Roundup: Historians' Take

Newspaper Editorial in Favor of Lamar Alexander's History Bill

Editorial in the Nashville City Paper (Oct. 9, 2003):Imagine that a recent immigrant just granted American citizenship knows more about American history and civics than your college-aged son or daughter. According to a new report, that’s the reality. The Albert Shanker Institute, a non-profit educational foundation, is worried many states have de-emphasized history and civics in favor of math and reading, and the facts are on its side.

David M. Kennedy: More Democracy in California Has Led to Chronic Chaos

David M. Kennedy, writing in the NYT (Oct. 5, 2003):On Jan. 25, 1787, 1,200 desperate farmers brandishing barrel staves and pitchforks attacked the federal arsenal in Springfield, Mass. They called themselves the Regulators. Led by a debt-plagued veteran of Bunker Hill and Saratoga named Daniel Shays, they sought firearms with which to enforce their threats to close the courts in western Massachusetts and compel the legislature to enact debt-relief

Michael Radu: Most Suicide Bombers Are Islamists

Michael Radu, Senior Fellow and Co-Chair, Center on Terrorism and Counterterrorism, at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia (Oct. 9, 2003): To most Westerners, especially Americans, the almost regular and predictable murder of Israeli civilians of all ages seems both incomprehensible and, precisely because of its regularity and frequency, unsurprising. The phenomenon has, however, stirred some interest in a media previously immune to serious a

Jonathan Coopersmith: We Must Finance this War

Jonathan Coopersmith, a historian at Texas A&M University, writing in the Dallas Morning News (Oct. 7, 2003): confess I have a dog in this fight. I have two small children, and I am worried about the world we are creating for them. Perhaps my biggest concern is the mismanaged postwar occupation of Iraq. My usual reaction when someone mentions national

Francis Fukuyama: We Shouldn't Rush Reconstruction in Iraq

Francis Fukuyama, writing in the Wall Street Journal (October 1, 2003):There is, of course, a perfectly respectable argument for accelerating the transition from U.S. to Iraqi authority that has been laid out in recent days both by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on this page and by Ahmed Chalabi, member of the Governing Council and head of the Iraqi National Congr

Joshua Brown: Is Bush Standing in Nixon's Shadow?

This illustration is by Joshua Brown, Executive Director of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the City University of New York Graduate Center:  

Niall Ferguson: An Empire, If You Can Keep It

Niall Ferguson, writing in Foreign Affairs (Sept. 2003):It is fast becoming conventional wisdom that the power of the United States today closely resembles that of the United Kingdom roughly a century ago. In the conclusion of my latest book, I attempted a brief comparison between British and American imperial rule, and I am far from the only historian to think along these lines: both Walter Russell Mead and Joseph Nye have also alluded to t

David Brooks: Colleges Slant Left

David Brooks, writing in the NYT (Sept. 27, 2003):Most good universities have at least one conservative professor on campus. When, for example, some group at Harvard wants to hold a panel discussion on some political matter, it can bring out the political theorist Harvey Mansfield to hold up the rightward end. At Princeton it's Robert George. At Yale it's Donald Kagan. These disse

David Brooks: The Presidency Wars

David Brooks, writing in the NYT (Sept. 30, 2003):ave you noticed that we've moved from the age of the culture wars to the age of the presidency wars? Have you noticed that the furious arguments we used to have about cultural and social issues have been displaced by furious arguments about the current occupant of the Oval Office? During the 1980's, when the culture wars were going full

Bush's Manichean Approach

Ehsan Ahrari, writing in Asia Times (Sept. 25, 2003):Watching President George W Bush at the United Nations on September 20, I was reminded of the foreign policy behavior of two major personalities of the United States: John Foster Dulles and Lyndon B Johnson. Dulles, who served as secretary of state during the Eisenhower administration, viewed the Cold War as essentially a strug

Avi Shlaim: Arafat's Not the Obstacle to Peace, Sharon Is

Avi Shlaim, professor of international relations at the University of Oxford, writing in the International Herald Tribune (Sept. 24, 2003): The Israeli cabinet's decision to exile Yasser Arafat, and the threats to assassinate him, have provoked a storm of international protest. A Security Council resolution demanding that Israel desist from deporting Arafat or th

Gerald Posner: Conspiracy Theories and 9-11

Gerald Posner (Sept. 29, 2003):Andreas von Bulow's book has climbed the German bestseller list, his lectures are jammed and, after two years of mounting frustration, his ideas are gaining traction.His thesis: The U.S. government staged the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington to justify wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is a tentative theory, he admits, based mostly on his doubt that Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda

Juan Cole: Bush's Hit List

Juan Cole, writing on his blog (Sept. 25, 2003):A Malaysian newspaper claims to have gotten an advance peek at statements in the new book by Wesley Clark, excerpted in Newsweek. I can't vouch for the accuracy of the report, but here it is: "It quoted former North Atlantic Treaty Organisation commander General Wesley C