Roundup: Historians' Take

October 20, 2004

Paul Johnson: The Dirtiest Election Ever Was ...

Paul Johnson, in the WSJ (Oct. 20, 2004): The two most significant elections in American history were in 1789 and 1793, when George Washington was elected, then re-elected as president. They were significant because he, by character and experience, was the ideal man to launch the new republic as its First Magistrate. Everyone knew this, including Washington himself, though he accepted with "

October 20, 2004

David Herbert Donald: Comparing Bush and Lincoln

Mike Pride interviews David Herbert Donald, in the Concord Monitor (Oct. 17, 2004):...I wonder if you would compare the way your historical Lincoln sought to lead with the way President Bush has led. I find it difficult to understand George Bush. But my feeling is that he and a small group of advisers have made up their minds that these things ought to be done, and

October 20, 2004

Geoffrey Nunberg: So Did We Learn Who Bush and Kerry Really Are from the Debates?

Geoffrey Nunberg, in Newsday (Oct. 17, 2004): [Geoffrey Nunberg is the author of "Going Nucular: Language, Politics and Culture in Controversial Times" and a Stanford University linguist.]The televison commentaries on this year's presidential debates have continued a grand tradition of sporting metaphors that runs back to the first Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960. "It's Sammy Sosa versus Pedro Martinez." "Nobody hit a home run." "Kerry's

October 19, 2004

Robert G. Rabil: Why Breaking Up Iraq Would Be an Awful Idea

Robert G. Rabil, in the Daily Star (Oct. 16, 2004): [Robert G. Rabil is a visiting professor of Middle East studies at Florida Atlantic University and the author of "Embattled Neighbors: Syria, Israel and Lebanon."]With Iraq at the center of the U.S. presidential election, the ongoing debate over how to pacify the country is reaching fever pitch in Washington. Two parallel ideas are gaining traction. One is that Iraq be broken up into three states. The

October 19, 2004

Nicholas Turse: How the Pentagon Is Building Human Robots to Fight Future Wars

Nicholas Turse, at tomdispatch.com, a web log of the Nation Institute (Oct. 2004):[Nicholas Turse is doctoral candidate at the Center for the History & Ethics of Public Health in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. He writes regularly for Tomdispatch on the military-corporate complex as well as for

October 19, 2004

Alexander Keyssar: Why Electoral College Reform Is Not Only Essential--But Doable (In 1969 We Almost Got Rid of It)

Alexander Keyssar, in the Boston Globe (Oct. 17, 2004):ONE OF THE MORE surprising features of the controversy surrounding the 2000 election was its failure to spark any sustained effort to abolish or reform the Electoral College. When it first became apparent that Al Gore had won the popular vote but lost the election, some politicians and pundits predicted that the end had

October 18, 2004

Michael Beschloss: Gerald Ford's Gift to Democracy ... Presidential Debates

Michael Beschloss, in the NYT (Oct. 17, 2004):Smoking a pipe in his Kansas City hotel room just before the 1976 Republican convention, behind by 30 points in some polls, President Gerald Ford told advisers that he had to "do something dramatically different" to win re-election. What he did enhanced American democracy, but it has been a specter for incumbent pr

October 16, 2004

H.D.S. Greenway: Did We Go to War to Stiffen Our Moral Fiber? (It's Happened Before)

H.D.S. Greenway, in the Boston Globe (Oct. 15, 2004): Curiously, before the slaughter in the trenches taught them otherwise, many Europeans in 1914 welcomed the coming apocalypse as a cleansing force for the moral good of nations, a sweeping away of what they thought had become corrupt and decadent.There was also a strong belief in empire, of the civilizing effects of what Europeans could teach "those lesser breeds without the law," as Rudyard Kipling put it. The last

October 16, 2004

Juan Cole: Now You Get to Choose Between Bush's View of the War on Terrorism and Kerry's

Juan Cole, at his blog (Oct. 14, 2004):The visions for the American future laid out by George W. Bush and John Kerry differ starkly on matters of war and peace, and the shape of American power in the Middle East. Bush has put enormous resources into the Iraq war compared to those he has committed to fighting al-Qaeda. Kerry pledges to concentrate on stamping out al-Qaeda. The American public has a clear choice between a co

October 13, 2004

Alexander N. Yakovlev: Perestroika Creator Fears Reversal

Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times, 10 Oct. 2004 There was a time when the word"perestroika" evoked visions of hope and change. The term means"reconstruction," and what was being rebuilt in those heady years of the late 1980s was the Soviet Union's entire relationship with its citizens and the world outside. These days, many Russians talk about perestroika with more scorn than reverence because millions here have been plunged into poverty by its free-market reforms. Peopl

October 13, 2004

Roger Kimball: Jacques Derrida's Malevolent Influence

Roger Kimball, in the WSJ (Oct. 12, 2004):It's not every French intellectual whose death is commemorated by an announcement from the office of Jacques Chirac, the French president. But Jacques Derrida, who died Friday at age 74, was not just any French intellectual. His work, as Mr. Chirac's office noted, was "read, discussed, and taught around the world."Whether Mr. Derrida was als

October 9, 2004

Jon Wiener: Rock the Vote (1972 and 2004)

Jon Wiener, in the Nation (Oct. 8, 2004): [http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041025&s=wiener] The same week a federal judge in Los Angeles ordered the FBI to release the last ten pages of its file on John Lennon, a group of rock musicians, headed by Bruce Springsteen, began an election-year concert tour of battleground states. The two recent events had a strange but distinct resonance.

October 9, 2004

Anne G. Myles: The Striking Parallels Between the Way Bush Talks About Iraq and the Way Americans in the 1790's Talked About Algiers

Anne G. Myles, at Common-Place.org (Oct. 2004): [Anne G. Myles is assistant professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa. She has published numerous articles on various aspects of dissent and gender in early America.] About midway through my undergraduate seminar on American captivity narratives last fall, we were discussing one of the earliest American literary works to deploy this essenti

October 9, 2004

Gil Troy: My School Should Have Shown the Courage to Let Ehud Barak Speak

Gil Troy, in the National Post (Oct. 7, 2004): [Gil Troy is professor of history at McGill University. This article is based on a speech professor Troy delivered at a rally in Montreal on Oct. 5.] Today, I feel very alone, very concerned, and very sad. Concordia University has barred former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak from speaking on campus, citing a "security risk assessment" that deems hosting him too dangerous, and far too many of us have greeted it

October 5, 2004

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.: Why He's Scared of a Bush Victory

Rick Shenkman, reporting for HNN (Oct. 4, 2004):Speaking at the 92nd Street Y in New York City Sunday night, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. warned that "if Bush is reelected he will take that as an endorsement of his policies," including the doctrine of preemptive war, "and make likely a preventive war against Iran." He warned that President

October 5, 2004

William Marina: Bush Has Lost the Mandate of Heaven

William Marina, at the website of the Independent Institute (Oct. 3, 200):[William Marina is Research Fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif., and Professor Emeritus in History at Florida Atlantic University.]Since at least the epic of Job described in the Bible, humans have tried to understand why their God has inflicted cruelties upon believers. Many years ago, I recall my daughte

October 5, 2004

Catherine A. Corman: "Homeland Security . . . Fighting Terrorism Since 1492"

Catherine A. Corman, at Common-Place (Oct. 2004):[A nonresident fellow at the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University, Cathy Corman lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, with her husband and eleven-year-old triplets and is completing two book manuscripts, one about Indian literacy during the removal era, the other a series of profiles of successf

October 3, 2004

Keith Watenpaugh: Iraq Needs Help Rebuilding Its Schools

Keith Watenpaugh, in a lecture delivered at the Villanova Center for Arabic and Islamic Studies (Sept. 29, 2004): When Professor Maghan Keita first asked me to speak on issues of higher education, academic conditions and intellectual life in Iraq just a few months ago, one of the first things I had to do was come up with a title. “The Rebuilding of Iraq’s Academic Community” was the easy part: a generation of brutish Baathist rule, a decade-long cruel, indiff

October 3, 2004

David M. Kennedy: Bush's Witless Betrayal of Woodrow Wilson

David Kennedy, in the Mercury News (Sept. 26, 2004):``What are we going to do with the influence and power of this great nation?'' Woodrow Wilson asked at Philadelphia's Independence Hall on the Fourth of July, 1914. Both the setting and the date underscored the urgency of his question. ``Are we going to play the old role of using that power for our aggrandizem

October 1, 2004

Victor Davis Hanson: Spreading Democracy

Victor Davis Hanson, posing a qustion h thinks Kerry should answer at he debates; in the New York Times, 30 Sept. 2004: [Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.] How might you explain the apparent abrupt change in policy of Libya; the unexpected removal of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb; and the about-face in Saudi Arabia -- and what precise plans do you have to induce similar such positive changes in att