Roundup: Historians' Take

June 29, 2005

James G. Basker: The Great Benefit of the Discovery Channel Poll on Greatest Americans

James G. Basker, in a letter to the editor of HNN (6-28-05): [Mr. Basker is President of The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of English at Barnard College.] The other day, I was filling out my ballot for Major League Baseball’s All- Star Game and a thought occurred to me. It’s not terribly difficult to come up with a system to help make the tough comparisons between great players. How many home runs has a player hit? What is hi

June 28, 2005

Gil Troy: What's Wrong with Live 8

Gil Troy, in the NY Post (6-27-05):'LIVE 8," the drive to fight African famine with con certs on July 2 in Philadelphia, Paris, Rome, Berlin, London and Toronto, was launched with much hoopla. "What started 20 years ago is coming to a political point in a few weeks," Bob Geldof told the BBC. "There's more than a chance that the boys and girls with guitars will finally get to t

June 28, 2005

Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin: Bush's Bad Idea for Los Alamos

Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, in LA Times (6-27-05)[Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin are coauthors of "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer" (Knopf, 2005).]Sixty years ago, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the World War II director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, proved that there are some thing

June 26, 2005

Eric Hobsbawm: America's Neo-conservative World Supremacists Will Fail

Eric Hobsbawm, in the Guardian (6-25-05):[Mr. Hobsbawm is author of The Age of Extremes: The Short 20th Century 1914-1991. This is an edited extract from his preface to a new edition of VG Kiernan's America: The New Imperialism.]Three continuities link the global US of the cold war era with the attempt to assert world supremacy since 2001. The first is its position

June 25, 2005

Howard Zinn: The Power and the Glory

Howard Zinn, in the Boston Review: [Mr. Zinn, the author of A People's History of the United States, is a historian and playwright. His essay is adapted from a lecture he gave for MIT's Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies].The notion of American exceptionalism—that the United States alone has the right, whether by divine sanction or moral obligation, to bring civilizatio

June 24, 2005

David Meir-Levi: Occupation and Settlement: The Myth and Reality

David Meir-Levi, in the Frontpagemag.com (6-24-05)One of the most prominent and contentious issues in the media coverage and Arab propaganda regarding the Israel-Arab conflict is that of Jewish “occupation” of Arab lands and the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (hereafter WBGS). Unfortunately, these issues have been clouded with misleading rhetoric and propagandis

June 24, 2005

Juan Cole: The Revenge of Baghdad Bob

Juan Cole, at Salon.com (6-9-05):The sheer dishonesty of the Bush administration whenever it speaks about the situation in Iraq was on display again during Bush's Tuesday press conference with visiting British Prime Minister Tony Blair. In recent weeks Bush has repeatedly expressed wild optimism, utterly unfounded in reality, about the political process in Iraq and about the ability of the new Iraqi government

June 24, 2005

Arlie Hochschild: 30 Years Ago We Cared About the Common Man

Arlie Hochschild, in Tomdispatch.com (6-20-05):[Mr. Hochschild is a professor of sociology at University of California, Berkeley and the author of The Commercialization of Intimate Life as well as The Time Bind and The Second Shift.]Let's consider our political moment through a

June 23, 2005

Max Boot: Why the Rebels Will Lose

Max Boot, in the LA Times (6-23-05):No wonder public support for the war is plummeting and finger-to-the-wind politicians are heading for the exits: All the headlines out of Iraq recently have been about the rebels' reign of terror. But, lest we build up the enemy into 10-

June 23, 2005

Diane Ravitch: Ethnomathematics

Diane Ravitch, in the WSJ (6-20-05):[Diane Ravitch is Research Professor of Education at New York University. She holds the Brown Chair in Education Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., where she is a Visiting Senior Fellow and edits the Brookings Papers on Education Policy

June 23, 2005

Jack Rakove: Bush, Nader and the 'I' Word

Jack Rakove, in Salon.com (6-23-05):[Mr. Rakove is the Coe Professor of History and American Studies at Stanford University]Ralph Nader and Kevin Zeese have summoned Americans once again to utter those fearsome words that ordinarily dare not speak their name: "high crimes and misdemeanors" and,

June 22, 2005

Patricia Nelson Limerick: Hope and Gloom Out West

Patricia Nelson Limerick, in the NYT (6-22-05):[Patricia Nelson Limerick, director of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado and the author of The Legacy of Conquest and

June 22, 2005

Tom Engelhardt: Why Withdrawal Is Now on the Agenda

Tom Engelhardt, writing at www.tomdispatch.com (6-21-05): [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.] Republican Congressman Walter B. Jones (famed for insisting th

June 22, 2005

Salman Rushdie: Daggers in the Heart of Liberty

Salman Rushdie, in the Toronto Star (6-21-05):What is a "fact?" In an age beset by bitter disputes about reality, the word itself, and its close relative "truth," become embattled. "Let the facts speak for themselves," historians, politicians and

June 21, 2005

Daniel Pipes: Radical Islam as its Own Cure?

Daniel Pipes, in the Frontpagemag.com (6-21-05):I admire the work of Reuel Gerecht, an insightful and prolific writer on matters Middle Eastern, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a frequent contributor to the Weekly Standard. In 1997, I calle

June 19, 2005

Paul Johnson: The Anti-Semitic Disease

Paul Johnson, in Commentary (6-16-05)[Paul Johnson is the author of Modern Times, A History of Christianity, and A History of the Jews, among many other books.]The intensification of anti-Semitism in the Arab world over the last years and its reappearance in parts of Europe have occasioned a number of thoughtful reflections on the nature and consequences of this

June 17, 2005

Paul Johnson: What Europe Really Needs

Paul Johnson, from the WSJ Opinion Journal (6-17-05):[Mr. Johnson is the author of Modern Times, A History of Christianity, and A History of the Jews, among many other books.]That Europe as an entity is sick and the European Union as an institution is in disorder cannot be denied. But no remedies currently being discussed can possibly remedy matters. What o

June 16, 2005

Daniel Pipes: Saudis Import Slaves to America

Daniel Pipes, in the New York Sun (6-16-05):Homaidan Ali Al-Turki, 36, and his wife, Sarah Khonaizan, 35, appear to be a model immigrant couple. They arrived in America in 2000 and now live with their four children in an upscale Denver suburb. Mr. Al-Turki is a graduate st

June 13, 2005

Wilfred M. McClay: Bush's Calling

Wilfred M. McClay, in Commentary 6-5-05[Mr. McClay teaches history and humanities the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and is the author most recently of Religion Returns to the Public Square: Faith and Policy in America ( Johns Hopkins).]Among all the things that liberals loathe about George W. Bush, his religious fervor would seem to be at or near the top of the list. Some consider him a mere p

June 10, 2005

Keith Windschuttle: The Journalism of Warfare

Keith Windschuttle, in New Criterion (June 2005):In December 1996, Robert Fisk of the London newspaper The Independent traveled to the mountains north of Khartoum where he met Osama bin Laden. The opening sentences of the article he wrote about the meeting went as follows: Osama Bin Laden sat in his gold fringed robe, guarded by loyal Arab mujahedin&hellip