Roundup: Historians' Take

David Greenberg: Playing the Tolerance Card

[David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers, has two new books out:Presidential DoodlesandCalvin Coolidge. ]

Lawrence Goodwyn: The Coming Party Realignment

[Mr. Goodwyn, the author of The Populist Moment, is emeritus professor of history at Duke.] Intransigence and myopia. The flowering of these habits within the GOP is driving the Democratic Party to clarity. And the potential for serious consequences is real. It is not enough to suggest that a big Democratic win is possible in 2008. Something far more strategic is at work: large-scale party realignment with historic implications. None of this seems apparent, of course. I

Tony Judt: France Looks Ahead, and It Doesn’t Look Good

[Tony Judt is director of the Remarque Institute at New York University and the author of “Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945.”] IT is easy to underestimate Jacques Chirac. Today the French will begin to vote for a new president, and soon Mr. Chirac, the 74-year-old incumbent, will pass from the scene unmourned. Over a political career spanning nearly five decades, during which he was mayor of Paris, prime minister (twice) and president for 12 years, Mr. Chirac app

Walid Phares: Losing the War in Congress, Not in Iraq

[Dr. Walid Phares is author of the War of Ideas: Jihadism against Democracy. He is the Director of the Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. ] A simple statement made by a national legislative leader in Washington this week indicates that a war is being lost, but it is not the war in Iraq. It is the defeat of the War of Ideas taking place nowadays in the US Congress. One striking example is a declaration by Senate Majority Leader H

Martin Kramer: Geopolitics of the Jews

[Martin Kramer is the Wexler-Fromer Fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Senior Fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, and Olin Institute Senior Fellow at Harvard University.] Over the winter, I gave a short address to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, at a meeting in Jerusal

Stephen Soldz: Psychology and Coercive Interrogations in Historical Perspective

[Stephen Soldz is a psychoanalyst, psychologist, public health researcher, and faculty member at the Institute for the Study of Violence of the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. He is a member of Roslindale Neighbors for Peace and Justice and founder of Psychoanalysts for Peace and Justice. He maintains the Iraq Occupation and Resistance Report web page and the Psyche, Science, and Society blog. He can be reached at: ssoldz@bgsp.edu.] T

Juan Cole: Bloody Wednesday

Well I guess those Baghdad markets aren't as safe as Senator John McCain thought. And, they look remarkably unlike small town Indiana this morning, contrary to what Congressman Mike Pence alleged a couple of weeks ago.The thing about reality and politics is that sooner or later, reality outstrips rhetoric, and then the politics is revealed for the lie it is. The silly allegation that the guerrillas are only artificially making it look like the surge is falling is another piece of f

Walter Nugent: The American Habit of Empire, and the Cases of Polk and Bush

[The author is ANDREW V. TACKES Professor of History (emeritus) at the University of Notre Dame. This is an expansion of his presidential address given at the annual meeting of the Western History Association in St. Louis, Missouri, on 13 October 2006. While the content is solely the author's responsibility, he wishes to thank Suellen Hoy, Alan Lessoff, and Walter LaFeber for their invaluable editorial contributions and suggestions.] ... Several years ago I taught seminars on th

Barbara Weinstein: Let the Sunshine In ... Government Records and National Insecurities

[Barbara Weinstein (NYU) is president of the AHA. She expresses her gratitude to Ken Serbin and Kenneth Maxwell for their help with this column and adds that "any errors committed or opinions expressed are, of course, entirely my responsibility."] What do George W. Bush, Angela Merkel, and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva have in common? They all head governments that have been embroiled in controversy over their reluctance or outright refusal to make government records available

Rick Perlstein: E. Coli Conservatism

[Mr. Perlstein is the author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus.] ... I've been studying the conservative turn in American politics pretty much fulltime since 1997. I never was a conservative. But I admired conservatives. The people then running the Democratic Party just did not seem to me strong people. They were "triangulators"—splitting every difference, selling out any principle, in the ever-illusive quest to divine the Amer

F. S. Naiden: How Iraq became a nation

[F. S. Naiden is a professor of ancient Greek at Tulane University. He is working on a biography of the marshals of Alexander the Great, the first part of which, “The Invention of the Officer Corps,” will appear in The Journal of the Historical Society in March. ] Before World War I brought aerial photography to the mapmaker’s art, seeing a nation whole was not as simple as looking at a picture. It was an act of imagination. And few countries were the subject of more imaginings than

Jonathan Zimmerman: In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, America needs a day of mourning and reflection

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of "Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century." ] "Turn on your TV," a friend instructed via e-mail. "Right now." So I did. And then I saw the murder and mayhem at Virginia Tech, where more than 30 people were gunned down Monday morning. I watched police officers storming buildings, rifles ready. Medics carried away the wounded and

Daniel Pipes: Bolstering Moderate Muslims

[Mr. Pipes, who is the director of the Middle East Forum, resumes his column this week after taking time off to teach a course titled"Islam and Politics" at Pepperdine University.] When I suggest that radical Muslims are the problem and that moderate Muslims are the solution, the nearly inevitable retort from most people is:"What moderate Muslims?""Where are the anti-Islamists' demonstrations against terror?" they ask me."What are they doing to combat Islamists? What have they done

Victor Davis Hanson: I recently had a dream ...

I recently had a dream that British marines fought back, like their forefathers of old, against criminals and pirates. When taken captive, they proved defiant in their silence. When released, they talked to the tabloids with restraint and dignity, and accepted no recompense. I dreamed that a kindred German government, which best knew the wages of appeasement, cut-off all trade credits to the outlaw Iranian mullahs - even as the European Union joined the Americans in refusing commer

Tom Engelhardt: The Devil's Dictionary of War in Iraq

[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 collection of Tomdispatch interviews.] My aunt Hilda,

Neve Gordon: Israel's Strategic Threat

[Neve Gordon teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University and can be reached at nevegordon@gmail.com.] In early April the rumors about Dr. Azmi Bishara, the most famous Arab Knesset member, began circulating on the Internet: Bishara is afraid to return to Israel; Bishara intends to resign from the Knesset; the Israeli Security Agency has decided to accuse Bishara of treason and espionage. The gag order preventing the publication of any informa

Niall Ferguson: On the Iranians taking British sailors hostage

... I have some sympathy with Capt Air, who has at least resisted the temptation to flog his story to the tabloids and Trevor McDonald. But can you imagine a Victorian naval officer talking this way? "Our rules of engagement stated," Capt Air explained, "that we could only use lethal force if we felt that we were in imminent danger of a loss of life." That's certainly how I would have characterised their predicament, surrounded as they were by RPG-toting members of the Islami

Frederick W. Kagan: Fighting to win

As Congress again takes up the issue of support for our troops fighting in Iraq, members should have the decency to take account of the successes those troops have fought for and achieved in recent weeks. Much of the support in the Democratic caucus for cutting off funds for Iraq comes from a conviction that the war is irretrievably lost. One could be excused for thinking that in the fall of 2006, when sectarian violence seemed to be cycling out of control against the backdrop of a wrong-headed

Martin E. Marty: Evangelical Adaptations

[Martin E. Marty's biography, current projects, upcoming events, publications, and contact information can be found at www.illuminos.com .] Since over one-fourth of U.S. citizens are listed in the demographic or sociological category "Evangelicals," we should spend at least one-fourth of our energies sighting accounts of them in the secular media, our chief zone of operations and spying. Recent treatments stress some significant chan

Timothy Furnish et al: Symposium ... One Islam?

[Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's managing editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in U.S. and Canadian foreign policy.]What are the differences between Arab Islam and Islam elsewhere -- such as in India, Indonesia and in Africa? What do these differences signify? To discuss these questions with us today, Frontpage Symposium has assembled a distinguished panel. Our guests are: Mike Ghouse, a Muslim thinker, speaker and writer, and president of the Foundation for