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Gates announced on June 10 that he would not reappoint General Peter Pace as

Dmitry Shlapentokh: Why Putin Needs Solzhenitsyn

[The writer is associate professor of history at Indiana University South Bend in the United States.] AT THE Russia Day awards ceremony on June 12, President Vladimir Putin gave the most prestigious national honour, the State Prize, to Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Calling the world-renowned Solzhenitsyn a man of great erudition, Mr Putin mentioned only one of his works in his award speech: a compendium of rare words and expressions in the Russian language. The

Mary L. Dudziak: Roberts misreads Brown and its history in today's school case

[Mary L. Dudziak is Judge Edward J. and Ruey L. Guirado Professor of Law, History and Political Science, University of Southern California.] There is much to be said about the uses of history in today’s important case, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1. History mattered to the Supreme Court in grappling with the role of race in student assignment, but history became a battleground, as Justices disagreed over both the lessons of hi

Juan Williams: Don’t Mourn Brown v. Board of Education

[Juan Williams, a senior correspondent for NPR and a political analyst for Fox News Channel, is the author of “Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America.”] LET us now praise the Brown decision. Let us now bury the Brown decision. With yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling ending the use of voluntary schemes to create racial balance among students, it is time to acknowledge that Brown’s time has passed. It is worth

Juan Cole: Bush Turns Iraq into Israel/Palestine

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com/.]Bush said in a speech on Thursday that he hopes Iraq will be like Israel, a democracy that faces terrorist violence but manages to retain its democratic character: In Israel, Bush said, 'terrorists have taken innocent human life fo

John Steele Gordon: What the Scottsboro Boys and the Duke lacrosse players have in common

[Mr. Gordon is the author of "An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power" (HarperCollins, 2004).] Imagine this: In a Southern town, a woman accuses several men of rape. Despite the woman's limited credibility and ever-shifting story, the community and its legal establishment immediately decide the men are guilty. Their protestations of innocence are dismissed out of hand, exculpatory evidence is ignored. The Duke rape case, right? No, the

Lawrence Mead: America will prevail

[Lawrence Mead is a professor of politics at New York University. This is an extract from the Centre for Independent Studies' John Bonython lecture he delivered in Sydney last night.] TO read the newspapers, one would believe US power was in steep decline. There are prophets of error, the many critics who believe US foreign policy has gone seriously wrong, especially in Iraq. And there are prophets of weakness, such as Yale historian Paul Kennedy, who wrote even before the end of th

Donald Worster: Fiddling While America Burns

[Donald Worster, author of books including “Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas,” is an environmental historian at the University of Kansas. He wrote this comment for the Land Institute’s Prairie Writers Circle, Salina, Kan.] The United States is the richest, most powerful nation in history — this you have heard many times before. What you have not heard so often is that America has also been, for nearly 200 years, the safest, most secure nation ever. Far from being awar

Eric Rauchway: Dick Cheney v. Aaron Burr

[Eric Rauchway is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, and the author, most recently, of Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America and Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America. ] Last week marked the bicentennial of the last time Americans thought a vice president posed a constitutional threat to the United States (no, the merely peculative Spiro Agnew does not count): On June 24, 1807, a grand jury returned an indictment for t

Carlos Eire: When Repression Masquerades as Social Justice ... Confessions of a Cuban Boy

[Carlos Eire is the Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University and author of Waiting for Snow in Havana (2003), the One Book/One Philadelphia selection for 2007. This essay is based on his presentation at Living Without Freedom: A History Institute for Teachers sponsored by FPRI’s Marvin Wachman Fund for International Education, May 5–6, 2007, held at and co-sponsored by the National Constitution Center and the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia. FPRI’s History Inst

Juan Cole: Surging toward disaster in Iraq

Earlier this week Sen. Richard Lugar, the senior Republican from Indiana, dismissed the U.S. "surge" in Iraq as unlikely to succeed. He condemned any illusions about staying the course. "We have overestimated what the military can achieve, we have set goals that are unrealistic, and we have inadequately factored in the broader regional consequences of our actions," Lugar said from the Senate floor. His alarm has been illustrated by the difficulties the U.S. and I

Juan Cole: Ahmadinejad: "I am not anti-Semitic"

Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul continue to show themselves among the few in Congress with any integrity and backbone. They declined to go along with a resolution charging Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad with incitement to genocide, given his alleged call for Israel to be 'wiped off the face of the map.' As most of my readers know, Ahmadinejad did not use that phrase in Persian. He quoted an old saying of Ayatollah Khomeini calling for 'this occupation regime over Jerusalem"

Richard Landes: How the media-created icon of Muhammad al Durah’s death, helped launch a new phase of global Jihad

[Richard Landes is Professor of Medieval History at Boston University, the animator of [28] The Second Draft, and blogger at [29] The Augean Stables. Having analyzed a [30] major dossier of forgeries around the dawn of the second millennium, he has turned his attention to another, and far more dangerous constellation, that permeate our MSM at the dawn of the third millennium.] To this day, most Westerners typically greet any effort to discuss the Al Durah MSM scandal with: “Fuggedaboudit

Lawrence S. Wittner: A rebirth of the anti-nuclear weapons movement?

[Mr. Wittner is a history professor at the State University of New York/Albany and coeditor of the forthcoming book Peace Action: Past, Present, and Future.] Although the nuclear disarmament movement has been in the doldrums since the end of the Cold War, in recent years there have been signs of a modest revival. Of course, even in the intervening period, the struggle against the Bomb never disappeared. Around the world, peace and disarmament organizations continued to

Jonathan Zimmerman: Duke Lacrosse Players Not Exactly Role Models Though Falsely Accused, Many Behaved Badly

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of “Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century” (Harvard University Press).] About thirty years ago, I sat in a musty college lecture hall and heard a statement that has stayed with me ever since. “The most important thing you’ll learn from history,” the professor said, “is that victims are not always angels.” I thought of the remark last week, as