Roundup: Historians' Take

Scott Reynolds Nelson: Mad Men in the He-Cession

[Scott Reynolds Nelson is a professor of history at the College of William and Mary. Among his books are Steel Drivin' Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend (Oxford University Press, 2006) and Crash: An Uncommon History of America's Financial Panics, forthcoming from Knopf in the spring of 2011.] ...Pundits have come to label the current economic downturn a "he-cession." In the summer issue of Foreign Policy, Reihan Salam, a fellow at the New America Foun

Nancy L. Cohen: 2010 as 1994? Relax, Democrats

[Nancy L. Cohen is a historian and the author of "The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865-1914" and "The Social History of the United States: The 1990s."] Two Democratic senators and one governor announced their retirements earlier this month, and days later, the smart money has Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts Senate seat falling to the GOP for the first time in nearly 60 years. Suddenly, the Republicans are crowing and Democrats are trembling -- everyone say

Johann N. Neem: MLK built on American tradition of organization and protest

[Johann N. Neem is associate professor of history at Western Washington University in Bellingham. He is author of "Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts" (Harvard University Press, 2008).] In the 1950s and 1960s, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and thousands of other Americans from all backgrounds took to the streets to advocate equal treatment for all Americans. The civil-rights movement was organized from the grass root

Julian Zelizer: Sports and Political Oversight Do Mix

[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.] When baseball slugger Mark McGwire admitted he had used steroids in his record-breaking 1998 season, he recalled refusing to talk about the subject in his 2005 testimony to C

Walter Russell Mead: The Death of the West

[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.] Between 1950 and 1989, the world was divided into clearly demarcated groups of countries. There was the “First World” of advanced industrial democracies also known as ‘the West’: western Europe; the British and European diaspora in North America, Australia and New

Andrew J. Bacevich: Why Can't America Win Wars?

[Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His new book Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War is due out in the spring.] President Obama’s decision to escalate U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan earned him at most two muted cheers from Washington’s warrior-pundits. Sure, the president had acceded to Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s request for more troops. Already in its ninth year, Operation Enduring Freedom was therefor

Eric Foner: Obama the Professional

[Eric Foner, a member of The Nation's editorial board, is the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, specializing in the Civil War and Reconstruction, slavery and nineteenth-century America.] The first year may not be the best way to judge a president. After one year in office, Abraham Lincoln still insisted that slavery would not become a target of the Union war effort, Franklin D. Roosevelt had yet to address the need for social insurance in the wake of the Gr

Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse: 666 to 1: The U.S. Military, al-Qaeda, and a War of Futility

[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. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com and the winner of a 2009 Ridenhour Prize for

Juan Cole: A New Middle East Cold War? Ahmadinejad slams Saudi Arabia over Yemen, Gaza

[Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute] While American security officials are focused laser-like on the 300 or so al-Qaeda members in rural Maarib province of Yemen, and worry about further strikes on the US planned by this small group, a regional food fight has broken out between Iran and Saudi Arabia about a different sort of local insurgency, the Huthis, who have so far not been seen by the US as an international terrorism threat. Yemen is on the face of it an u

Jonathan Zimmerman: Obama Should Go to Haiti

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. His most recent book is “Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory.”] Thus far, President Obama has done all the right things in response to Tuesday’s catastrophic earthquake in Haiti. He hastily dispatched American ships, transport planes, and more than 2,000 troops to help distribute supplies, search for missing victims, and maintain order in the devastated Caribbean nation. At a press

Julian Zelizer: It's the Institutions, Stupid!

At its halfway point, the 111th Congress is faring poorly in the court of public opinion. By November 2009, only 26 percent of Americans approved of how Congress was doing its job, according to Gallup; other polls point to similar results. Still, there are a number of reasons why Democratic leaders should be pleased with its performance. Congress passed a $787 billion economic stimulus bill that many experts say helped stabilize the financial markets and is leading to a steady, if s

Dilip Hiro: Iran, 1979 and 2010

The dramatic images of protestors in Iran fearlessly facing -- and sometimes countering -- the brutal attacks of the regime’s security forces rightly gain the admiration and sympathy of viewers in the West. They also leave many Westerners assuming that this is a preamble to regime change in Tehran, a repeat of history, but with a twist. After all, Iran has the distinction of being the only Middle Eastern state that underwent a revolutionary change -- 31 years ago -- which originated as a mild s

Glenn W. LaFantasie: Our Permanent Culture of Political Violence

[Glenn W. LaFantasie is the Richard Frockt Family Professor of Civil War History and Director of the Institute for Civil War Studies at Western Kentucky University. His most recent book is "Gettysburg Heroes: Perfect Soldiers, Hallowed Ground" (Indiana University Press, 2008).] In the wake of Jared L. Loughner’s attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords -- part of a shooting rampage that has claimed six lives -- Americans are going through much hand-wringing and s

Victor Davis Hanson: 2010: Our Year of Decision

Sometimes long-festering problems collide — and explode — in a single memorable year. We can go as far back as the fifth century B.C. to see this phenomenon — and we may see it again in 2010. In 480 B.C., a decade of Aegean tension culminated in the Persian invasion of Greece. Nothing seemed able to stop the onslaught of King Xerxes as he broke through the pass of Thermopylae — until the Greeks under Themistocles rallied at the sea battle of Salamis and saved the West.

Carl Paulus: What's Been Missed with Harry Reid's Comment

[Carl Paulus is a Ph.D. candidate at Rice University and studies nineteenth-century American politics.] This past weekend it was revealed that Harry Reid in 2008 referred to then-Senator Obama as "light skinned" and "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one." The reaction to these revelations came as expected: Republicans called for Reid to resign from his leadership position, while Democrats circled the wagons around the Senate Majority Leader. Desp

Jon Wiener: Obama's Secrecy Problem

[Jon Wiener, a contributing editor of the Nation, teaches American history at UC Irvine and is the author of, among other books, "Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files."] 'For a long time now there's been too much secrecy in this city." That's what President Obama said on his first day in office. He was talking about the way George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had used 9/11 as a pretext for pulling a veil over many of their key policies and actions. Last week, Obama

Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse: Making Sense of the New CIA Battlefield in Afghanistan

[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. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com and the winner of a 2009 Ridenhour Prize for

Victor Davis Hanson: Beating the Dead Terrorist Horse

[Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the editor of the forthcoming Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome]Most of the current acrimony over counterterrorism is stale. The debate is simply a rehash of issues that were discussed and, in

Jonathan Tremblay: The Vatican Reveals Secret Documents: Selling off History

[Jonathan Tremblay is a Historian and Breaking News Editor for the History News Network] Historians are abuzz with a new announcement from the Vatican. They will be releasing 105 documents to the public from their secret archives, many of which were never known to even exist. Kept in the vaults of St. Peter for a millennium, this very small sampling of fascinating literary sources would probably not have braved the centuries were it not for the extremely stringent conservation and a

David Greenberg: The Honeymooners

[David Greenberg, a historian at Rutgers University, is the author of Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image] The promise and selling point of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign—breaking with the past, delivering something new—was the oldest promise in American politics. Since European settlers crossed the Atlantic imagining (mistakenly) a “new world” without history, Americans have rewarded talk of new beginnings. The early colonists sought to create a society de novo in ways that Europ