Roundup: Historians' Take

Juan Cole: Were Mitt Romney's Remarks Anti-Muslim Bigotry?

Mitt Romney has attacked Al Sharpton's remark about his being defeated by those who 'really do believe in God' as a piece of religious bigotry.But first of all the remark came in the context of Sharpton's debate with Christopher Hitchens concerning belief in God, and Sharpton maintains that he was just saying that it wasn't the Hitchens types who would defeat Romney, but the believers. So it isn't clear that Sharpton intended to say that Mormons don't really believe in God.

Walid Phares: The broad implications of Sarkozy’s election

[Walid Phares is the director of Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a visiting scholar at the European Foundation for Democracy, and the author of The War of Ideas: Jihadism against Democracy.] ... Since the 1970s, France has been a target for terrorist activities. Left-wing, right-wing, and Middle Eastern-rooted groups attacked the country and were fought fiercely by the government. As of the early 1990s, French urban centers began to witness

William Dalrymple: Delhi, 1857 ... A bloody warning to today's imperial occupiers

[ William Dalrymple's The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857, has just been published in paperback by Bloomsbury .] Soon after dawn on May 11 1857, 150 years ago this week, the Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar was saying his morning prayers in his oratory overlooking the river Jumna when he saw a cloud of dust rising on the far side of the river. Minutes later, he was able to see its cause: 300 East India Company cavalrymen charging wildly towards his palace.

Neve Gordon and Yigal Bronner: The Death of Samir Dari

[Neve Gordon teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University, Israel and can be reached at nevegordon@gmail.com. Yigal Bronner teaches in the South Asian Department at the University of Chicago, USA and can be reached at ybronner@uchicago.edu .] Almost a year and a half has passed since our friend Samir Dari was gunned down by an Israeli policeman. Samir, an Israeli resident and father of two, approache

Jonathan Zimmerman: Arabic school's critics are the true zealots

[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).] Hey, stop teaching the language of the enemy! Don’t you know there’s a war going on? That’s what self-described American patriots said about German during World War One, when instruction in the language all but disappeared from our public schools. And that’s what they’re saying today, about a pro

Michael Beschloss: A President's Ultimate Test

When friends heard I was writing a book on presidential courage, some of them turned snarky: "Was there ever such a thing?" they would ask. They presumed all of our presidents have been versions of what seems to be the modern politician—obsessed by polls, focus groups and fund-raising, chasing the holy grail of popularity. But in fact, if you explore American history you will find that at crucial moments we have been startlingly dependent on having a chief executive who demonstrates wh

Jean Edward Smith: The Peace Presidents

[Jean Edward Smith, the John Marshall Professor of political science at Marshall University, in Huntington, W. Va., is the author of 12 books, including biographies of Ulysses S. Grant, Chief Justice John Marshall and General Lucius D. Clay. His latest book is “F.D.R.”] On Feb. 8, 2004, George W. Bush proudly proclaimed to Tim Russert on “Meet the Press,” “I am a war president.” Like an 8-year-old playing with toy soldiers, Bush, an Air National Guard dropout, looked at war with vicarious

Daniel Pipes: A Million Moderate Muslims on the March

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.]"Moderate Unicorns," huffed a reader, responding to my recent plea that Western states bolster moderate Muslims. Dismissing their existence as a myth, he notes that non-

Seth Rockman: Baltimore's history of 'illegal' workers

[Seth Rockman, assistant professor of history at Brown University, is completing a book on the survival strategies of Baltimore's working families in the early 1800s. His e-mail is seth_rockman@brown.edu] Last week's raid on a Baltimore employment agency and the conviction of a local restaurateur remind us that undocumented workers cook our meals, stitch our T-shirts and perform invisible but indispensable labor throughout the city. The re

Michael Fry: It’s up to the English to save the Union

The break-up of Britain is on the cards, although it still does not have to happen. The Scottish election on Thursday was so closely fought and brought such a tight result that the formation of a Scottish National party government in Edinburgh is not yet a cast-iron certainty. But it is the most likely outcome; then one part of the UK will be ruled by politicians hostile to its existence. There has been nothing like this since Sinn Fein took a majority of Irish seats in the general

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom: Shanghai’s Latest Global Turn

[Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is a Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, and the author, more recently, of China's Brave New World--And Other Tales for Global Times, published this month by Indiana University Press.] How should the remarkable tale of Shanghai’s resurgence be told? As Jeff Wasserstrom explains, an increasingly popular approach is to treat it as a sequel — a tale of a city finally getting back on the cosmopolitan capitalist track that it had followed

Frederick Kagan: Plan B? Let’s Give Plan A Some Time First

[Frederick W. Kagan is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former professor of military history at the United States Military Academy.] KUWAIT ONE of the most common criticisms of the current “surge” in Iraq is that its proponents have not developed a Plan B in case it fails. The skeptics liken this lack of a backup strategy to the Bush administration’s failure to plan for various contingencies after the initial invasion in 2003; they see a continuity of err

Daniel Galvin: Ronald Reagan’s Resilient Regime

[Daniel Galvin is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. His primary areas of research and teaching are the American presidency, political parties, and American political development. He is co-editor of Rethinking Political Institutions: The Art of the State. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University.] ... Why is Ronald Reagan still so relevant, and why should we care? Yale University political scientist Stephen Skowronek explains in his ground-brea

Walter Laquer: So Much for the New European Century

[Walter Laqueur, a historian and a founding editor of the Journal of Contemporary History, lives in Washington. This essay was adapted from his book The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent, to be published next week by Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin's Press. Copyright © by Walter Laqueur.] ... Europe as we once knew it is bound to change, probably out of recognition, for a number of reasons, partly demographic and cultural, but also political and social.

Daniel Pipes: Where the Nazi "Big Lie" Endures

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] "If today's Arab anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish propaganda strongly resembles that of the Third Reich, there is a good reason." So writes Joel Fishman of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs in"The Big Lie and the Media W

Nasir Khan: Islam in a Western Mirror

[Nasir Khan, Dr Philos, is a historian and a peace activist. He is the author of Development of the Concept and Theory of Alienation in Marx's Writings and Perceptions of Islam in the Christendoms: A Historical Survey. He has written numerous articles on international affairs and human rights. He has his own blog at http://nasir-khan.blogspot.com through which he can be contacted.] Present-day images of Muslims and Islam in Western

Howard Zinn: A power governments cannot suppress

Fifty years after the executions of Italian immigrants Sacco and Vanzetti, Governor Dukakis of Massachusetts set up a panel to judge the fairness of the trial, and the conclusion was that the two men had not received a fair trial. This aroused a minor storm in Boston. One letter, signed John M. Cabot, U.S. Ambassador Retired, declared his"great indignation" and pointed out that Governor Fuller's affirmation of the death sentence was made after a special review by"three of Massa

David Greenberg: In Nixon’s Tricks, Rove’s Roots and a Blueprint for Bush

[David Greenberg, an assistant professor of history and journalism at Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, N.J., is the author of three books, “Nixon’s Shadow,” “Presidential Doodles” and, most recently, “Calvin Coolidge.” He writes the “History Lesson” column for Slate.] If you’re a political junkie with Internet access looking for cheap laughs — and if you’re reading this column, you probably are — take a minute, go to YouTube and search for “Nixon” and “Rove.” Your

Margaret MacMillan: The Flawed Wilsonian Dream

[Margaret MacMillan, a professor of history and provost of Trinity College in the University of Toronto, is the author of “Women of the Raj” and “Paris 1919.” Her most recent book is “Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World.”] Today’s presidential candidates are understandably cautious when it comes to foreign policy, especially about stepping into the minefields of Iraq. But in their remarks, it is possible to discern an assumption about the rightness of American leadership

Juan Cole: George Tenet on the staircase with the neocons

The French call it "the spirit of the staircase" (l'esprit d'escalier), the clever reply to someone that comes to you on your way up to the bedroom after a cocktail party. In his new book, released Monday, former CIA Director George Tenet has delivered himself of hundreds of pages on the staircase, imagining what he should have said or could have said to Richard Perle, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice and the other neoconservatives who marched the country to war in Iraq using the pretext of Sep