Roundup: Historians' Take

Stanley Crouch: Gates' Cold Shower on the Reparations Debate

[Stanley Crouch is an essayist and columnist based in New York. He has been awarded a MacArthur, a Fletcher, and was recently inducted into the Academy of Arts and Sciences. The first volume of his Charlie Parker biography will appear within a year.] In the world of slang, smack means either heroin or dung. The academy has been overrun by intellectual smack dealers for a good while, but the biggest bust of the game has just taken place. With intellectual honesty as his

Walter Russell Mead: Europe in Crisis

[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.] The latest sickening bout of stock market turbulence underlines the point I made on this blog last December; the next stage of the global economic crisis is centered in Greece. That’s an unpleasant reality for our European friends who have spent much of

Gil Troy: Obama the President is Not Alexander the Great

[The writer is professor of History at McGill University and a Shalom Hartman Institute Research Fellow. He is the author of Why I Am A Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today and Leading from the Center: Why Moderates Make the Best Presidents.] I understand Barack Obama’s impatience with Israel. I see his logic whereby if only Israel would freeze, concede and withdraw, the conflict would end. I can imagine the appeal, for the first African-American US president

Harold James: Another Failed British Experiment

[Harold James is professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University and Marie Curie professor of History at the European University Institute, Florence. His most recent book is The Creation and Destruction of Value: The Globalization Cycle.] British politics has always been something of an experimental laboratory for the industrialized world. In the 1970s, Britain was where the preeminent postwar model of how to manage the economy collapsed. That model had been

Jim Downs: Historical Context Can Help Us Better Understand Debate Over New Health Care Legislation

[Jim Downs is author of the forthcoming book, "Sick from Freedom: The Unexpected Consequences of the American Civil War." He is an assistant professor of history at Connecticut College.] Once upon a time, the United States had a full-fledged national health care system. The federal government employed 120 doctors, constructed 40 hospitals, provided medical care to over 500,000 people, and even created special facilities for orphans and the elderly. That health care

Daniel Pipes: In Europe, Remorse Has Turned to Masochism

[Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. This piece was crossposted at the National Review Online.]"Nothing is more Western than hatred of the West." So writes the French novelist and essayist Pascal Bruckner in his book La tyrannie de la pénitence (2006), capably translated into

Victor Davis Hanson: What's Happening with Israel?

[Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services.] Current American relations with our once-staunch ally Israel are at their lowest ebb in the last 50 years. The Obama administration seems as angry at the building of Jewish

Julian Zelizer: Washington has Always Helped Set Rules for Wall Street

[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.] On Sunday, Sens. Chris Dodd and Richard Shelby said that they were close to a bipartisan compromise on financial regulation, which could be reached as early as this week.

Joshua Brown: Arizona Shreds the Constitution

  Joshua Brown is executive director of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning and professor of history at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Shanghai’s Expo: What Everyone Needs to Know

[Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, is the author of “China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know.”] In exactly one week, the countdown clocks in Shanghai will all finally hit zero. This is because this year May Day will also be Opening Day for the 2010 World Expo, an event that has been largely ignored in the United States (at least until very recently), but has been the subject of an enormous amount of advance publicity

Elaine Tyler May: Promises the Pill Could Never Keep

[Elaine Tyler May, a professor of history at the University of Minnesota, is the author, most recently, of the forthcoming “America and the Pill.”] An end to poverty. A cure for divorce. The elimination of unwed pregnancy. Fifty years ago next month, when the Food and Drug Administration announced that it would approve the oral contraceptive, these were the highest expectations for it. At the same time, few of its promoters in 1960 imagined how the pill, as it quickly became known,

Robert Zaller: If This is Capitalism, Bring on Socialism

[Robert Zaller is a professor of history at Drexel University. He can be reached at op-ed@thetriangle.org.] Wall Street died in 2008. Every major bank and investment house on the Street was, as they say of unlucky homeowners, underwater. Their putative assets were exceeded by their debts and collateral obligations; and since they were all entangled like snakes, none could extricate itself from the common fate. The system went into cardiac arr

Nicole Hemmer: Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are Not Guilty of Sedition -- But Over-the-Top 'Tea-Party' Rhetoric Doesn’t Help

[Nicole Hemmer is a lecturer at Manchester College and a PhD candidate in history at Columbia University. She is writing a history of conservative media.] Sedition. The word is all the rage as the nation commemorated the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing this week amid tumultuous times: a historic recession, massive deficits, nationwide “tea party” protests. As memories of the domestic terror attack resurface, critics of those tea party protests have shifted the debate f

Jonathan Zimmerman: Mark Twain's Travels With the 'Savages'

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University and is the author of "Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century."] Italians are superstitious. Portuguese are lazy. Turks are dishonest. And the French? They're fat, and filthy besides. Welcome to the world of Mark Twain, who died 100 years ago this week. We know Twain best from his novels about life in America, especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry

Henry Irving: Revisiting the 'Big Society'

[Henry Irving is a PhD Student at the University of Leeds whose AHRC funded research is focused on the interrelationship between economic policy and popular politics during the transition to peace after 1945.] Following the first televised Prime Ministerial Debate last week, Conservative party strategists have adopted an increasingly negative campaign focused on the potential dangers of a hung parliament. The reason for this negativity might be more complex than a simple reaction to

Francis Beckett: Britain Will Never Have It So Good Again

[Francis Beckett is an author, journalist, broadcaster and contemporary historian.] The year 1956 was when the old Britain died and a new one was born. It was the year that so many of the old assumptions were shattered: that Britain was a great power; that being British was something special; that politics and political dogmas and doctrines such as socialism could make the world a better place; that the British Empire was strong and benevolent and forever; that British theatre mirro

Erik Christiansen and Jeremy Sullivan: The Tea Party Challenge to History

[Erik Christiansen teaches history at the University of Rhode Island and at Roger Williams University. Jeremy Sullivan is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Maryland at College Park.] When considering the political scene of the moment, it is difficult not to see how historical allegory plays an important role in the public spectacle known as the Tea Party movement. From the name itself, an acronym (Taxed Enough Already) that fuses current concerns to a patriotic histo

Allan Lichtman: Vote for Your Favorite Corporation

[Allan Lichtman is a professor of history at American University and a national political analyst. His e-mail address is lichtman@american.edu.] Believe it or not, a corporation has announced an intention to run for U. S. representative in Maryland's 8th Congressional District in Montgomery County. No, this is not some silly joke like writing in Superman or Wonder Woman on your presidential ballot. It is an effort by the progr

Niall Ferguson and Ted Forstmann: Back to Basics on Financial Reform

[Mr. Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard University and a professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School. Mr. Forstmann is senior founding partner of Forstmann Little & Company, and chairman and CEO of IMG.] A "trilemma" is like a dilemma, only there are three things to choose from and you can have just two. The current debate over post-crisis financial regulation suggests we face such a trilemma: We can choose any two of the following, b

Henry Louis Gates Jr.: Ending the Slavery Blame-Game

[Henry Louis Gates Jr., a professor at Harvard, is the author of the forthcoming “Faces of America” and “Tradition and the Black Atlantic.”] ...While we are all familiar with the role played by the United States and the European colonial powers like Britain, France, Holland, Portugal and Spain, there is very little discussion of the role Africans themselves played. And that role, it turns out, was a considerable one, especially for the slave-trading kingdoms of western and central A