Roundup: Historians' Take

January 2, 2004

Jefferson Cowie: Howard Dean Was Right to Try to Get Back the Southern White Vote

Jefferson Cowie, a history professor at Cornell University, writing in the American Prospect (Nov. 7, 2003):When a white, patrician guy from a very white state starts talking about Confederate flags, he really ought to be careful. Howard Dean's clumsy recent statement that he wants to court "white folks in the South who drive trucks with Confederate flag decals on the back

January 2, 2004

Edmund Morris: Ronald Can't Be Hurt by a TV Movie

Edmund Morris, writing in the NYT (Nov. 9, 2003): The idea that anything so trivial as a made-for-TV mockumentary might harm [Ronald Reagan's] reputation is ludicrous. Theodore Roosevelt suffered much worse damage, historiographically speaking, in 1931, when the biographer Henry Pringle depicted him as an overgrown bully. Pringle's book is still in print, but has not stopped T. R. from s

January 2, 2004

Iraq: Lessons from Reconstruction

Sanford V. Levinson, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education: [What Book Most Richly Deserves Greater Attention?] For me this is an easy question. The answer is The Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials, 1871-1872, by Lou Falkner Williams. Published in 1996 by the University of Georgia Press, it is already out of print, perhaps because readers think it a narrow book interesting only to specialists. Nothing could be further from the truth.

January 2, 2004

Sam Tanenhaus: Is Richard Pipes the Godfather of the War on Terrorism?

Sam Tanenhaus, writing in the Boston Globe (Nov. 2, 2003): Over the past two years, the Bush administration has inspired one of the more stimulating scavenger hunts in recent memory -- the search for the Ur-theorist of its bold foreign policy initiatives. With each new turn another name has emerged. "Regime change" gave us the political philosopher Leo Strauss. The "shock and awe" campaign brought forth the Cold War calculations

January 2, 2004

Victory in Iraq, One Tribe at a Time

Amatzia Baram, professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Haifa, writing in the NYT (Oct. 28, 2003):A letter earlier this month signed by Saddam Hussein and addressed to the sheiks of the Arab tribes in the Sunni Triangle insisted that Iraq "has been a poison" to the American soldiers and that "victory is near." It was one more sign that the former dictator un

January 2, 2004

Irfan Khawaja: On the Necessity of Getting Jews and Muslims to Acknowledge Hard Truths

Irfan Khawaja, writing in the online edition of Tikkun (Nov. 2003):The Zionist ideal is perhaps best captured in a slogan of Israel Zangwill, an early Zionist, who described Palestine as "a land without a people for a people without a land." The idea is that the Jews were a "people without a land" in the sense of being a minority wherev

January 2, 2004

Nicolas Baverez: France Needs to Reform

Sebastian Rotella, writing in the LA Times (Oct. 26, 2003):The France-bashers are at it again. This time, however, they don't work for the Pentagon or the British tabloids. They aren't emptying bottles of Bordeaux into American gutters or canceling tours of the Riviera.This time, the people announcing that France is going to the dogs are respected and influential French intellectuals. This country enjoys a good old rip-snorting, two-

January 2, 2004

Steven Weinberg: Why the Pentagon Failed to Prepare for Postwar Iraq

Steven Weinberg, professor of science at the University of Texas and winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, writing in the NY Review of Books (Nov. 6, 2003): Though there always will be soldiers and sailors"seeking the bubble reputation, even in the cannon's mouth," it seems that the vainglory of individual commanders has lately become less dangerous in war, as improvements in the technology of communications and surveilla

January 2, 2004

Arnold Beichman: Why I Miss the Cold War

Arnold Beichman, writing in the Wall Street Journal (Oct. 28, 2003) (subscribers only):Am I being wholly rational when I say that I miss the Cold War? There was a time, say a decade ago, when I wouldn't have hesitated for a minute to answer that I most certainly do not miss the Cold War. But as I pull my shoes back on at Sea-Tac airport, rebuckle by belt, repack my

January 2, 2004

Richard Reeves: Bush Should Study Up on the History of the Philippines

Richard Reeves, writing on Yahoo.com (Oct. 23, 2003):"America is proud of its part in the great story of the Filipino people," said President Bush (news - web sites) to a joint session of the Congress of the Philippines last week. "Together our soldiers liberated the Philippines from colonial rule." Unfortunately, we then killed more than 200,000 Filipinos. Almost all of the dead were civilians, killed in the two years after

January 2, 2004

Rick Perlstein: How Joe Lieberman Could Ruin the Democrats' Chances

Rick Perlstein, writing in the Village Voice (Oct. 27, 2003):[I]t's not too early to predict that if the Democrats lose the presidential election next November, Lieberman will be the one to blame. That will certainly be so if he ends up becoming the nominee—in which case the Democratic Party will be left without an activist base.... Perversely, it might even be worse for the

January 2, 2004

Ann Applebaum: Germans as Victims ... Fallout from 9-11?

Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag: A History, writing in the Jewish World Review (Oct. 16, 2003): As in the United States, many of the books that have recently found their way to the top of German bestseller lists concern Sept. 11, 2001. Unlike those in the United States, many of them also argue that the Bush administration was responsible for Sept. 11. One book, by a for

January 2, 2004

James Miller: The Weather Underground, RIP?

James Miller, professor of political science at the New School for Social Research and editor of the journal Daedalus, writing in the Boston Globe (Oct. 19, 2003):THIRTY-FOUR YEARS AGO this fall, a small band of well-educated young Americans hell-bent on storming heaven steeled themselves to commit an act of spectacularly gratuitous violence. A militan

January 2, 2004

Confronting Our Eugenic Past and Genetic Future

Edwin Black, writing in Newsday (Oct. 2003):On October 14, the Senate unanimously passed America's first serious anti-genetic discrimination bill, which now goes to the House for consideration. The measure would forbid discrimination by insurers, employers and others based on genetic background or identity, just as current protections cover workplace or financial bias because of race, religion and national origin. All eyes are now on

January 2, 2004

Mark Essig: Searching for More Humane Ways to Execute People

Mark Essig, author of Edison and the Electric Chair: The Story of Light and Death, writing in the NYT (Oct. 21, 2003):For the past century and a half, America's capital punishment debate has resembled a strange game of leapfrog: opponents of the death penalty claim that the current method, whatever it may be, is barbaric, which prompts capital-punishment supporters to refine that method

January 2, 2004

Eric Alterman: Novak's No Journalist

Eric Alterman, writing in the Nation (Oct. 16, 2003):The second great fiction of this story is the notion that Robert Novak is a "journalist." Nobody else published this story, because all six of the other reporters given the leak weighed the perceived motives of the leaker and the likely cost of publication to the country and to Plame and Wilson against the value of

January 2, 2004

Richard Wolin: Suicide Bombing Shouldn't Be Defended

Richard Wolin, professor of history and comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, writing on the website of the Chronicle of Higher Education (Oct. 20, 2003):In recent weeks a publishing scandal involving charges of anti-Semitism has dominated the feuilleton sections of leading German dailies. The debate has embroiled one of the nation's most respected publishing houses, the Frankfurt-based, left-liberal firm of S

January 2, 2004

Juan Cole: Iraqi Shiites ... America's Would-Be Allies

Juan Cole, writing in the Boston Review (Oct./Nov. 2003):The ambitious aim of the American war in Iraq—articulated by Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and other neoconservative defense intellectuals—was to effect a fundamental transformation in Middle East politics. The war was not—or not principally—about finding weapons of mass destruction, or preventing alliances with al Qaeda, or protecting the Iraqi population from Sad

January 2, 2004

Fouad Ajami: How Oil Changed the Politics of the Middle East

Fouad Ajami, writing in the NYT (Oct. 17, 2003):It was not so much the guns of Oct. 6, 1973, and the assault of the Egyptian and Syrian armies against Israel, that changed contemporary history and remade our world. It was the use 11 days later of the "oil weapon," and the price increases that followed, which tipped the scales of history. By the time OPEC unsheathed the oil weapon,

January 2, 2004

Walter Russell Mead: Neocons' Niche in American History

An interview with Walter Russell Mead published by the Christian Science Monitor (Oct. 2003):Which leaders in US history would be neocons today? It's possible that Teddy Roosevelt would be a neocon. I think it's almost certain he would have supported the war in Iraq. And he wouldn't have cared about the lack of a UN resolution. I'm not sure who else would be a neocon in foreign policy. In some ways [neocons] are very original. Is