Roundup: Historians' Take

Victor Davis Hanson: Interview

Name: John Matel Thanks for joining us this morning. We have several questions already, so we can start immediately. My name is John Matel and I am your moderator for this chat. To fill the lag time between when Dr. Hanson get and reads the questions and when he can type in the answers, I will post comments with links to sites of related interest to keep the flow going. Other than that, my only role is to pass along questions. The opinions Dr. Hanson expresses are his own.

Maurice Isserman: David Horowitz and the Truth

[Maurice Isserman is professor of history at Hamilton College . The author of many books, he is currently writing a history of Himalayan mountaineering.] One way to fight back against contemporary assaults on the values of the American academy is to expose lies when we hear them. In that spirit, I offer the following story, which suggests how little respect conservative activist David Horowitz has for the truth when it proves politically inconvenient. On Tuesday evening

Juan Cole: Why US Troops Have to Begin Leaving Iraq Now

The hundreds of thousands of protesters who came out throughout the world on Saturday were demanding a US and British withdrawal from Iraq. The protesters are right that we have to get US ground troops out of Iraq. The issue is not the rights and wrongs of the war. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There was no nuclear program, and the mushroom clouds with which Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice menaced us were figments of their fevered imaginations, no m

Robert McElvaine: Is God a Terrorist?

[Robert McElvaine is Professor of History at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, and author of Eve's Seed.] Is God a terrorist? Many self-professed Christians seem to think so. The devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina provided a sodden, gruesome opportunity for some who call themselves Christians to vent their distortions of the religion of Jesus. They did so by extending the old idea that a deadly storm like Katrina is an "act of God." &qu

Joel Kotkin: History Tells Us that in Disasters It's Local Authorities Who Make the Difference

[Mr. Kotkin, an Irvine Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of "The City: A Global History" (Modern Library, 2005).] ... The huge discrepancy between the Texas and Louisiana responses should call into question the assumptions that have been trumpeted since Katrina. Foremost, we need to reconsider the central focus on the role of the federal government. Historically, the first responders in a crisis have been local officials, the province being more on

Ira Katznelson: New Deal, Raw Deal ... How Aid Became Affirmative Action for Whites

Hurricane Katrina's violent winds and waters tore away the shrouds that ordinarily mask the country's racial pattern of poverty and neglect. Understandably, most commentators have focused on the woeful federal response. Others, taking a longer view, yearn for a burst of activism patterned on the New Deal. But that nostalgia requires a heavy dose of historical amnesia. It also misses the chance to come to terms with how the federal government in the 1930s and 1940s contributed to the persi

Ruth Rosen: Get Hitched, Young Woman

Why have “out-of wedlock” pregnancies suddenly entered the national debate over President’s Bush’s astonishingly incompetent failure to rescue the poor in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina? The answer is obvious: It’s a great way to change the subject, and to remind us that in contemporary America, only unmarried mothers fail to demonstrate “personal responsibility.” Never mind that neither the Pentagon nor Congress can account for the $200 billion that have been spent

Daniel Pipes: Enforce Islamic Law in Canada?

In 1991, the Canadian province of Ontario passed what seemed at the time to be an enlightened, multicultural piece of legislation. Called the Arbitration Act, it stipulates that if two parties agree to engage a commercial, religious, or other arbitrator to settle a civil dispute, the provincial authorities will then enforce the verdict, so long as it is in accord with Canadian law. "People can use any arbitrator they want and can use a religious framework if it is mutually acce

Niall Ferguson: What happens if we pull out of Iraq? Think Beirut - to the power of 10

[Niall Ferguson is Professor of History at Harvard University and a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. http://www.niallferguson.org] There is a wonderful Rudyard Kipling short story entitled On the City Walls, which can be read as a kind of metaphor for British rule in India - and perhaps for our apparent misrule in Iraq today. The city in question - Lahore, thinly disguised - is seething with communal antagonism between numerou

Matthew Mulcahy: Hurricanes, Poverty, and Vulnerability: An Historical Perspective

[Matthew Mulcahy is associate professor of history at Loyola College in Maryland. His book, Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribean, 1624-1783, will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press in December, 2005.] ... The word hurricane derives from the Native American word huracán. Native American groups throughout the Caribbean basin recognized huracán (spelled in a variety of ways) as a powerful god or supernatural force under the control of a god. The Taino Ind

Immanuel Wallerstein: Katrina ... The Politics of Incompetence and Decline

The entire world has been following with stupefaction the incredible performance of the U.S. federal government's response to the physical and human disaster of the hurricane Katrina. All the television networks of the U.S. and of many other countries plus all the major newspapers have been following the story in detail. The general reaction has been to ask how could the government of the richest and most powerful country in the world have reacted to this disaster as poorly as, or even much less

Juan Cole: No, We Can't Immediately Withdraw from Iraq

Michael Schwartz argues that the US military cannot play any positive role in preventing an all-out Iraqi civil war and should therefore get out of Iraq. I just cannot understand this sort of argument. Iraq is not now having a conventional civil war, in which you'd have militias fielding 2,000 or 3,000 men against one another and vying over territory. If such a civil war broke out, of course the US military could stop it

Victor Davis Hanson: Our Media Hurricane

Remember all of this about Hurricane Katrina? The destruction was the result of global warming. And it was made worse by too many troops off in Iraq. Endemic racism and neglected environmental legislation were as toxic as flood. Military assets were unused due to incompetence or heartlessness. The neglect of the victims was an indictment of a crass and uncaring society. But none of that ad hoc "analysis" proved conclusive. Yes, Hurricane Katrina r

Ted Widmer: Whatever Became of Presidential Peacemaking?

One hundred years ago, at 3:47 p.m. on Sept. 5, 1905, the American presidency became a global institution. That is the precise moment when the Treaty of Portsmouth was signed, ending the Russo-Japanese War and bringing enormous credit to the treaty's architect, Theodore Roosevelt. For single-mindedly willing it into existence, Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize -- the only time a sitting American president has done so. Today, we are a far stronger nation in nearly every category than we were th

Jim Sleeper: Forget the cheap slogans. Saving a city is hard and dirty work.

Excuse me, but we’ve been here already. Before our Compassionate Conservative-in-Chief bumbles any further toward diverting billions of dollars from the existing budget to create "enterprise zones" and an “ownership society” in the Gulf Coast for people who didn't invest their wealth justly in the first place, he -- and liberals, too -- might study how New York City rose above devastation as bad as New Orleans' before September 11. Only hard-won syntheses of left and right got New York

Mark Safranski: The Need for Soldier-Statesmen

Whether you view the War on Terror through the prism of William Lind's 4GW theory, Dr. Barnett's PNM taxonomies, John Robb's " open-source" warfare or more orthodox perspectives, globalization is making demands upon American military officers more reminiscient of the late 19th century than the 20th. A commander today must be more than a specialist in the military arts and an inspirational leader in the field; increasingly they are dealing with questions of politics and diplomacy once r

Jim Sleeper: Allan Bloom and the Conservative Mind

CONSERVATIVES in 1987 may still have been basking in Ronald Reagan's ''morning in America,'' but nothing prepared their movement, or the academic and publishing worlds, for the wildfire success of Allan Bloom's ''Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students.'' Amid a furor recalling that over William F. Buckley Jr.'s ''God and Man at Yale'' in 1951, Bloom indicted liberal academics for betraying liberal education. His atta

Lawrence Goldstone: The White Washing of American History

CONVENTIONAL wisdom in publishing these days holds that, in order to be commercial, any book on the founding of the United States has to be "a story of triumph," an 18th century "Seabiscuit." Muddying the picture by suggesting, for example, that slavery had a lot more to do with the forging of the Constitution than is generally assumed creates a story of failure. Failure does not sell. Americans certainly have been treated to a number of rosy portrayals of the fr

Daniel Pipes: Musharraf's Historic Speech

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] When the Malaysian currency tanked in late 1997, the country's then-prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, said he had "definite information" that Jews were the cause. "We do not want to say that this is a plot by the Jews, but in reality it is a Jew who trigge

Christopher Morris: Post-Civil War Deals with the Feds Ensured a New Orleans Society Dominated by Whites

Once again the entire country is confronted with the legacy of Reconstruction. It is too simple to chalk up the tragedy of New Orleans to the force of nature, or to an unfathomable God. Hurricanes, like earthquakes, tornadoes, eruptions and tsunamis, do come, but who or what sends them is only half the story. Such disasters, whatever their origin, smash into worlds of our making. In the case of New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina hit a city of intractable poverty, in which t