Roundup: Historians' Take

Craig Steven Wilder: Why I Joined La Raza!

[Craig Steven Wilder is a Professor of History at Dartmouth College.] The attempt to change the political climate in Washington by escalating the immigration debate has backfired. Instead of swamping the airwaves and virtual world with news that emphasized their policy strengths, Republicans on Capitol Hill have unwittingly catalyzed massive civil rights demonstrations. Part of the problem, of course, is their reckless cafeteria-style rhetoric, which vulgarly seeks its audi

Martin Kramer: Israel and the Iraq War

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt includes a section entitled"Israel and the Iraq War" (pp. 30-31). There they seek to establish that Israel's leaders, intelligence agencies, and public opinion enthusiastically supported a war to remove Saddam. Israel exerted"pressure" on the United States, fed Washington"alarming reports" on Iraq's WMD capabilities, and beat the

Ruth Rosen: Taxes ... And what progressives need to do about them

[Ruth Rosen is Visiting Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy, U.C. Berkeley.] I don’t need to remind anyone that it’s time to pay your taxes. But when will progressive politicians, intellectuals and activists learn to counter the Right's mantra that we get nothing for our hard-earned tax dollars? What we all need to do, however, is to figure out how to explain to ordinary Americans why, in fact, we do pay taxes. The Repu

Jeffrey Herf: Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism in Historical Perspective

The current (vol. 25, no. 1, March 2006) issue of The Journal of Israeli History isa special issue devoted to the theme:"Convergence and Divergence: Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism in Historical Perspective."  Viewing abstracts of the articles or ordering the issue can be done at the website of Taylor and Francis publishers. The collection includes essays on Germany, as well as the United States, England, France, Poland, Israel and Iran. . The Taylor and Francis website URL i

Garry Wills: Christ Among the Partisans

[Garry Wills is professor emeritus of history at Northwestern University and the author, most recently, of"What Jesus Meant."] THERE is no such thing as a "Christian politics." If it is a politics, it cannot be Christian. Jesus told Pilate: "My reign is not of this present order. If my reign were of this present order, my supporters would have fought against my being turned over to the Jews. But my reign is not here" (John 18:36). Jesus brought no political message or p

Gary Leupp: “Ideologies of Hatred”? What Does Condi Mean?

[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; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.] On NBC’s Meet the

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom: Misreading China ... It's time to move beyond old stereotypes

Three-quarters of a century ago, Americans often viewed China through one of two distorting lenses, both of which can be linked to famous works of popular culture of the 1930s. One was a patronizing lens that can be associated with the 1931 Pearl Buck novel "The Good Earth," and the popular 1937 film it inspired. The other was a demonizing lens that can be associated with a 1932 horror film, "The Mask of Fu Manchu." China today, of course, is a very different place. A

Garry Wills: Iraq & Vietnam

[Editor's Note: The following excerpt is drawn from Garry Wills's review of Taylor Branch's biography of Martin Luther King.] ... Of course, Branch had all but completed At Canaan's Edge before the war in Iraq began. But no one read-ing his account now can fail to see resemblances between King's protest against the war and those now criticizing ("almost traitorous") what is going on in the Middle East. Even more striking are the defenses made for the present war and what w

Keith Halderman: Louis Armstrong and Marijuana an Anecdote

[Keith Halderman is a research assistant at the Trebach Institute and is working on his Ph.D at American University. His is a member of the Liberty and Power group blog at HNN.] If we were to nominate the five most influential black people in American history the name Louis Armstrong would certainly belong on our list. His contribution to the uniquely American art form jazz was immeasurable. In 1936, French music critic Hughes Pana

Juan Cole: Exit Plan

Senator John Kerry argues that the United States should set a May 15 deadline for the formation of a national unity government in Iraq, and then set a December 31, 2006 deadline for US withdrawal. Kerry seems to be under the impression that the US is fighting "al-Qaeda" in Iraq, which is generally not true. It is fighting Sunni Arab Iraqis, whether nationalists or religious Salafi revivalists or tribesmen or good old boys. But he is right that the US military should stop doing search a

Daniel Pipes: How Israel Can Win

Since I argued in a column last week that Israel can and must defeat the Palestinian Arabs, a barrage of responses have contested this thesis. Some were trivial (Ha'aretz published an article challenging my right to opine on such matters because I do not live in Israel) but most raised serious issues that deserve an answer. The ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu observed that in war, "Let your great object be victory," and he was echoed by the 17th-century Austrian war thi

Jackson Lears: The Fate of Our Republic

[Jackson Lears is editor of Raritan and the author, most recently, of Something for Nothing: Luck in America (Viking/Penguin).] To anyone who cares about the fate of our republic, these are troubling times. Yet seldom has our public discourse seemed so inadequate to the seriousness of the situation. George W. Bush's administration has pushed us into moral and constitutional crisis, but the media remain committed to business as usual--trivializing criticism of the president as partis

Howard Zinn: America’s Blinders

Now that most Americans no longer believe in the war, now that they no longer trust Bush and his Administration, now that the evidence of deception has become overwhelming (so overwhelming that even the major media, always late, have begun to register indignation), we might ask: How come so many people were so easily fooled? The question is important because it might help us understand why Americans—members of the media as well as the ordinary citizen—rushed to declare their support

Michael Honey: In Grim Times Like These Remembering Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King Is Helpful

[Michael Honey teaches American history at the University of Washington, Tacoma, and recently held the Harry Bridges endowed chair in labor studies at the UW. He has published two previous award-winning histories of labor and civil rights in the South, and his book on Martin Luther King Jr. and the Memphis sanitation strike is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.] In recent months, southern freedom fighters Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King, and most recently, Anne Braden, a less-well known

Tom Engelhardt: The Hyperpower Hype and Where It Took Us

Mr. Engelhardt is the author of The End of Victory Culture and co-editor of History Wars, the Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past.

John Gurda: History was made — and echoed — in Latino march

[John Gurda is a Milwaukee historian.] ... The "Day without Latinos" march took place less than a mile from where I was working in downtown Milwaukee, but it escaped my notice completely. Not until the March 23 demonstration was over did I realize that history had been made. Whether the event attracted the 30,000 people claimed by its organizers or the 10,000 to 15,000 estimated by local police, it was Milwaukee's largest protest march in decade

Gary Leupp: Better Off Under Saddam

[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; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.] Saddam Hussein is

Jonathan Zimmerman: Culture wars ... Beware of presuming sameness

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He recently completed a history of American teachers in the Third World, to be published this fall.] I don't remember her name. But I can still picture my sixth grade student's frightened expression, when I asked her to give the first classroom presentation that morning. "Where I come from," she said, in a quivering voice, "girls don't go first." She was an immigr

Harvey Sicherman: The Legacy of Milosevic

[Harvey Sicherman, Ph.D., is president of the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a former aide to three U.S. secretaries of state.] Slobodan Milosevic, former President of Yugoslavia, died on March 11, 2006, in a Dutch prison before he could have been convicted of crimes committed during the Balkan Wars of the nineties. Characteristically, he had turned an international trial into a personal political platform, taking advantage of the court to prolong it for four years

Neve Gordon: Kadima's political vision actually puts the peace process into reverse

[Mr. Gordon teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University and is currently a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley’s Human Rights and Middle East Centers. He is the editor of From the Margins of Globalization: Critical Perspectives on Human Rights.] Israelis went to the polls this week with the hope of resolving the Israeli Palestinian conflict once and for all. The new political party Kadima, which means "forward" in Hebrew, promised as much and therefore