Roundup: Historians' Take

May 18, 2005

Daniel Pipes: CAIR's Hate Crimes Nonsense

Daniel Pipes, at frontpagemag.com (5-18-05):Should you read Unequal Protection: The Status of Muslim Civil Rights in the United States 2005, an annual report issued last week by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), you'll learn how the Muslim experience in America is worsening. Specifically, the number of"anti-Muslim hate crimes in the United States" has gone up dramatically: from 42 cases in 2002,

May 17, 2005

Daniel Pipes: Business as Usual in the Palestinian Authority

Daniel Pipes, in the NY Sun (5-17-05):Yasser Arafat's demise in November excited great hopes among those who saw his malign personality as the main reason for Palestinian intransigence.But those of us who saw the problem as larger than Arafat – as resulting, rather, from the deep radicalization of the Palestinian body politic – expected little change. Indeed, I wrote at the

May 16, 2005

Ernest R. May: Why the 9-11 Commission Succeeded

Ernest R. May, writing in the New Republic about his experience as a consultant to the 9-11 Commission (3-16-05):... My job was to help produce the historical narrative. For this task, I had two comparative advantages. The first was a long career as a historian. The second was a lack of partisan bias. Many years earlier, I had been a commissioner myself. The commission was to re

May 16, 2005

Fouad Ajami: How the Middle East Became George W. Country

Fouad Ajami, in the WSJ (5-16-05):"George W. Bush has unleashed a tsunami on this region," a shrewd Kuwaiti merchant who knows the way of his world said to me. The man had no patience with the standard refrain that Arab reform had to come from within, that a foreign power cannot alter the age-old ways of the Arabs. "Everything here -- the borders of th

May 13, 2005

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.: Bush's Rewriting of the History of Yalta

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., at the Hufflington Blog (5-9-05):The Yalta conference in February 1945 produced, according to President Bush, "one of the greatest wrongs of history." The Yalt

May 13, 2005

Jon Wiener: How the Media Framed the Columbia University Story--And How It Should Have

Jon Wiener, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (5-9-05): [Jon Wiener is a professor of history at the University of California at Irvine and author of Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud and Politics in the Ivory Tower (The New Press, 2005).]The media storm around Columbia's Middle Eastern-studies department provides one of the few cases in which students' complaints about professors' classroom conduct

May 12, 2005

Geremie Barmé: The Antecedents to the Current Sino-Japanese Conflict

Geremie Barmé presented this at a conference organized by Li Narangoa and Tessa Morris-Suzuki and revised it for Japan Focus. He is Professor in the Division of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University. His recent books include In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture. May 4 2005 marked the 76th anniversary of the iconic Chinese patriotic protest movement. It was the day in 1919 when students

May 12, 2005

Bernard Lewis: The Two Changes that Sabotaged Democracy in the Middle East

Bernard Lewis, in Foreign Affairs (May/June 2005): ... The Islamic tradition insists very strongly on two points concerning the conduct of government by the ruler. One is the need for consultation. This is explicitly recommended in the Koran. It is also mentioned very frequently in the traditions of the Prophet. The converse is despotism; in Ar

May 10, 2005

Daniel Pipes: Some Palestinians Are Inspired by Israel's Democracy

Daniel Pipes, in the NY Sun (5-10-05):For all their rhetoric about Israel's"vicious" and"brutal" occupation, Palestinian Arabs - including their leaders - sometimes let down their guard and acknowledge how they prefer Israel to the Palestinian Authority. Here are some recurring themes:Restraints on violence. After PA police raided the house of a Hamas supporter in a late-night operation and roughed up

May 7, 2005

David Ekbladh: We Should Remember that Nation-Building in Korea Took 52 Years

David Ekbladh, in the Wilson Quarterly (April 2005): [David Ekbladh is a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He is currently completing a history of modernization as an instrument of U.S. foreign relations during the 20th century.] ... American involvement in Korea began in the backwash of World War II, but it took on increasing significa

May 7, 2005

Tom Engelhardt: Did Both the US and USSR Lose the Cold War?

Tom Engelhardt, at the website, TomDispatch.com (5-2-05): [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.] Of the two superpowers that faced each other d

May 6, 2005

Ron Chernow: Why the Attempt by Some Republicans to Eviscerate the Courts Is Unwise

Ron Chernow, in the NYT (5-6-05)[Ron Chernow is the author, most recently, of "Alexander Hamilton."]LEADING evangelical conservatives are taking on the federal judiciary, which they see as hostile to religion, and they have much more in mind than simply putting an end to Senate filibusters against judicial nominees. Some have now proposed that Congress cut off federal financing for judges and even abolish some lower-level courts that they feel have issued decisi

May 5, 2005

David Brooks: Militant Secularists Should Remember Lincoln's Use of Religion

David Brooks, in the NYT (5-5-05): On Sept. 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln gathered his cabinet to tell them he was going to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. He said he had made a solemn vow to the Almighty that if God gave him victory at Antietam, Lincoln would issue the decree.Lincoln's colleagues were stunned. They were not used to his basing policy on promises made to the Lord. They asked him to repeat

May 5, 2005

Ken A. Grant: The Danger in the New Pope's Marriage of Religion and Politics

Ken A. Grant, in the newsletter of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School (5-5-05): [Ken A. Grant is a doctoral candidate in church history at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago.]Wading into the turbulent waters of the relationship between church and state is always a treacherous affair, whether entering from the church or state side. With the installation of Pope Benedict XVI, we might be reminded of this fact.Cardinal Joseph

May 5, 2005

Max Boot: Why the Brits Don't Care If Blair Lied

Max Boot, in the LAT (5-5-05): How can you tell if a political party is brain-dead? Easy. It spends an entire campaign denouncing the incumbent as a smarmy, good-for-nothing liar, rather than outlining its own agenda. The Republicans tried it against Bill Clinton in 1996, the Democrats tried it against George W. Bush in 2004, and now in Britain the Conservatives a

May 3, 2005

Matthew Dennis: The Danger of Prayer Breakfasts

Matthew Dennis, in the Eugene, Ore. Register-Guard (5-1-05): [Matthew Dennis, professor of history at the University of Oregon, is the author of "Red, White, and Blue Letter Days: An American Calendar."]Since the beginning of the republic itself, the role of religion in American life has been controversial - even as the United States supposedly became a more secular society, and even in Oregon, statistically the least churched state in the union.A case in poi

May 3, 2005

Daniel Pipes: Why We Shouldn't Be Buddy-Buddy with Hamas

Daniel Pipes, in the New York Sun (5-3-05):The Bush administration's push for quick democracy in the Middle East has an increasingly clear implication: if Islamist organizations such as Hamas are to be likely electoral winners, Western powers should stop classifying them as terrorists and instead come to terms with them.This conclusion follows from suc

April 29, 2005

Tom Engelhardt: Those Persistent Vietnam Echoes

Tom Engelhardt, at tomdispatch.com (4-25-05):[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.] Okay, okay, Iraq's not Vietnam. For one thi

April 29, 2005

David Starkey: Gunpowder Plot was England's 9/11

Nick Britten, in the London Daily Telegraph (4-22-05): FOUR hundred years after the Gunpowder Plot, the broadcaster David Starkey warned yesterday that the lessons of terrorism had not been learnt and history was repeating itself. Dr Starkey said Islamic fundamentalists had the same incentive and were acting in "precisely the same way" as those behind the conspiracy to blow up James I and spark a Catholic uprising. The historian and constituti

April 29, 2005

Martin Kramer: Columbia's Misguided Search for a Israel Studies Scholar

Martin Kramer, at his blog (4-29-05):Last month, Columbia University announced with much fanfare that it would establish a chair of Israel studies. Four generous trustees threw in $3 million to make it happen—and to help extricate the university from its crisis.