Roundup: Historians' Take

Steve Fraser: Those who brought you the Great Depression and our own current emergency are still running the show

[Steve Fraser, the author of "Wall Street: America's Dream Palace," is a visiting professor at New York University.] A grisly banner was held aloft the other day at a demonstration on Wall Street. Its graphic message advised denizens of the street to "Jump!" It was a frightful reminder of perhaps the most widely believed legend about the Great Depression of the 1930s; that the sudden collapse of the economy filled the sky with the falling bodies of suicidal stock

Norman Markowitz: Does Sarah Palin Want to be an American Citizen?

[Mr. Markowitz teaches history at Rutgers.] Sarah Palin is attacking Barack Obama for "palling around with terrorists," twisting media accounts to falsely connect Obama with the Weather Underground figure Bill Ayers. Let me say that I have no sympathy, and never had, for the anarcho-syndicalist craziness and bona fide infantile leftism, that Ayers and his associates represented nearly 40 years ago, when Obama was in the 3rd grade. By contrast, Sarah Palin

Kate Merkel-Hess and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom: What Time Is It in China?

Foreign travelers often find it disorienting that every part of China is on the same time zone, that of the capital, meaning the sun can set at 6:00 p.m. on one day of their tour, 10:00 p.m. on another. Journalists and academics primarily interested in China take the uniform use of Beijing time in stride, but we’re sometimes affected these days by a different sort of temporal confusion. Namely, figuring out whether China should be seen as futuristic (it has the world’s fastest train) or at least

Mark Naison: The McCain Palin Strategy of Character Assassination Will Not Work This Time

[Mark Naison is Professor of African American Studies and History, Fordham University.] Now that Barack Obama has taken a decisive lead in the Presidential Race, John McCain and Sarah Palin have decided to take a time honored theme out of the playbook of the American Right and attack their opponent's patriotism We saw that in the debate where Palin, rather than dealing with substantive issues regarding American military strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan called the Obama

Francis Fukuyama: The Fall of America, Inc.

The implosion of America's most storied investment banks. The vanishing of more than a trillion dollars in stock-market wealth in a day. A $700 billion tab for U.S. taxpayers. The scale of the Wall Street crackup could scarcely be more gargantuan. Yet even as Americans ask why they're having to pay such mind-bending sums to prevent the economy from imploding, few are discussing a more intangible, yet potentially much greater cost to the United States—the damage that the financial meltdown is doi

Andreas Umland: Was Medvedev Exposed?

[Dr Andreas Umland is editor of the book series "Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society" (www.ibidem-verlag.de/spps.html) and administrator of the web site "Russian Nationalism" (groups.yahoo.com/group/russian_nationalism/).] The clearer the larger implications of Russia’s latest adventure in the Caucasus become, the more the Russian leadership’s actions, in August 2008, look dysfunctional. A growing numbe

Dean Baker: Statement on Congressional Approval of Bailout

[Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of "The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer" (www.conservativenannystate.org). He also has a blog, "Beat the Press," where he discusses the media's coverage of economic issues. You can find it at the American Prospect's web site.] This is the first time in

Alan Schroeder: Good Format, Bad Format (Re: The Debates)

[The following is a post by Alan Schroeder, author of Presidential Debates: Fifty-Years of High Risk TV.] What a difference a format makes. In the first Obama-McCain debate the candidates had two minutes for opening responses, followed by a five-minute discussion period on each topic. In practice, thanks to two verbally confident candidates, these periods ran even longer. Biden and Palin had only ninety seconds for their initial responses and two minutes for discussion, in a debate

Niall Ferguson: The End of Prosperity?

... We tend to think of the Depression as having been triggered by the stock-market crash of 1929. The Wall Street crash is conventionally said to have begun on "Black Thursday" — Oct. 24, 1929, when the Dow Jones industrial average declined 2% — though in fact the market had been slipping since early September. On "Black Monday" (Oct. 28), it plunged 13%, the next day a further 12%. Over the next three years, the U.S. stock market declined a staggering 89%, reaching its nadi

Jim Sleeper: Don't Just Hold Your Nose

I've read all the sober explanations of why we must hold our noses and support the bailout. I've watched Barack Obama intone the same on the Senate floor. Sorry, but it all fits into a neoliberal paradigm whose adherents haven't noticed that it's over. Watching the Senate's pompous porkers play populist with the package was like watching Hapsburgs greet their subjects in July, 1914. True, we're all tethered into the dance: We love our cars -- couldn't imagine reconfiguring our lives

Juan Cole: The non-debate

It was not a debate. Just as television in prime time has been largely emptied of drama and innovative comedy, with a few exceptions, in favor of empty-headed "reality shows," so the political debates have mostly been gutted. Judging "how the candidates did" is rather like weighing in on the wittiness of the libretto of "Big Brother" or the pace of character development in the latest episode of "Keeping up with the Kardashians." The genre of t

Robert S. McElvaine: Christian Populism, Then and Now

[Robert S. McElvaine is Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts & Letters at Millsaps College. His new book is Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America (Crown).] Vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin may seem at first glance to have much in common with Christian populist William Jennings Bryan: Both present themselves as representatives of the Common Citizen and claim to believe that everything in the Bible is literally true. But is this populism -- or this Christ

The Atlantic: We called five historians and political scientists to ask them which presidential election this one most resembles. Here’s what they said.

Joan Hoff, professor of history, Montana State University, and former president of the Center for the Study of the Presidency."The election that immediately comes to mind is 1968—particularly the negativity aimed at Lyndon Johnson and the direction the country was going in because of the Vietnam War. What most commentators miss is that Johnson’s resignation wasn’t just about the war. He also was facing a serious economic problem that I don’t think he knew how to resolve. Nations were b

Alan Brinkley: 'In My Lifetime I Have Seen Nothing That Resembles The 1930s More Than The Present Moment'

Now that even the longshot bailout has self-destructed, it's hard to predict anything about the near-term future of the economy, and I will not attempt to do so. But at some point, after who knows how much damage, we will reach a point of stability, look over the wreckage, and decide collectively how to proceed. It is hard for me to imagine that the view from that grim point would support a continuation of the anti-government, anti-regulation regime that has benefited so many wealth

Michael Nelson: How Vice Presidential Debates Came to Be

[Michael Nelson, a former editor of The Washington Monthly, is a professor of political science at Rhodes College and a nonresident senior fellow at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.] The first presidential debates occurred 48 years ago, in 1960. The first vice presidential debate didn’t take place until debates resumed in 1976, 16 years later. How come? The answer is that three very significant things happened to the vice presidency dur

Julian Zelizer: Sitting senators become stand-up guys

Wednesday night's vote on the financial bailout was good for future legislators who plan to run for president. For decades, the conventional wisdom has been that sitting senators make bad presidential candidates. Almost everything about the legislative process is rough and ugly, the thinking goes. Legislators compromise, take contradictory stands, strike deals with their adversaries and form unholy alliances. When the life of a sitting senator is exposed on the campaign trail, it d

Andrew Meyer: McCain's missing a vital point about Afghanistan

[About 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 the City University of New York. This blog reflects my belief that the study of the history and culture of other nations is indispensible to the conduct of modern politics.] The difference between John McCain and Barack Obama over foreign policy toward Pakistan has generated much press coverage of late. It

Ira Chernus: How Forgotten Iraq May Elect the Next President

[Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin. He can be reached at chernus@colorado.edu.] In 1932, in the midst of a disastrous economic meltdown, Franklin D. Roosevelt made"the forgotten man" the centerpiece of his presidential election campaign. Far more than we suspect, this year's ele

Bee Wilson: NYC once had its own milk scandal

[Bee Wilson is the author of “Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud From Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee.”] THE milk was marketed as pure and wholesome, and it looked fine to the naked eye. How were the mothers to know they were poisoning their babies? They had paid good money for it on the open market. It would take thousands of sick children before lawmakers did anything to stop it. China in 2008? No, New York City in 1858. Missing from the coverage of the cur

Nigel Jones: Austria, still hobbled by its history

[Nigel Jones's Countdown to Valkyrie: The July Plot against Hitler is published in December by Frontline Books.] Austria is special. Its tourist board will tell you that, as will the headlines on the infrequent occasions when the Alpine republic grabs global attention. One of those rare occasions happened this weekend: Austria's far-right parties scooped up 29 per cent of the votes between them in a general election, pushing them ahead of the conservative People's Party, and only ju