Roundup: Historians' Take

January 23, 2004

Peter Maguire: The Myth of Nuremberg Is Warping the Debate About Saddam's Trial

Peter Maguire, who has taught the laws of war at Columbia University and Bard College, is author of Law and War; writing in Newsday (Dec. 28, 2003): The captured Iraqi leader is the most significant single war-crimes defendant since Herman Goering took the stand at Nuremberg in 1946. Compared to Hussein's use of poison gas against Iranians and his own people, Slobodan Milosevic, now on trial in the Hague , is a relative small fry. How ironic that

January 23, 2004

Correlli Barnett: The Terrorists Are Winning

Correlli Barnett, writing in the Spectator (Dec. 13, 2003): Last month, the sixth since President Bush proclaimed ‘Mission Accomplished' in Iraq, proved the worst so far in terms of American and ‘coalition' body bags: 81 in all. November was also marked by the bombing of a residential quarter in Riyadh, and by the four Istanbul car-bombs. In ironic contrast, this was the month dignified with President Bush's state v

January 23, 2004

The Pill Did Was Not Responsible for the Sexual Revolution

Joshua M. Zeitz, lecturer in history at Cambridge University, writing in the NYT (Dec. 27, 2003): Opponents of the emergency contraceptive, known as Plan B, say they are concerned that among other things, widening access to the morning-after pill will encourage sexual promiscuity, particularly among young people. It was this apprehension that led Dr. W. David Hager of the University of Kentucky to join thre

January 23, 2004

Arnold Beichman: Anti-Semitism Is Global

Arnold Beichman, writing in the Washington Times (Dec. 31, 2003): I wonder why the thesis is rarely examined publicly that the Palestinians will never never never never never never never be allowed to make peace with Israel even if the Palestinians wanted to. Yasser Arafat, Hamas, Hezbollah and free-lance terrorists won't allow it to happen because they believe victory is at hand. The reason this the

January 23, 2004

Mike Davis: The Berlin Wall May Be Down, But We've Got Others Now that Are More Insurmountable

Historian Mike Davis, writing on www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute (Jan. 2004): When delirious crowds tore down the Berlin Wall in 1989, many hallucinated that a millennium of borderless freedom was at hand. Globalization was supposed to inaugurate an era of unprecedented physical and virtual electronic mobility. Instead neoliberal capitalism has promptly built the greatest barrier to free

January 23, 2004

An Anthropologist's Perspective on Affirmative Action Is Different from a Historian's

Melvin Konner, writing in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Jan. 19, 2004):Anthropologists take the long view. For instance, when we hear historians say "ancient," we smile a bit indulgently and say "recent," as in "the recent invention of agriculture" --- by which we mean 10,000 or 12,000 years ago. This event may be twice as old as recorded history, or for that matter twice the age of the Creation

January 23, 2004

Tom Engelhardt : Neocons Playing at War

Tom Engelhardt, writing for www.tomdispatch.com (January 2004): [T]he neocon utopians who dreamed up our distinctly unpeaceful Pax Americana in deepest, darkest Washington and out of whole cloth seem to have imagined global military domination as something akin to the board game Risk. They too were, after a fashion, Risk managers, seeing themselves rolling the dice for little weapons icons (most of whi

January 23, 2004

Kiron Skinner: Why Reagan Gave MLK a National Holiday

Kiron Skinner, co-editor of Reagan: A Life in Letters, writing in the NYT (Jan. 19, 2004): On Oct. 27, 1964, Ronald Reagan came to national political prominence. In a televised speech he endorsed the presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater, the Republican senator from Arizona. Mr. Goldwater was considered a foe of the civil rights movement. In fact, the National Association for the Advance

January 23, 2004

Bush Is the Worst President Since ...

Bernard Chazelle, Princeton professor, writing in his blog:Ah, the ease with which George W. Bush attracts superlatives! Helen Thomas calls him"the worst president ever." A kinder, gentler Jonathan Chait ranks him"among the worst presidents in US history." No such restraint from Paul Berman, who brands him"the worst president the US has ever had." Nobel Laureate George Akerlof rates his gover

January 23, 2004

Michael Bellesiles: The Federal Government Should Not Try to Censor Middle East Studies Scholars

Michael Bellesiles, writing for the History News Service (Jan. 5, 2004): The more the United States gets involved in the world, the more necessary a knowledge of foreign nations becomes. Yet Congress is trying to handicap that endeavor by encouraging scholars to place service to the state above intellectual independence. Politicians rarely appreciate scholarly diversity and critical judgment. Experts of all kinds

January 23, 2004

Why the Current Economy Reminds this Professor of the 1930s

Edmund S. Phelps, McVickar Professor of Political Economy and Director of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia, writing in the WSJ (Jan. 5, 2004): Booms are not all alike. Nor slumps. Shocks and institutions are never exactly the same. Yet the late 1990s boom, the slide into slump and recent rebound has a striking similarity to the boom of the roaring 1920s, the deep declin

January 23, 2004

CIA Needs a History Lesson on Iraq

William Goldcamp, diplomatic historian and former intelligence analyst, writing in the Washington Times (Jan. 2, 2004): Any good historian must be frustrated at both the coverage and analysis of the situation in Iraq and the war on terror in general. For its part, the intelligence community has turned its back on history as the foundation of long-term and short-term analysis and embraced p

January 23, 2004

Juan Cole: Cheney's Plan for a Secret Police in Iraq Could Turn Iraqis Against the Government Over Time

Juan Cole, writing in his blog (Jan. 4, 2004): According to the Telegraph Dick Cheney has managed to put through a plan to have the US CIA train an Iraqi secret police (mukhabarat) and fund it at $3 bn., as part of the"black" CIA budget. The article claims that this secret police apparatus will allow the US to continue to control Iraq even after a civilian Iraqi government is supposedly installed on July 1. I have to say that this plan wor

January 23, 2004

Daniel Pipes: Islamists Police the Classroom

Daniel Pipes, writing in the WorldNetDaily.com (Jan. 2, 2004): The United Muslims Association of Florida, Tampa Bay Area Chapter is a group that openly and closely aligns itself with the Council on American-Islamic Relations , and other Islamist organizations. Not long ago, it posted with pleasure on its website news that the Unive

January 23, 2004

Martin E. Marty: Jesus as an American Icon

Martin E. Marty, of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School, writing in his newsletter, Sightings (Jan. 5, 2004): Today is the Twelfth Day of Jesusmas, a.k.a. Christmas.  The word Christmas, or"Christ"+"mass," gives many citizens problems today.  The mass part, an issue when anti-Catholicism was prime, is no scandal: Americans are patient with each others' rituals. 

January 23, 2004

David Klinghoffer: Mel Gibson's Controversial Film Coincides Closely with Ancient Jewish Writings

David Klinghoffer, a columnist for the Jewish Forward and author of the forthcoming Why the Jews Rejected Christ: In Search of the Turning Point in Western History, writing in the LAT (Jan. 1, 2004): Mel Gibson's forthcoming movie about the death of Jesus, "The Passion," has created an angry standoff between the filmmaker and Jewish critics who charge him with anti-Semitism. It's a controversy that will continue to affect relations between Chris

January 23, 2004

Virginia Postrel: What Separates Rich Nations from Poor Nations?

Virginia Postrel, author of The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture and Consciousness, writing in the NYT (Jan. 1, 2004):THOSE who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. To that old saw, an economist might reply, "If only it were so easy." Then every country could be rich. Alas, the process of economic development

January 23, 2004

Kiron Skinner: 2003 Was Like 1983 ... A Year We Saw Pay-Offs for Being Strong

Kiron K. Skinner, assistant prof. at Carnegie Mellon University and co-editor of Reagan: A Life in Letters, writing in the NYT: Historical analogies are always fraught with incongruities. Yet we make them anyway, perhaps to reassure ourselves that even though the present seems grim, the past either predicts that things will improve or at least reminds us that things aren't as bad now a

January 23, 2004

Jagdish Bhagwati: The Immigration Reform of 1986 Failed

Jagdish Bhagwati, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, University Professor at Columbia, writing in the WSJ (Jan. 12, 2004): It is tempting ... to consider the administration's proposed immigration reforms, unveiled last week, as a bid for the Hispanic vote. Yet such a view, with its narrow focus, would be a big mistake -- not least on the part of the Democrats. The fact is th

January 23, 2004

Arnold Beichman: The Post Office Honors Paul Robeson ... Stalinist

Arnold Beichman, writing in the Washington Times (Jan. 13, 2004): On Jan. 21, the United States Postal Service will issue a stamp honoring a man who: * Greeted the promulgation of Josef Stalin's "Constitution" in 1936 as "an expression of democracy, broader in scope and loftier in principle than ever before expressed." * Supported the Stalin-Hitler pact and