Roundup: Historians' Take

Victor Davis Hanson: The New Racial Mess

[Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.] Weren’t we supposed to enter a new age of tolerance with the election of Pres. Barack Obama? His half-black, half-white ancestry and broad support across racial lines suggested that at last Americans judged each other on the content of our characters — not the color of our skin or

William J. Astore: Why It’s Wrong to Equate Military Service with Heroism

[William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and TomDispatch regular, teaches History at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. He welcomes reader feedback at wjastore@gmail.com.] When I was a kid in the 1970s, I loved reading accounts of American heroism from World War II.  I remember being riveted by a book about the staunch Marine defenders of Wake Island and inspired by J

Tom Engelhardt: Advice for General Petraeus on the Rules of Engagement: It’s Neither/Nor, Not Either/Or

[Tom Engelhardt, author of the recently-published The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books, July 2010) and editor of Tomdispatch.com, writes in a guest editorial for Informed Comment] Recently, we’ve been flooded with news stories and debate about the “rules of engagement” for U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Now-discredited war commander General Stanley McChrystal, we’ve been told, instituted fiercely restrictive rules of engagement to lessen the number o

Efraim Karsh: Who’s Against a Two-State Solution?

[Efraim Karsh, editor of the Middle East Quarterly and author most recently of Palestine Betrayed (Yale), is professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College, University of London.] "Two states, living side by side in peace and security." This, in the words of President Barack Obama, is the solution to the century-long conflict between Jews and Palestinian Arabs in the Middle East. Washington is fully and determinedly on board. So are the Europeans. The

Eric Rauchway: David Brooks Doesn’t Understand Progressivism Very Well

[Eric Rauchway is a professor of history at UC Davis.]Today’s David Brooks column is terrible as history or political semantics, but it nearly makes a minimally sensible point. First the terrible part. When historians look back on this period, they will see it as another progressive era. It is not a liberal e

Tom Palaima: Capitalizing on Socialism's Bad Name

[Tom Palaima is a regular contributor to the Austin American-Statesman, The Texas Observer, and the Times Higher Education. Contact: tpalaima@mail.utexas.edu.] Among techniques to prevent informed discussions from taking place on critical issues that are facing our country is the timeworn strategy of demonizing the opposition through personal attacks or by linking them and their views to some notion, practice or philosophy that a good m

Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman: The Trouble with Chavismo

[Rabbi Abraham Cooper is associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, where Harold Brackman is a historian and consultant. For more information, see www.wiesenthal.com.] With Americans worried about unemployment, the deficit, immigration, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and more, it's not surprising that some are looking abroad for other approaches to governing. Even Venezuela's Hugo Chávez is being touted by some as having figured out a bette

Julian Zelizer: Why Obama's Poll Numbers Have Sunk

[Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of"Arsenal of Democracy" and a book on former President Carter to be published next fall by Times Books. He is also the editor of a new book about former President George W. Bush to be published next fall by Princeton University Press.] President Obama's supporters have been frustrated about the apparent paradox of this administration. With the recent passage of historic financial regulat

Daniel Martin Varisco: Born Free, Unless You are Female

[Daniel Martin Varisco is Professor of Anthropology at Hofstra University.]I opened my email this morning and back-to-back there was instant conflict: a posting about a new Indian Deobandfatwa ruling that veiled Muslim women should not ride bicycles and another about a female French lawyer who ripped the face cover

Niall Ferguson: Today's Latter-Day Keynesians Have Learnt Nothing

[The writer is an FT contributing editor. His new biography of Siegmund Warburg, High Financier, has just been published by Penguin.] To those of us who first encountered the dismal science of economics in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the current debate on fiscal policy in the western world has been – no other word will do – depressing. It was said of the Bourbons that they forgot nothing and learned nothing. The same could easily be said of some of today’s latter-da

Walter Russell Mead: Obama's Ideals Could Lead to War

[Walter Russell Mead is Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. He blogs at The-American-Interest.com] In spite of what some conspiracy-minded critics on the right think, mainstream journalists like Time’s Joe Klein do not often agree with Fidel Castro. That both Klein and Castro think the chances of war between the United States and Iran have increased recently is w

Joel Richard Paul: Which Tea Party?

[Joel Richard Paul is a professor at the University of California Hastings Law School and author of Unlikely Allies: How a Merchant, a Playwright, and a Spy Saved the American Revolution.] Tea Party activists, I owe you an apology. I used to think that the country was divided between blue states and the "irony-free zone." I realize now that the Tea Party is, in fact, a lot funnier than Democrats ever were. When the leadership of the Tea Party accused the NAACP

Kai Bird: Afghanistan: Vietnam Redux

[Kai Bird is author of “The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy & William Bundy, Brothers in Arms.” He and Martin J. Sherwin won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished biography for their book “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.”] The war in Afghanistan is nearly nine years old. Despite the Obama administration’s July 2011 target date for de-escalating, there seems no end in sight. It is already longer than the U.S. ground war in Vietnam

David Greenberg: Too Big To Fail, the 1912 Version

[David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers and author of three books of political history, has written the "History Lesson" column since 1998.] In the historic election of 1912, a sitting president faced a former president and a future president. William Howard Taft, the conservative Republican incumbent, enjoyed support from banking and business, which mostly opposed any new federal powers and agencies that might restrict their freedom. The form

Victor Davis Hanson: Holder’s Hypocrisy

[Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.] Attorney General Eric Holder has developed a bad habit of accusing others of acting in bad faith while doing so himself. Take the issue of Guantanamo Bay. In Aspen, Colo., last week, Holder accused Congress of playing politics by preventing President Obama from closing the Guantan

John M. Barry: How Prepared Are We for the Next Great Flu Breakout?

[John M. Barry, Distinguished Scholar at the Tulane/Xavier Center for Bioenvironmental Research, is the author ofThe Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History (Viking, 2004). This study of the 1918 pandemic was named by the National Academies of Science the year's outstanding book on science or medicine. He has advised both the Bush and Obama administrations on influenz

Jesse Lemisch: Mean Bastards as Culture Heroes

[Jesse Lemisch is a Professor Emeritus of History at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York.] All day long, and on into a second day, here in New York, the media have been full of George Steinbrenner. He’s always been a Mean Bastard -- even in the Seinfeld version -- and that’s how he is memorialized: a Mean Bastard and a Winner. Sometimes he’s represented as a Mean-Bastard-with-a Heart-of-Gold-who-Gave-Money-to-Good-Causes. It would se

Daniel Martin Varisco: Worth a Response: Why Yemen is Not Afghanistan

[Daniel Martin Varisco is Professor of Anthropology at Hofstra University.]Yemen hardly ever makes the news unless a journalist wants to rail against the green-dribbling khat habit of grown men who wear skirts or trump with the terrorism card. In the Sunday Magazine of The New York Times, Robert F. Worth asks the provocative question: “Is Yemen the Next Afghanis

Timothy Garton Ash: Britain Has Spent 50 Years Hunting in Vain for Its Role

[Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist.] Foxhunting may have been curbed, but some Brits are back at another of their traditional pastimes: role-hunting. It's nearly 50 years since the American secretary of state Dean Acheson whipped up a storm by saying that Britain had lost an empire but not yet found a role. Role-hunting has been a British sport ever since. Tally-ho! goes up the cry, every time we have a new government, and off they gallop, le

Juan Cole: Global Warming and al-Qaeda in the Greater Indian Ocean

[Juan Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History and the Middle East scholar at the University of Michigan. He has written extensively on the Middle East and the West-Islam relations.] ...The general bad news is that a University of Alabama team of scientists has concluded that the first half of 2010 has been the hottest first five months of a year on record. The specific bad news is that a team of climate scientists at the University of Colorado has di