Roundup: Historians' Take

Jon Wiener: Arizona Ethnic Studies Ban Defended by Fox News

[Jon Wiener teaches US history at UC Irvine. His most recent book is Historians in Trouble.] It was a dirty job, but somebody had to do it: defend the new Arizona law that bans ethnic studies in public schools. Fox News anchor Greta van Susteren took on the task, with predictable results.... What exactly is wrong with Arizona schools offering Chicano Studies classes? Van Susteren asked Tom Horne, Arizona superintendent of public instruction, who sponsored the bill an

Gil Troy: A Careerist Conundrum of Supreme Proportions

[Gil Troy is a professor of history at McGill University and a visiting scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington.] For New Yorkers born in the 1960s, U.S. President Barack Obama’s nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court triggered the frissons of pride and envy many of us feel when someone our age and from our humble background makes it. But Ms. Kagan’s careerist conundrum is particularly fascinating. Did this woman with the perfect Princeton-Oxford-H

Julian Zelizer: Senate Should Accept Kagan's '95 'Challenge'

[Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. His new book is "Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security: From World War II to the War on Terrorism," published by Basic Books. Zelizer writes widely about current events.] In 1995, Elena Kagan published a lengthy book review in the University of Chicago Law Review, titled "Confirmation Messes, Old and New," in which she was critical of

Tom Engelhardt: Obama’s Flailing Wars -- A Study in BP-Style “Pragmatism”

[Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing

Daniel Okrent: An Illegal Substance Sold Legally

[Daniel Okrent is the author of "Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition," just published by Scribner.] "He owned some drugstores, a lot of drugstores," Daisy Buchanan said. "He built them up himself." To Daisy, this was a perfectly reasonable explanation of the wealth of her new neighbor, Jay Gatsby. To her husband, more knowing about the world beyond the boundaries of East Egg, it was evidence that Gatsby had made his money as a bootlegger.

Charles Postel: The Tea Party and the Dark Side of Conservatism

[Charles Postel, an assistant professor of history at San Francisco State University, won the Bancroft Prize in American history for his book “The Populist Vision.”] Tea partiers proudly proclaim themselves conservatives. And rightly so. Tea party protesters repeat the conservative catchwords of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, who built their careers fighting the “creeping socialism” of civil rights legislation, Social Security and Medicare. Tea partier

Victor Davis Hanson: The Other European Volcano

[Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and editor, most recently, of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome.]Five years ago, the European Union’s account of itself resonated with end-of history triumphalism. In organic fashion, democratic socialism would spread eastward and southward, recivilizing the old Warsaw Pact and the Balkans through cradle-to-grave entitlements, state unionism, radica

Juan Cole: The New Realities of the U.S. Sphere of Influence

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] Iraq is in the US sphere of influence now, as the Philippines are, but in neither case does this modern form of great power politics require a big military presence. The Neocons’ dream of a division (25,000 – 30,000) US troops permanently in Iraq has been defeated by the Mahdi Army, the Baathists, and Su

Jonathan Zimmerman: Putting the Accent on Bigotry

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University.] In the 1930s, Bel Kaufman applied to teach in the New York City public schools. She took a written examination and then an oral one, which required her to recite a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay. A few days later, Kaufman received a curt letter in the mail: “Failed for poor background in English.” In short, she had the wrong accent. Emigrating from Russia at the age of 12, Kaufman graduated magn

Victor Davis Hanson: Profiling, Diversity, and Arizona’s New Law

[Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and editor, most recently, of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome.] Profiling is considered among the worst of American sins. Not long ago, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested by the Cambridge, Mass., police for trying to enter his own locked home after misplacing his key. Almost immediately, President Obama rushed to condemn

Greg Grandin: Glenn Beck, America’s Historian Laureate

[Greg Grandin is a professor of history at New York University.  His most recent book, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City, just published in paperback, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was picked by the New York Times, the New Yorker, and NPR for their “best of&rdquo

Joel Beinin: Egyptian Workers Demand a Living Wage

[Joel Beinin is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History at Stanford University. He is the principle author of The Struggle for Worker Rights in Egypt (Washington, DC: Solidarity Center, 2010).] On May 11 the Egyptian government extended the State of Emergency, which has been in effect continuously since 1981, for an additional two years. The Emergency Law gives the regime broad powers which it has used to try to suppress dissent of all so

Ruth Harris: How the Dreyfus Affair Explains Sarkozy's Burqa Ban

[Ruth Harris is a fellow of New College, Oxford, and author of Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion and the Scandal of the Century.] ...Indeed, the debate [over banning the burqa] has a long history in France and is not merely a product of the right, though Sarkozy's opponents denounce it as a nakedly political attempt to attract anti-immigrant support. A powerful, and sometimes irrational, fear of religious influence -- once Catholic, now Muslim -- has long been a part of French society, th

Iain McLean: Tories Avoid Irish Entanglements

[Iain McLean is Professor of Politics, Nuffield College Oxford and a member of the History & Policy Network.] The Conservative Party, now in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, no longer needs to rely on the support of Ulster Unionists. This is just as well, because the history of entanglements between Irish and British parties suggests it would have been an unwise move, which the Conservatives narrowly avoided. In January, Conservative Northern Ireland spokesman

Geraldo L. Cadava: Arizona Has a Long History of Demonizing Mexican Migrants

[A native of Tucson, Geraldo L. Cadava teaches Latino history at Northwestern University. Harvard University Press will publish his forthcoming book on the Arizona-Sonora border region since World War II. E-mail him at g-cadava@northwestern.edu] The inclination of Arizonans to target Mexicans as the cause of their political and financial problems has shaped the state's history for at least a century. In the middle of World War I, employer

Burt Folsom: The Tyranny of Good Intentions

[Burt Folsom teaches history at Hillsdale College.] As we look around us, we are awash in failed government programs. At the state level, California (and other states) are broke and desperate for cash. At the federal level, we see minimum wage laws stifling the hiring of young men and women; a social security system that is on the verge of paying out more than it takes in; and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac receiving $145 billion in tax dollars now, and more later. We got i

Peter Rachleff: Don’t Give Us Your Tired, Poor

[Peter Rachleff is a history professor at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN.] The “nativism” manifested in SB1070, Arizona’s new law ordering police to challenge residents for proof of citizenship or immigration papers, is nothing new. Such hostility to newcomers — displayed in rallies and demonstrations, expressed in politics and codified in laws — has been an all-too-frequent presence throughout U.S. history. As Americans prepare to debate not only the Arizona law (and it

Walter Russell Mead: The Middle East Peace Industry

[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.] George Mitchell (below) has arrived in Jerusalem and the ‘proximity talks’ have started, but it is not at all clear what will come of them. The Middle East peace process is the longest running piece of diplomatic theater on the world stage. Dating from

Daniel Pipes: Accepting Israel as the Jewish State

[Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.]When a major Arab state would finally sign a peace treaty with Israel, it was long assumed, the Arab-Israeli conflict would end. The Egypt-Israel peace treaty of 1979, however, buried that expectation; it had the perverse effect of making other states and also the

Ira Chernus: Why Are So Many Americans Scared of Undocumented Immigrants?

[Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Read more of his writing on Israel, Palestine, and American Jews on his blog: http://chernus.wordpress.com.] “The overwhelming majority of Americans think the country’s immigration policies need to be seriously overhauled.” And most Americans support Arizona’s stringent new immigration enforcement law, “even though they say it may lead to racial profili