Roundup: Historians' Take

Juan Cole: The Ghoul's Glossary ... the 2008 Election

Alaska: The only one of the 50 states where secessionists are considered American patriots rather than traitors. Catholic working class: Synonym for "feminist." Communist: 1. A believer in a graduated income tax ("Communists" include Adam Smith and 81% of professional American economists). 2. When modified by 'Chinese' : A supplier of retail goods to Walmart. Friends: Persons whom John McCain does not know and does not actually like very

Simon Schama: A Farewell to Dubya, All-Time Loser in Presidential History

"Forgotten but not gone" was the way in which the supremo of Boston politics, Billy Bulger, liked to dismiss the human irritants he had crushed beneath his trim boot. The same could now be said for the hapless 43rd President of the United States as the daylight draws mercifully in on his reign of misfortune and calamity. How is he bearing up, one wonders, as the candidate from his own party treats him as the carrier of some sort of infectious political disease? How telling was it that

Larry Bartels: How smart is the American voter?

[Larry M. Bartels directs the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. A longer version of this article appears in the current Wilson Quarterly.] One of the bestselling books of the 2008 election season has been "Just How Stupid Are We?" by popular historian Rick Shenkman. It presents a familiar collection of bleak results f

Mark Naison: To My Republican Friends- A Vote For Obama Is a Vote to Rescue the GOP From Bigotry

[Mark Naison is Professor of African American Studies and History, Fordham University.] One of the things I've learned, through long experience, is that it can be as difficult to change a person's political affiliation as it is to change their religion. People are attached to political parties through tradition and sentiment as well as ideology, and to try to get people to change parties is usually futile and often counterproductive.Some of my favorite former students are

Joseph Palermo: Chicagoans Studs Terkel and Barack Obama (and the Election of 2008)

John Steinbeck's widow asked Studs Terkel to write an introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of The Grapes of Wrath. And while he was working on it Robert F. Kennedy's eldest son, then Congressman Joe Kennedy, called Terkel to come to Iowa and see for himself the plight of American farmers."Here it is the 1980s," Terkel wrote in his memoir, Touch and Go, "and you've got farmers who are starving. You saw the Depression in the Iowa countryside; the topsoil worn out, dust, towns with F

Joseph Lane: Is it 1856 or 1860? (The Past as Political Prologue)

[Joseph Lane is the Hawthorne Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Emory & Henry.]Peter Lawler wrote a fascinating analysis here at the Britannica Blog of eight recent elections that might help us understand this one, and I would like to offer another perspective on the question of historical antecedents and what we might learn from them.Is this 185

Daniel Pipes: Obama's Connection to Sirhan Sirhan

From the perspective of a Middle East & Islam specialist, the just-concluding U.S. presidential election is extraordinary for the outsized role of one's subject area. Consider some of the topics:Barack Obama's birth and youth as a Muslim, a fact that he completely denies ("I've always been a Christian,""I have never been a Muslim"). Obama's network

Tom Engelhardt: The End of a Subprime Administration

[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 American Age of Denial. The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a co

Nathan Kozuskanich: How a search of Early Republic newspapers turned up evidence relevant to the Supreme Court gun case

The quest for original intent has dominated Second Amendment scholarship, a trend further solidified in the Supreme Court’s recent gun case, District of Columbia v. Heller. In the majority opinion, Justice Scalia insisted that the “normal meaning” of the words of the Second Amendment must be used to understand the Framers’ intent, not “secret or technical meanings that would not have been known to ordinary citizens in the founding generation.”1 But how can scholars (and justices, for that matter

John Steele Gordon: Speculators, Politicians, and Financial Disasters

Fueled by easy credit, the real-estate market had been rising swiftly for some years. Members of Congress were determined to assure the continuation of that easy credit. Suddenly, the party came to a devastating halt. Defaults multiplied, banks began to fail. Soon the economic troubles spread beyond real estate. Depression stalked the land. The year was 1836. The nexus of excess speculation, political mischief, and financial disaster—the same tangle that led to our pres

Mark Naison: Our Goal on Election Day ... A Mandate to Bring Relief to the Nation's Suffering

[Mark Naison is Professor of African American Studies and History, Fordham University.] As election day approaches, and the nation's economic problems grow severe, our goal for November 4 should not be just to assure an Obama victory, but to give him a mandate that will allow him to take immediate action to funnell aid to the millions of Americans on the verge of losing their hones and their jobs To prevent suffering on a massive scale, we need a dramatic program

Richard Reeves: The Fifth 'Pivot Point' Election

"Do Elections Matter?" That was the title of a conference of historians, journalists and other interested parties sponsored by The New York Historical Society last week. The answer, of course, was "yes" — and this one matters a good deal more than most. The tone of the day's talk was set at the beginning by Akhil Reed Amar, a professor of law and political science at Yale. In a presentation I agreed with, Amar raised the possibility that the 2008 election could b

Stanley Kutler: Closing Guantanamo ... Bush leaves another big decision to his successor

The U.S. government’s failure to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center for alleged terrorists continues to haunt and color our standing in the world. Barack Obama and John McCain both endorsed closing the facility. Even President George W. Bush has been known to utter such a heretical idea, and some of his top aides have expressed similar sentiments. In 2006, Bush said, “I’d like to close Guantanamo, but I als

Jim Sleeper: Treat, or Trick? Elections Officials, Beware!

In honor of Halloween, here's one more frisson about election tricks perverse enough to block the treat of a victory.One Saturday morning in 1982 I walked into the Brooklyn Board of Elections and found 30 supporters of then-State Senator Vander Beatty" checking" voter registration cards from the recent primary election. The hobgoblins of Florida, 2000, never outdid what I saw that morning in Brooklyn. But, believe me, it can happen again.Beatty's minions --

Frederick Kagan: Security Should be the Deciding Issue

As the scale of the economic crisis becomes clear and comparisons to the Great Depression of the 1930s are tossed around, there is a very real danger that America could succumb to the feeling that we no longer have the luxury of worrying about distant lands, now that we are confronted with a"real" problem that actually affects the lives of all Americans. As we consider whether various bailout plans help Main Street as well as Wall Street, the subtext is that both are much more important to Ameri

Andrew J. Bacevich: The Next President and the Global War on Terror

[Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His bestselling new book is The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (The American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books). To listen to a podcast in which he discusses issues relevant to this article, click here.] A week ago, I had a long conversation with

Eric Alterman: A Liberal Supermajority (Finally) Finds Its Voice

[Eric Alterman is a Distinguished Professor of English, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and Professor of Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He is also "The Liberal Media" columnist for The Nation, a senior fellow and "Altercation" weblogger for Media Matters for America, (formerly at MSNBC.com) in Washington, DC, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC, where he writes and edits the "Think Again" column

William Polk: We need to reduce the American empire

The announced topic of my talk to you today is not exactly what I want to discuss with you. For me to tell you what I would advise the incoming American president to do about oil is not so useful. Most of you could do a better job of that than I. If such advice is not coals to Newcastle, it is worse: “oil” to London. So let me cast my net somewhat more widely. I begin with one of our national weaknesses. We Americans have a tendency to offer solutions before we know what we ar

Julian Zelizer: Taking It To The People

There has been a lot of buzz today that Barack Obama is going too far with his thirty minute television commercial. Reporters have speculated about whether it shows Obama's arrogance, or extravagance, and if this move is just overkill. Will Americans react badly to thirty minutes of Obama? Why is this necessary? We should not be so quick to dismiss what Obama is doing. We must first remember that Obama's tactic is nothing new. There is precedent for candidates to purchase national televis

Robert S. McElvaine: "Black Tuesday" plus 79 Years

[Historian Robert S. McElvaine is Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts & Letters at Millsaps College and the author of The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941 (Random House). His latest book is Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America (Crown).] "Is it happening again?" That is the very disturbing question that many Americans are nervously asking on this, the seventy-ninth anniversary of "Black Tuesday," the date of the Stock Market Crash, in