Roundup: Historians' Take

Martin E. Marty: Religion Used to Be Private ... How Times Have Changed

[Marty is a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he taught religious history.] Exactly 50 years ago, as I was finishing graduate school, ready to enter the circle of historians who chronicled American religious history as a largely white Protestant preserve, my adviser introduced me to Will Herberg. Here was a Jewish-existentialist-theologian-sociologist who had just published "Protestant-Catholic-Jew." Herberg, through his classic book and his presence,

Daniel Pipes: How Terrorism Obstructs Radical Islam

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] Do terrorist atrocities in the West, such as the attacks of September 11, 2001 and those in Bali, Madrid, Beslan, and London, help radical Islam achieve its goal of gaining power?No, they are counterproductive. That's because radical Islam has two distinct wings

Jonathan Cutler and Thaddeus Russell: Workers of the World ... Disunite!

[Jonathan Cutler is a professor of sociology at Wesleyan University and the author of 'Labor's Time: Shorter Hours, the UAW, and the Struggle for American Unionism.' Thaddeus Russell is a professor of history at Barnard College and the author of 'Out of the Jungle: Jimmy Hoffa and the Remaking of the American Working Class.'] The growing rift between insurgents in the AFL-CIO and the leadership of the labor federation looks increasingly like civil war.... The heyday of

Edmund Morris: Presidents Need to Keep Their Distance

[Edmund Morris is the author of "Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan," "Theodore Rex" and a forthcomingbiography of Beethoven.] CINDY Sheehan's attempt to have President Bush tell her - again - how sorry he is about the death of her son in Iraq is escalating into a protest more political than personal. As such, it is a legitimate expression of antiwar sentiment. But the individual cry for attention at the heart of it - "Mr. President, feel my pain!" - is m

Harvey Sicherman: King Fahd’s Saudi Arabia

[Harvey Sicherman, Ph.D., is President of the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a former aide to three U.S. secretaries of state. His latest essay “Cheap Hawks, Cheap Doves, and American Strategy” is forthcoming in the Fall 2005 issue of Orbis.] On August 2, 2005, Saudi King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz was laid to rest in an unmarked grave. Wrapped simply in a brown robe, his bier borne by family after the briefest of funeral services, Fahd’s end gave no clue to his life. He had been one of th

Daniel Pipes: The End of Treason

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] News reports from Britain indicate that three Islamist leaders in that country – Omar Bakri Mohammed, Abu Uzair, and Abu Izzadeen – could face treason charges.The first two of them said, after

Roger Pulvers: The Japanese Diplomat Who Saved the Lives of Jews

Exactly 60 years ago, during the evening of Aug. 14, 1945, Emperor Hirohito recorded the speech of surrender to be broadcast to the Japanese nation the next day at noon.Aug. 15, 1945 found Chiune Sugihara, his wife, Yukiko, and their three little children in Romania, interned there by the Red Army. It was unclear what their fate would be. Japan had been officially at war with the Soviet Union, albeit for only a few days. Who was Chiune Sugihara, and how did he c

Juan Cole: Iraqis Shouldn't Rush Constitution-Writing Just to Get a Deal

[Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan] Meetings are still being held on the final issues bedeviling the finalization of the Iraqi constitution. Iraqi government spokesmen keep saying that 16 or 17 issues are outstanding and all should be resolved by August 15. In fact, most of these issues are intractable (Should Iraq be a centralized state, a federal state, or a very loose federal state? Should religious law be applied to personal status issues like marri

Karen Armstrong: On Misreading Holy Books

[Karen Armstrong is the author of The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism] Human beings, in nearly all cultures, have long engaged in a rather strange activity. They have taken a literary text, given it special status and attempted to live according to its precepts. These texts are usually of considerable antiquity yet they are expected to throw light on situations that their authors could not have imagined. In times of crisis, people turn to their scriptures with renewed ze

Daniel Pipes: Today Gaza, Tomorrow Jerusalem?

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] Are Israel's critics correct? Does the"occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza cause the Palestinian Arabs' anti-Semitism, their suicide factories, and their terrorism? And is it true these horrors will end only when Israeli civilians and troops leave the territories?Th

Juan Cole: Blowback, Big Time

Juan Cole, at his blog (8-2-05): Once upon a time, a dangerous radical gained control of the US Republican Party. Reagan increased the budget for support of the radical Muslim Mujahidin conducting terrorism against the Afghanistan government to half a billion dollars a year. One fifth of the

Samuel Huntington: Atheists ARE Outsiders in America

Samuel Huntington, in the WSJ (June 16, 2004):The battle over the Pledge of Allegiance has stimulated vigorous controversy on an issue central to America's identity. Opponents of "under God" (which was added to the pledge in 1954) argue that the United States is a secular country, that the First Amendment prohibits rhetorical or material state support for religion, and

Bernard Lewis: The UN Is Likely to Botch the Job in Iraq

Bernard Lewis, in the WSJ (May 12, 2004):The U.S. turn to the United Nations for help in Iraq raises two questions, one of perception, the other of substance.There can be no doubt that this appeal, in the context of the events in Fallujah, will be perceived in many circles in the Middle East -- and not only in the Middle East -- as signifying fea

Tom Engelhardt: It's Bush Administration Officials Who Are Drawing the Vietnam Parallels Now

Tom Engelhardt, in www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation InstituteHere was part of a May 4 conversation between Larry King and Colin Powell on Larry King Live about the photos from Abu Ghraib, and it was distinctly from the"a-few-bad-eggs" school of Iraqi analysis: "KING: Let's go one by one. First, let's discuss the a

Paul Kennedy: The U.S. Is Already in Decline

Mike Steketee, in the Australian (May 7, 2004):THERE are increasing signs the US has overreached and faces decline despite its unrivalled military and economic power, according to Paul Kennedy, a leading historian. In Sydney to address the Future Summit, a major conference on the nation's future, Professor Kennedy, of Yale University, said the US was top-heavy in expensive Cold War weapons systems such as nuclear submarines and suffered from a

Most Historians Doubt Clinton's Book Will Be of Great Value

From the Associated Press (May 3, 2004):As President Clinton rushes to finish his memoirs, he faces the more pressing task of writing a book deemed worthy of all the attention, an accomplishment no president has pulled off since Ulysses S. Grant. Some leading historians have ideas on how Clinton could do it.``He's an intelligent fellow and if he writes as well as he talks, he could make an interesting contribution to history,'' says Arthur M. Schlesin

Juan Cole: The U.S. Is Losing Control in Iraq

Excepts from the blog of historian Juan Cole, April 6-12, 2004:Hamza Hendawi of AP points out that the US offensives in Fallujah and the Shiite south have been extremely costly politically. Interim Governing Council members grew openly critical, and one suspended his membership on the council. The minister of human rights resigned in protest. The appointment of a minister of human rights in Iraq was treated as a great pr

Kenneth C. Davis: The Founding Fathers Might Have Appreciated Michael Newdow's Campaign to Rid the Pledge of Allegiance of the Words "Under God"

Kenneth C. Davis, in the NYT (March 26, 2004), writing about Michael Newdow's lawsuit against the Pledge of Allegiance: ... Eighteenth-century America was largely Christian and overwhelmingly Protestant, and the dominant Protestant denominations (Congregationalism in New England, the Anglican Church in the South) even enjoyed state subsidies. Quakers were hanged in the early Coloni

Wacky French Intellectuals Blame the U.S. for All the World's Troubles

Laurent Murawiec, a senior policy analyst with the RAND Corporation in Washington, D.C. and the author of a new translation of Carl von Clausewitz's On War (into French) in frontpagemag.com (April 15, 2004):Whence comes the phenomenon known as fundamentalist Islam or Islamism? Some French analysts from a range of disciplines (international affairs, Orientalism, security studies, journalism) have

Lewis Gould: Bush Is Learning that the Presidency Is More than Photo-Ops

Lewis Gould, in the Wash Post (April 18, 2004):There comes a moment in almost every presidency when an unpleasant bit of reality intrudes upon the happy routine of striking media poses, harvesting reelection money and rubbing the egos of political allies. It's a moment when the unique burdens of the Oval Office begin to weigh upon its occupant more heavily than before,