Roundup: Historians' Take

Roger Pulvers: What price social equality since the ventriloquists' putsch?

On the fourth anniversary of the 9/11 atrocity, is it too early to talk of a Bush legacy? What vision has the administration of President George W. Bush bestowed on the United States as a result of the terrorist attacks that day? Without that shattering event to give "definition" to his presidency, in all probability Bush would have become just as ineffectual a one-termer as James Buchanan, the president whose impotent leadership split his Democratic Party and aggravated tensio

Michael Bassett: Victory By New Zealand's Labour Would Lead To Instability

[Michael Bassett, a minister in the 1980s Lange Labour government, is a political historian who won a Qantas Media Award in 2004 as New Zealand's best political columnist.] New Zealand's 2005 election was always the Labour incumbent's to lose. Yet there's a 70-30 chance Prime Minister Helen Clark will emerge in two weeks' time as Labour's first leader to win three elections on the trot. With 218,000 special votes yet to be counted, our odd mixed member proportional system could yet

Gavan McCormack and Wada Haruki: The Strange Record of 15 Years of Japan-North Korea Negotiations

No country is closer to Japan than Korea. From ancient times, the two neighbors have enjoyed intimate exchanges. Yet today Japan has relations with only one of the two Korean states, and even that relationship is contentious. While Japan normalized relations with the Republic of Korea (ROK or South Korea) in 1965, it has not yet formally recognized the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea). This asymmetry is a major obstacle not only to repairing Japanese-Korean relations o

Ted Steinberg: Our Tsunami?

[Ted Steinberg is a professor of history and law at Case Western Reserve University. Among his books are Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America (Oxford University Press, 2000), Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History (Oxford University Press, 2002), and the forthcoming American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn, to be published by W.W. Norton & Company in March.] Is Hurricane Katrina "our tsunami," as the mayor of Biloxi, Miss., A

Martin E. Marty: The High Price the Catholic Church Paid for Its Opposition to Birth Control

[Martin E. Marty's biography, current projects, upcoming events, publications, and contact information can be found at http://www.illuminos.com.] Twice a year, two-score Midwest historians of Christianity, more of them Roman Catholic than not, gather at the Cushwa Center at the University of Notre Dame. We celebrate and criticize one book each meeting. This time it was Catholic University of America Professor Leslie Woodcock Tentler's Catholi

Geneive Abdo: Is the U.S. Ready for Egyptian Democracy?

In the wake of Egypt's reelection of President Hosni Mubarak on Sept. 7, the chattering classes have been pouring praise on Mubarak's government for a vote they view as a first step toward shattering a half-century of authoritarian rule. For the first time in Egyptian history, multiple candidates were allowed to stand in the election. And many assume that credit is due the Bush administration for its persistent pleas for democracy in the Arab world. But the far more significant outc

Joshua Brown: Mission Not Accomplished (Illustration)

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Martin Kramer: When Scholars Make Predictions About the Middle East I Keep Track

I collect predictions made by academics about the Middle East. Many of my critics rebuke me for it. Joel Beinin huffs:"It is not the task of scholars engaged in university based teaching and research to engage in such predictions." Fred Halliday puffs:"Failure to predict, as anyone educated in the basics of the phil

Daniel Pipes: Christianity Dying In Its Birthplace

What some observers are calling a pogrom took place near Ramallah, West Bank, on the night of September 3-4. That's when 15 Muslim youths from one village, Dair Jarir, rampaged against Taybeh, a neighboring all-Christian village of 1,500 people. The reason for the assault? A Muslim woman from Dair Jarir, Hiyam Ajaj, 23, fell in love with her Christian boss, Mehdi Khouriyye, owner of a tailor shop in Taybeh. The couple maintained a clandestine two-year affair and she became pregnant

Ari Kelman: America's Underclass Exposed

Live, in color, and beamed into our homes 24 hours a day, Americans have been dying. The ill, untended and desperate; the young mothers, staggering out of the Convention Center, clinging to hollow-eyed babies; the elderly, trapped in attics, calling for help that won't be coming; and the corpses, floating in fetid water. If the storm was a Category 4 when it made landfall, the images left in its wake are Category 5 or more. They have the power to topple not buildings but myths, so d

Daniel Pipes: What If The United States Had Not Invaded Iraq

Much would be different had George W. Bush not decided to invade Iraq. In some ways, the situation would be worse: The Iraqi population would still suffer under the totalitarian rule of Saddam Hussein. The shaky economy, car bombs and ethnic unrest that Iraqis face today are far lesser evils compared with the poverty, injustice, brutality and barbarism that was their fate between 1979 and 2003. Regional security would be imperiled. Saddam Hussein invaded tw

Kevin Baker: What Would Founding Fathers Think of America Today?

Kevin Baker, appearing on 'CNN in the Money' (July 4 2004): HEADLINE: America Celebrates Independence Day; How Would Fouding Father's View America Today? GUESTS: Kevin Baker, Dr. Gary Namie, Sandy Baum, Lawrence Kersten BYLINE: Jack Cafferty, Andy Serwer, Susan Lisovicz, Christine Romans, Allen Wastler CAFFERTY: ... We were thinking a little bit back to the founding fathers who got this whole the experiment underway about 236 years or so ago and wondering how close

Ted Steinberg: A Natural Disaster, a Man-Made Catastrophe, and a Human Tragedy

[Ted Steinberg is a professor of history and law at Case Western Reserve University. Among his books are Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America (Oxford University Press, 2000), Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History (Oxford University Press, 2002), and the forthcoming American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn, to be published by W.W. Norton & Company in March.] ... there is a great deal that the [2004] tsunami and the present h

Simon Winchester: Too Bad We Didn't Follow the Example Set by San Francisco After the Earthquake of 1907

[Simon Winchester is the author of the forthcoming book "A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906."] THE last time a great American city was destroyed by a violent caprice of nature, the response was shockingly different from what we have seen in New Orleans. In tone and tempo, residents, government institutions and the nation as a whole responded to the earthquake that brought San Francisco to its knees a century ago in a manne

Juan Cole: Christopher Hitchens Is Still Hopeful About Iraq?

Bush administration foot-dragging and ineptitude in handling the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans has profoundly demoralized his supporters on the right. The hawkish intellectuals who gathered around George W. Bush to support his "War on Terror" once used language that suggested his machine-like omnicompetence. The Afghanistan War was to be "Operation Infinite Justice" until it was pointed out that Allah was the only one in that part of the world generally permit

Eric Foner: The Power of Outrage

This time the Bush Administration could not hide the dead bodies--or the walking wounded, whose abandonment by American society began not in the hurricane's wake but many years earlier. The only bright spot in this man-made disaster has been the wave of public outrage at the Bush Administration's abject failure to provide aid to the most vulnerable. Indeed, it is hard to think of a time, other than at the height of the civil rights movement, when the plight of poor black Southerner

Daniel Pipes: L.A.'s Thwarted Terror Spree

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] The Jewish High Holidays this year fall in early October, and that's when a massacre was planned against two Los Angeles synagogues, as well as other targets, according to an

Tom Engelhardt: The Perfect Storm and the Feral City

[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.] The headline was:"Direct hit in New Orleans could mean a modern Atlantis," and the first paragraph

Joshua Brown: Baghdad or New Orleans (Illustration)

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Niall Ferguson: Looking for a Scapegoat for Katrina

[Niall Ferguson is Professor of History at Harvard.] Disasters happen. Two hundred and fifty years ago, on November 1, 1755, the Portuguese capital, Lisbon, was flattened by an earthquake that killed thousands of its inhabitants. Like the hurricane that inundated New Orleans last week, the calamity inspired not only awe at the power of nature and sympathy for the helpless victims, but also all kinds of moral commentary. None was more profound than that of the French philosopher Volt