Roundup: Historians' Take

July 26, 2004

Tom Engelhardt: The President Who Talks to God ... Hello? Hello?

Tom Engelhardt, at TomDispatch.com (July 25, 2004): The American Prospect's"Purple People Watch," which tracks the presidential election on a state-by-state level, reported that, on a recent presidential trip through Pennsylvania (where Bush is, by the latest polls, trailing Kerry),"while the White House press pool w

July 26, 2004

Allan Megill: How Will History View the 9/11 Report?

Allan Megill, in Newsday (July 25, 2004): [Allan Megill teaches history at the University of Virginia. He is the author of"Karl Marx: The Burden of Reason."] The 9/11 Commission Report offers an account of the events of Sept. 11, 2001, that is nothing short of gripping. It is especially worth reading as an object lesson in how easy it is to be blindsided

July 22, 2004

Max Boot: Why the OSS Succeeded and the CIA Is Failing

Max Boot, in the Los Angeles Times (July 22, 2004): If you want to know what's wrong with the CIA — and these days who doesn't? — start with the fact that it's almost 60 years old. How many 60-year-olds do you know who take insane risks, rethink cherished shibboleths and produce brilliant flashes of insight? That is what's required to win the war on Islamist

July 21, 2004

Rick Perlstein: Why Supporters of President Bush Love Him No Matter What He Does or Says

Rick Perlstein, in the Village Voice (July 20, 2004): Here are some things that Christopher Nunneley, a conservative activist in Birmingham, Alabama, believes. That some time in June, apparently unnoticed by the world media, George Bush negotiated an end to the civil war in Sudan. That Bill Clinton is"lazy" and Teresa Heinz Kerry is an"African col

July 15, 2004

Max Boot: Perhaps the U.S. Should Emulate Subtler British Imperialism

Max Boot, in the Los Angeles Times (July 15 2004): With the Coalition Provisional Authority disbanded and L. Paul Bremer III back at home, it's time to ponder the future of American imperialism. Many, of course, will huffily reply that U.S. imperialism has no future, and they will point to all the troubles we've encountered in Iraq during the last y

July 15, 2004

Juan Cole: Bush's Speech in Defense of the War Is ....

Historian Juan Cole, at his blog:President Bush gave a speech on Tuesday in which he made specific claims about how the United States is safer as a result of his military action. I dispute assertions about particular Middle Eastern or South Asian countries. (Statements in italics are from the media coverage of the speech.) "The world is changing for the better because of American leadership. Ameri

July 14, 2004

Morris P. Fiorina: What Culture War?

Morris P. Fiorina, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor of Political Science at Stanford, in the WSJ (July 14, 2004):"There is a religious war going on in this country, a cultural war as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America." With those ringing words insurgent candidate Pat Buc

July 14, 2004

James Jay Carafano: A Good Peace Can Follow a Bad Occupation

James Jay Carafano, in a paper published by the Heritage Foundation (July 13, 2004):... Although occupation is an inevitable task in any successful military conflict, it is one that arguably receives little attention from the public, policymakers, or the military itself. One has only to compare the scope of scholarship on the battles of World War II with the post-war occupation period.3

July 12, 2004

Daniel Pipes: Saddam Hussein, Novelist

Daniel Pipes, at frontpagemag.com (July 9, 2004): Ash-Sharq al-Awsat, a London-based Arabic paper, yesterday began the complete serialization of Saddam Hussein's final novel written as a free man, Be Gone Demons! As though it were just any book, the newspaper posted a picture of the cover and of the author (appearing as a jailbird, however

July 12, 2004

Rick Perlstein: 1980s Democrats Were Never Really All that Liberal--And Clinton in '92 Was Not All that Centrist

Rick Perlstein, in Boston Review (July 2004): ...Dissenters who do call for a bolder Democratic Party—one thinks of Robert Borosage of the Campaign for America’s Future—are sometimes dismissed as throwbacks to the ’60s. Well, I can’t be dismissed as a throwback. The ’60s ended when I was less than three months old. The traumas that shaped the world view of a Teixeira, a Greenbe

July 12, 2004

Edwin Black: IBM's Role in the Nazi Roundup of Gypsies

Edwin Black, in the Forward (July 9, 2004): In April 1941, a Romanian census taker came to the home of a suspected Roma Gypsy working as a blacksmith in the picturesque town of Schaas. The senior Nazi statistical official observing the process wrote,"He did not dare to deny his ethnical descent as Gypsy." The census taker instructed:"Now, please write: Gypsy."Shortly thereafter, that Gypsy black

July 12, 2004

Daniel Pipes: What Was Binyamin Netanyahu Ready to Concede on the Golan Heights?

Daniel Pipes, at his blog (June 27, 2004): A seemingly forgotten topic – the Lauder-Nader round of negotiations between Israel and Syria in August-September 1998 – has suddenly revived, thanks to Bill Clinton's autobiography, My Life, published June 22. In it, the former president roughly confirms my investigative article of July 1999, where I wrote th

July 12, 2004

Juan Cole: Bush Calling John Edwards Inexperienced Is Laughable

Juan Cole, at his blog: George W. Bush alleged Thursday that John Edwards lacks the experience necessary to be president. The problem with this argument is that Bush lacked the experience necessary to be president when he ran in 2000, so this sort of cheap shot just hoists him by his own petard. Let's just remember a seminal

July 11, 2004

Padraic Kenney: Abu Ghraib Similar to Worst of Historical Precedents

Padraic Kenney, in the Denver Post (July 11 2004): What does it feel like to stand naked on a chair with a hood over your head and electrodes attached to your body? And, just as important, what is the point? To the first of these questions, history provides no answer. Jacobo Timerman, an Argentine newspaper editor imprisoned and tortured in 1977 because the regime suspected an international

July 11, 2004

Charlotte Allen: Bush and the Religious Vote

Charlotte Allen, in the Los Angeles Times (July 11 2004): It's a meme typically favored by liberal, Democratic-leaning pundits: Religion — or rather, the public expression of religious belief in political life — is dangerous to America. The idea's propagators are usually talking specifically about President Bush, an unabashed Christian who lards his speeches

July 11, 2004

Ron Chernow: Alexander Hamilton and Early American Political Malice

Ron Chernow, in the New York Times (July 11 2004): Two hundred years ago today, Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton squared off in a sunrise duel on a wooded ledge in Weehawken, N.J., above the Hudson River. Burr was vice president when he leveled his fatal shot at Hamilton, the former Treasury secretary, who died the next day in what is now the West Village of Manhattan. New Yorkers turned out en masse for Hamilton's fun

July 9, 2004

The Close US-Saudi Connection Began with Reagan, not Bush

Rachel Bronson, in the Los Angeles Times (July 9 2004): The close, cozy relationship between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia began with Ronald Reagan, not George W. Bush as some filmmakers and journalists contend. When Reagan came to office in 1981, he inherited a turbulent Middle East. Oil prices had jumped from $3.39 per barrel to more than $21. The zealou

July 9, 2004

East and West Coasts Are Blending into Cultural Banality

Patrick Moore, in the Los Angeles Times (July 9 2004): The fact that the New Yorker now has more subscribers in California than in New York is just one more indicator of the growing similarities between two cities that were once considered the extremes of American culture — New York City and Los Angeles. This is not good news for either L.A., the vanguard of A

July 9, 2004

Walter Isaacson: Clinton's Book Better Than Reported

Walter Isaacson, in the Australian Financial Review, (originally washpostbookworld) July 7 2004: If each era gets the leaders it deserves, then it is also true that each gets the memoirs it deserves. Not surprisingly, Bill Clinton, avatar of the 1990s and of the ageing baby boom

July 8, 2004

Religion's Role in Urban History: An Overlooked Relationship?

Joel Kotkin, in the Los Angeles Times (July 8 2004): Los Angeles County's recent decision to remove a tiny cross from its seal has inspired an enormous protest from the region's evangelical community and its conservative allies. The issue seems likely to embroil the county in a storm of lawsuits and lead perhaps to a divisive ballot measure during the n