Roundup: Historians' Take

Lawrence S. Wittner: Nuclear Disarmament Activism in Asia and the Pacific, 1971-1996

[Lawrence S. Wittner is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany.  This article is adapted for The Asia-Pacific Journal from his new book, Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement (Stanford University Press).] Although the worldwide campaign against nuclear weapons was in the doldrums during the early 1970s, the antinuclear move

Edwin Black: North Korea Missile Threat Against Hawaii and Alaska Has Been Expected for Ten Years—Iran Regime a Full Partner

Edwin Black is the New York Times bestselling author of IBM and the Holocaust, Nazi Nexus and The Plan: How to Rescue Society the Day the Oil Stops—or the Day Before. He can be reached at www.edwinblack.com. In a frantic race with high winds, bone-chilling ice storms and rattled political nerves, the American defense establishment has been rushing to meet the threat now faced by Hawaii, Guam, Al

Tony Judt: Israel's Fictions on the Ground

[Tony Judt is the director of the Remarque Institute at New York University and the author of “Postwar” and “Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century.”] I am old enough to remember when Israeli kibbutzim looked like settlements (“a small village or collection of houses” or “the act of peopling or colonizing a new country,” Oxford English Dictionary). In the early 1960s, I spent time on Kibbutz Hakuk, a small community founded by the Palmah unit of th

Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin: 'A New Deal for Veterans'

The original, Post-World War II GI Bill has been both idealized as evidence of America as land of opportunity, and criticized for primarily benefiting white men while perpetuating racial and gender discrimination. So write Glenn C. Altschuler, a professor of American studies and dean of the School of Continuing Education and Summer Sessions at Cornell University, and Stuart M. Blumin, professor emeritus of American history at Cornell, in their new book, The GI Bill: A New Deal For Veterans (Oxfo

Jonathan Zimmerman: Where have all the state capitol reporters gone?

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. His most recent book,"Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory," was published this month.] Hey, have you heard the latest joke? It's called the New York Legislature. Two Democrats recently defected to the Republicans, allowing the GOP to take over the Senate; someone locked the door of the Senate chamber, until Republicans mysteriously located the key; then one of the two defector

Wada Haruki: Japan-North Korea Relations—A Dangerous Stalemate

Wada Haruki is Emeritus Professor of Tokyo University and author of Kin Nissei to Manshu Konichi Senso (Kim Il Sung and the Manchurian Anti-Japanese War, 1993), Chosen Senso zenshi (A Complete History of the Korean War, 2002), Kita Chosen – Yugekitai kokka no genzai (North Korea –Partisan State Today, 1998), Chosen yuji o nozomu no ka (Do we Want a Korean Emergency? 2002) and Dojidai hihan – Nicho kankei to rachi mondai (Critique of Our Own Times – Japan-North Korea Relations and the Abduction P

Martin Kramer: Obama's Middle East map in shreds

There is nothing at all surprising about Barack Obama's reluctance to embrace the surge for freedom in Iran. As I've shown, he received his primer on the Middle East from Rashid Khalidi, who facilitated Obama's formation as a Palestine-centric Third Worldist. In this view of things, only the situation of the Palestinians deserves to be described as"intolerable" —the word Obama used in Cairo—and action is promised only to them. Iranians are defrauded and assaulted

Jon Meacham: Theocracies Are Doomed. Thank God.

[Jon Meacham is the Editor of Newsweek. Meacham’s latest book, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for biography or autobiography...He has written for The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, and The Washington Post Book World...Meacham graduated from The McCallie School and from The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, with a degree summa cum laude in English Literature.] For years A

Juan Cole: Crunch Time in Tehran

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] Reformist presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi said Saturday morning that the 4 pm GMT rally on Saturday against the alleged stealing of the presidential election in Iran would go ahead. This despite the threa

Tom Palaima: What ignorance has cost us

[Palaima (tpalaima@sbcglobal.net) is a professor of classics at the University of Texas. ] Ignorance is not always bliss. Just ask police Lt. Wayne DeMoss who was denied promotion recently for failing to recognize City Manager Marc Ott at the funeral of a former police captain. What do you think about that decision? I received a MacArthur Genius Award yet I routinely blank on the names of deans, provosts, colleagues and studen

Steven A. Leibo: On indifference to global warming

[Dr. Steven A. Leibo directs the Sage Colleges Program in International & Globalization Studies.] Boy, how predictable! Just when we we’re feeling good about this emerging environment of greater toleration. Just when a leader like President Obama could emerge and appoint a judge like Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court a last century wack job like the killer who showed up at the Holocaust Museum reminds of us of how many of the hatreds of the last century, the century some have

Juan Cole: Stealing the Iranian election

Mir-Hosain Mousavi, who maintains he won last Friday's presidential election despite official assertions that he lost 2 to 1 to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is calling for another rally Thursday, this time in part to honor the persons killed by hardliners or security forces in the course of previous demonstrations.Mourning the martyr is as central to Iranian Shiite religious culture as it was to strains o

Richard Seaford: What the ancient Greek anxiety about money has to tell us about our own economic predicaments

[Richard Seaford is Professor of Greek Literature at the University of Exeter. He is the author of _Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and tragedy in the developing city- state_, 1994, and of a commentary on Euripides' Bacchae, 1996.] What makes the ancient Greeks worth studying is that they are sufficiently like us to be comprehensible but sufficiently unlike us to be worth making the effort to understand. It may be a common theme among enthusiastic modern supporters of the Classics tha

Martin Kramer: Iranian turmoil

[Prof. Kramer, the author of Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America, was a full-time tenured academic at Tel Aviv University. He is now a senior fellow at the Adelson Institution of Strategic studies and a Senior Fellow at the Olin Institute at Harvard.] My short assessment of the turmoil in Iran appears (with nine other expert assessments) at Middle East Str

Daniel Pipes: The Middle Eastern Cold War

A cold war is"the key to understanding the Middle East in the 21st century." So argue Yigal Carmon and three of his colleagues at the Middle East Media and Research Institute (MEMRI) in a recent study,"An Escalating Regional Cold War."

Dominic Sandbrook: 30 years on from the Islamic revolution, can diplomacy win out?

[Dominic Sandbrook is the author, most recently, of "White Heat: a History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties".] On the first day of February 1979, an Air France plane landed at Tehran Airport. It was carrying an elderly Islamic cleric from Iran’s rural hinterland who had not been in his native land for 15 years. As he stepped down from the plane, dressed entirely in black, supported by a French flight officer, a thousand waiting admirers began to chant his name: Ruhollah

Julian E Zeizler and Melissa Lerner: Obama can succeed in Mideast

[Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. Melissa Lerner graduated this spring with highest honors from Princeton, where she completed a senior thesis about presidential leadership and the Arab-Israeli conflict.] At a time when the Obama administration is dealing with a barely stable economy while trying to address long-term health care, two wars, the environment and the threat of terrorism, many ask whether it

Andrew Meyer: The Iran that Could Have Been (and Might Yet Be)

[About Mr. Meyer: "After living in mainland China and Taiwan for four years and in Japan for one year I returned to the U.S. and earned a doctoral degree in Chinese history, which I teach at a college in New York. "Madman of Chu" reflects my belief that the study of the history and culture of other nations is indispensible to the conduct of modern politics. "Marriage Equality Amendment" is devoted to amending the U.S. Constitution to protect the right of same-sex couple

Daniel Pipes: Assessing Binyamin Netanyahu's Speech at Bar-Ilan University

In a major speech today at the Begin-Sadat Center of Bar-Ilan University, Binyamin Netanyahu laid out his vision to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. In brief, it's a fine speech, making many needed points, but it fails on the critical point of prematurely accepting a Palestinian state.Here are some of the high points, important statements eloquently articulated:

Tom Engelhardt: Charisma and the Imperial Presidency

[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