Roundup: Historians' Take

Kevin Starr: What's Happened to California's Spirit?

Peter Schrag, in the Mercury News (April 18, 200): For the ever-ebullient Kevin Starr, who retired almost three weeks ago as California's state librarian, optimism about his native state is second nature, the view almost as grand as it was a decade ago when he took the job. And as California's premier social and cultural historian, he's as entitled to it as anyone. Even when

Juan Cole: How the U.S. Is Like Iran

Juan Cole, in his blog (week of April 12, 2004): I have concluded that the Bush administration is like Iran. The Iranian government has two of everything. It has a relatively liberal president, and a hardline supreme jurisprudent. The reformists control the foreign ministry, the hardliners control the military. The reformists have some parliament representatives, the hardliners control the Guardian Council, which has the power of judici

Juan Cole: President Bush's Incoherent News Conference

Juan Cole, in his blog (April 14, 2004): I saw President Bush's news conference Tuesday evening. He said many things that disturbed me, not in any partisan sort of way (and I continue to maintain that simple partisanship makes for bad analysis), but on grounds of ethics and clear thinking and democratic values. I got the transcript and began arguing back, but could see it could go on for hours. And probably others would do a better job

Tom Engelhardt: Yes, Vietnam Echoes Are Loud and Clear

Tom Engelhardt, in www.tomdispatch.com (April 16, 2004): Optimism then, optimism now: Air Force Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, Centcom's second in command in January: "We've watched the number of significant events (against coalition forces) decline considerably... I won't say we've turned the corner or that there is light at the end of the tunnel, but our soldiers, airmen, Marines and sailors ar

Eric Rauchway: Iraq, Bush and the Mess We're in

Eric Rauchway, in Altercation (April 14, 2004): My heart sank when the President said ,"I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with [an] answer, but it hadn't yet."  Has ever a President uttered more demoralizing words in the course of seeking to reass

He Taught Condi Rice--And He's Appalled at Her Support for the Iraq War

Diane Carman, in the Denver Post (April 9, 2004): Back when Condoleezza Rice was one of Arthur N. Gilbert's students, the University of Denver was a very different school. 'It was like 'Cheers,'' he said, 'a place where everybody knew your name.' Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's father, Josef Korbel, was the esteemed director of the international studies program and the reason Rice changed her major from music to political science. So even 23 ye

Allan Lichtman: Bush's Press Conference Showed a Man in Full Evangelical Fervor

From CTV News (April 14, 2004):When you understand U.S. President George W. Bush's "muscular evangelism," you understand his news conference Tuesday night, says a U.S. historian. "This was an evangelist with machine guns, a combination of Teddy Roosevelt's triumphalism with Jerry Falwell's moralism," Allan J. Lichtman, a presidential his

Doris Kearns Goodwin: On John Kerry's Relationship with the Catholic Church

An interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin on the NBC Today Show (April 12, 2004):LESTER HOLT: Of course John F. Kennedy ran as the first Catholic presidential candidate. There was a controversy then, but if I recall, it was more of a controversy involving non-Catholics and their perception of how he would perform in office as a Catholic. DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: That's exactly right. It's incredible to remember how fiery it was when Kennedy first started the pr

Robert Rabil: Iraqis Are Now Creating a Myth of Patriotism By Fighting the U.S. Occupation

Walid Phares and Robert Rabil, professors of Mideast Studies at Florida Atlantic University, in the WSJ (April 13, 2004):Arising from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, Iraq comprised the three former provinces of Mosul, with its Kurdish Sunni majority; Baghdad, with its Arab Sunni majority; and Basra, with its Arab Shiite majority. The British favored the Arab Sunnis to rule Ira

Sean Wilentz: Condi Rice, (Bad) Historian

Sean Wilentz, in Salon (April 13, 2004):National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice is a professional historian and political scientist. And so it was especially noteworthy when she testified under oath last week that the famous president's daily brief on al-Qaida from Aug. 6, 2001, contained "historical information based on old reporting" that did not warn of new attacks

David Brooks: The Relevance of the Shultz-Weinberger Debate of the 1980s

David Brooks, in the NYT (April 13, 2004): Twenty years ago, Secretary of State George Shultz went to the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York to give a speech about terrorism. Fighting a war on terrorism, he emphasized, means coping with uncertainty. Terrorists operate outside the normal rules, Shultz observed. Because an attack is so hard to anticipate, he said,"our responses s

Joshua Brown: June 30 Approaches

What Harold Lasswell Said About Propaganda in the 20th Century Is Relevant to Iraq in the 21st

Bruce A. Williams, a professor in the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in the Chronicle of Higher Education(April 12, 2004): With the 2004 presidential-election campaign well under way, the invasion of Iraq has become a central concern. In debating the action's merits, we have an important opportunity to reflect on the impact on democratic politic

David Greenberg: How Veeps Get Picked

David Greenberg, in the NYT (April 11, 2004): A hundred years ago, most people voted for president strictly according to their party's line; having two regions or factions represented on the ticket made sense as a way to bolster party unity. But through the 20th century, power migrated from party bosses to the candidates. The nominee's image came to loom larger than his affiliat

Anders Lewis: Chomsky's Stalinist Arguments

Anders Lewis, frontpagemag.com (April 9, 2004): To the American Left in the 1960s, Hanoi was the Eternal City. It was the place to go to protest America's war in Vietnam and to express one's solidarity with Ho Chi Minh's Communist regime. In Hanoi one could find, according to Tom Hayden and Staughton Lynd, a “socialism of the heart” and a budding “rice-roots democracy.” “We suspect,” they observed, “th

Arnold Beichman: Iraq's History of Falluja-Like Violence

Arnold Beichman, in the Washington Times (April 9, 2004): The mutilation and gruesome display of four Americans in Fallujah, Iraq, last week raises a topic seldom openly discussed in the Middle East: the unusual kind of sadistic violence, historic in Iraq, reflecting the ethos of Iraqis when politically aroused. What Iraqis in the street did to the Americans was copy what Saddam had been doing for years, by one form of torture or another, to the Iraqi people

Why Belgium Is Denouncing a BBC Documentary About the History of the Congo

Paul Belien, editor of the Flemish quarterly Secessie, in the WSJ (April 8, 2004): Tonight, Belgian television will show the BBC documentary"White King, Red Rubber, Black Death," about Belgian King Leopold II's reign of terror in his private Congo colony in 1885-1908. The documentary, hardly the stuff of controversy anywhere else, almost didn't make it onto the airwaves here. L

Gil Troy: Germany Wasn't Rebuilt in a Year, Nor Shall Iraq

Gil Troy, in the Montreal Gazette (April 04, 2004) It is generally recognized that America's military triumph brought, as one observer noted,"absolute ruin ... old men, old women, young women, children from tots to teens carrying packs, pushing carts, pulling carts, evidently ejected by the conquerors and carrying what they could of their belongings to no where in particular." The looting following the U.S. bombardment only intensified the misery. Contemplatin

Derek Catsam: The New South Africa , Ten Years On

Derek Catsam, Fellow, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, in Safundi: In April ten years ago a remarkable thing happened. Many have called it a “miracle,” but that seems rather to ignore the human agency of more than four decades of struggle against an apartheid system that had made South Africa a skunk among nations. South Africa may have become a “Rainbow Nation of God,” in Bishop Tutu's apt phrase, but it was largely because of ye

Mark A. Peterson: The Puritans and Gay Marriage

Mark A. Peterson, in Common-Place.org (April 2004):...The outcry against gay marriage rests on the assumption that marriage is a"natural" institution rooted in timeless religious and cultural practices. But President Bush and his supporters have got their history wrong, at least with respect to religion, government, and marriage in Massachusetts. The Puritan colonists who founded Massachusetts might not have welcom