Roundup: Historians' Take

Jonathan Zimmerman: Gallaudet and the perils of culture

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of"Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century," which was published recently by Harvard University Press.] I've never met Jane Fernandes. Nor do I know if she would have made an effective president at Gallaudet University, America's only liberal arts university for the deaf, which revoked her contract last weekend. But here's what I do know: The attacks on Mrs. Ferna

Juan Cole: Partitioning Iraq Would Be a Mistake

The possibility that ethnic rivalries may break Iraq into three pieces has emerged as an election issue in U.S. politics. Last week, Bush administration spokesman Tony Snow branded any plan for partition a "nonstarter." Other politicians, however, are not so sure. Both Republicans and Democrats have endorsed a loose Iraqi federation of three equal parts, and some are even campaigning on the idea. Democratic Senate candidate Harold Ford of Tennessee and Democratic House candidate Ted An

Rick Perlstein: Henry Kissinger, The Unrealist

[Rick Perlstein is the author of Nixonland: The Politics and Culture of the American Berserk, 1965-1972, which will be published next year.] ... To begin unraveling the true meaning of Kissinger's advice to the White House [as reported by Bob Woodward in State of Denial], we have to go back to August 3, 1972. On that date, President Nixon repeated to the good doctor, his national security adviser, what he'd been saying in private since 1966: America's war aim (standing up a pro-Amer

J. R. Clark: What Donald Rumsfeld Said About Vietnam in 1966 (You won't believe this)

This is what a Republican congressman had to say about the war: "Recognizing the difficulties, the fact remains that lacking success in meeting the economic, social, and political problems, the US effort, with thousands dead and billions spent and precious time lost, could be completely wasted. "If there is a single lesson to be drawn thus far from our experience in Iraq, it is that the United States, and, indeed, the free world, have failed thus far to devel

Niall Ferguson: What's wrong with the computerized war games kids play

"All my life I have played va banque [go for broke],” said Hitler. Churchill too was a gambler, once literally deluging his wife with his casino winnings. Eisenhower preferred the bridge table. For Homo ludens (“playing man,” a phrase coined by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga in 1938), war is the great game and World War II was the greatest game of them all. My sons, ages 7 and 12, play these games compulsively. For a while, their GameCube favorite was Medal of Honor: Allied

Daniel Pipes: Decision Time on Iran

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] As the Iranian government announced last week a doubling of its uranium enrichment program, the United Nations Security Council bickered over a feeble European draft resolution. It would do no more than prohibit Iranian students from studying nuclear physics abroa

Thomas Sowell: Iraq is the latest in a series of catastrophes growing out of diversity

Iraq is not the first war with ugly surprises and bloody setbacks. Even World War II, idealized in retrospect as it never was at the time -- the war of "the greatest generation" -- had a long series of disasters for Americans before victory was finally achieved. The war began for Americans with the disaster at Pearl Harbor, followed by the tragic horror of the Bataan death march, the debacle at the Kasserine Pass and, even on the eve of victory, being caught completely by

David K. Johnson: “Purge of the Perverts” Redux ... Scapegoating Gays

[David K. Johnson teaches history at the University of South Florida, is the author of The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: 2004), and is an associate scholar at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute.]Conservative Republicans are scapegoating gay Americans again. Though their outrage over Rep. Mark Foley is recent, it employs tactics they honed during the McCarthy-era “purge of the perverts.”

Daniel Martin Varisco: Hijab, Raw Meat and Catnip

[Daniel Martin Varisco is Chair, Anthropology Department at Hofstra University.] Many non-Muslims assume that Islam is a far more sexist religion than Judaism or Christianity, usually under the assumption that only the latter two faiths have been secularized into acceptable moral modernity. Media images of women covered in full-length chadors or wearing a solid niqab (face covering) with only slits for eyeholes, the legality of having four wives, Quranic passages torn out of cont

Michael Kazin: Why Obama's a star

Why, just two years after being elected to the Senate, has Barack Obama set so many Democratic -- and some Republican -- imaginations on fire? The Illinois Democrat is certainly a magnetic speaker who delivers original phrases in composed yet passionate tones. His life, as told in the powerful memoir Dreams From My Father , seems a model for the globalized future: The only child of a biracial, bicontinental union, he grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia, then went on to become a community organizer i

Ruth Rosen: South Dakota, sexual politics, and the American elections

[Ms. Rosen is a historian and journalist who formerly wrote a column for the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. She now teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and is a senior fellow at the Longview Institute. A new edition of her book The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America ( Penguin, 2001) will be republished in 2007 with an updated chronology and epilogue .] This is an "only in America" story that takes pl

Tom Engelhardt: Why Baghdad Will Keep Burning

[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.] Are we no

Victor Davis Hanson: The Dark Ages — live from the Middle East!

The most frightening aspect of the present war is how easily our pre-modern enemies from the Middle East have brought a stunned postmodern world back into the Dark Ages. Students of history are sickened when they read of the long-ago, gruesome practice of beheading. How brutal were those societies that chopped off the heads of Cicero, Sir Thomas More and Marie Antoinette. And how lucky we thought we were to have evolved from such elemental barbarity. Twenty-

Tom Palaima: The evil that men do lives after them

[Mr. Palaima is Dickson Centennial professor of classics at the University of Texas.] The ancient Athenians used public dramas, known as tragedies, to look at problems they had to face. These plays were the centerpieces of yearly festivals that all citizens received payment to attend. They could see one another as they watched the performances in a big open-air theater. They could share their reactions afterward. In spring 415 BCE, right after the Athenian citizenry had

Saul David: History Warns Us to Withdraw

[Dr Saul David is the author of many books, including 'Military Blunders' (Constable) and 'Victoria's Wars' (Viking). His television series include 'Time Commanders' for BBC2. He was educated at Ampleforth College and studied history at Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities (MA and Ph.D).] President George W Bush's acknowledgement that the current fighting in Iraq is comparable to the 1968 Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War is an extraordinary ad

David C. Paris: Higher Education at Risk?

[David C. Paris is the Leonard C. Ferguson Professor of Government at Hamilton College and Senior Fellow at the American Association of Colleges and Universities. He is the author of Ideology and Education Reform: Themes and Theories in Public Education (Westview Press, 1995), and “Standards and Charters: Horace Mann Meets Tinkerbell” in Educational Policy (1998) and is the former vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty at Hamilton College.] We’ve heard this befo

Tom Engelhardt: Losing the Home Front (Part 1)

[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.] Recently, s

Steve Hochstadt: Why I Am a Conservative

[Steve Hochstadt was a Professor of History at Bates College for 27 years. He now teaches at Illinois College in Jacksonville, IL.] I believe in traditional values. I think that values from our heritage as Americans need to be more powerfully expressed in our society. On those aspects of social life in America where I feel like I stand outside today’s norms, people call me conservative. I was raised in the 1950s, when traditional values dominated in America. We

Juan Cole: Bush compares Iraq & Vietnam. Oops.

In his interview with George Stephanopoulos on Wednesday evening, George W. Bush accepted that there might be a parallel between the spike in killings of US troops in Iraq and the Tet offensive in Vietnam. Many commentators are saying that he finally admitted that Iraq is a quagmire like Vietnam, but this is a complete misreading of what Bush is saying.Bush's position is that things are going just great in Iraq, and

Niall Ferguson: There are 300m Americans, but still not enough to rule the world

[Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University.] You would have thought that 300 million Americans would be enough to rule the world, or at least a couple of medium-sized failed states. The population of Iraq is 27 million, that of Afghanistan 31 million. Yet the same week that the population of the United States officially passed the 300 million mark, we heard two startling admissions that testify to the scale of crisis facing America's unspoken emp