Roundup: Historians' Take

Michael T. Klare: Garrisoning the Global Gas Station

[Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author of several books on energy politics, including Resource Wars (2001), Blood and Oil (2004), and, most recently, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy. A brief video of Klare discussing key subjects in his new book can be viewed by

Juan Cole: McCain Confuses Baghdad with Seoul Again

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.]John McCain says that it isn't too important when American troops leave Iraq, that the main thing is to ensure there aren't troop deaths. He said that the US has troops in a lot of places, including South Korea.

Elizabeth Wood: Who Is the Real Leader of Russia?

[Elizabeth Wood is professor of Russian and Soviet history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.] Russia's troubled history suggests that Medvedev will probably be more of a figurehead than a real president. Ever since Dmitri Medvedev's nomination to succeed Vladimir Putin as president of Russia, followed by his election and now his inauguration, Kremlin watchers, both Russian and Western, have been discussing the so-called "Putin-Medvedev tandem" and

Jeff Biggers: America's First Blogger ... Anne Royall

Call her America's first blogger, albeit two centuries ahead of her times. Today is her birthday. Born on June 11, 1769, Anne Royall was an American original, a stranger to fear, and one of the nation's most daring, impassioned and indomitable social critics in Washington, DC. In the early nineteenth century. To say she was simply a woman ahead of her time overlooks the hard wrought accomplishments of her life and the scandalous legacy she left behind. Unafraid to wrestle with the g

Frederick Kagan & Kimberly Kagan: How Prime Minister Maliki Pacified Iraq

[Ms. Kagan is president of the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D.C., and author of "The Surge: A Military History," forthcoming from Encounter Books. Mr. Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.] America is very close to succeeding in Iraq. The "near-strategic defeat" of al Qaeda in Iraq described by CIA Director Michael Hayden last month in the Washington Post has been followed by the victory of the Iraqi government's secur

Tom Engelhardt: One Man's Online Journey through Bush's Alphabet Soup

[Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site, has just been published. Focusing on what the mainstream media didn't cover, it is functionally an alternative history o

Harold James: The Future of Globalization

[Harold James is Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. His books include International Monetary Cooperation Since Bretton Woods (1996), The End of Globalization: Lessons from the Great Depression (2001), and Europe Reborn: A History 1914–2000 (2003). This essay is based on his presentation at the 8th Transatlantic Editors’ Roundtable, “

Greg Grandin: What Will the Obama Doctrine Be Like? (Re: Latin America)

[Greg Grandin teaches history at New York University. He is the author of Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism and The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War.] Google"neglect,""Washington," and"Latin America," and you will be led to thousands of hand-wringing

Juan Cole: The Real Question is, Would a President McCain be good for Women?

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] A spate of newspaper articles has appeared profiling women activists who are furious that their candidate was defeated and who feel Senator Clinton was disrespected because she is a woman. It is often alleged that the

Neve Gordon: How Israel’s occupation has changed in the past 20 years

[Neve Gordon is a senior lecturer in the Politics and Government Department at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. For information about his forthcoming book and more www.israelsoccupation.info.] It took me a moment before I understood why my story about a few relatively inconsequential incidents, which occurred years ago at my high school, had such an effect on the undergraduates taking my fall semester course in 2006. On

Ruth Rosen: Tales From Inside the Editorial Board Room

[Ruth Rosen Professor Emerita of History, U.C. Davis Visiting Professor of History U.C. Berkeley.] When I first heard about Scott McClellan's charges that the Bush administration had lied and deceived Americans during the months and years leading up to the war, I burst into tears of happiness. No, nothing he wrote was new. And even if he still seems like a sleazy public relations expert in obfuscation, an insider was finally telling the truth, in one book. My story is differen

Neve Gordon: Israel's problem, since its 1967 victory, is that it wants Palestinian land but not the people who live on it

[Neve Gordon teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University, Israel. For information about his book, Israel’s Occupation, and more www.israelsoccupation.info ] On June 8, 1967, just a few hours after the Israeli military captured Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, Haram al Sharif, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan visited the site. Noticing that troops had hung an Israeli flag on the cap of the Al-Aqsa shrine, Dayan asked one of the soldiers to remove it

David Greenberg: Historical Perspective on Clinton's Timetable for Conceding

[David Greenberg is a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers and a contributing editor to The New Republic.] Despite what you may have heard, there is nothing slow or delayed about Hillary Clinton's decision to wait until Saturday to formally concede the Democratic nomination--at least as a historical matter. It has been a while since a Democratic nomination fight came down to the wire as this one has, but consider: * In 1984, when Walter Mondale prevailed ov

Jonathan Zimmerman: Memorize this!

[Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of education and history at New York University, is teaching this year at NYU's study-abroad program in Accra, Ghana. He is the author of "Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century."] My 12-year-old daughter recently asked me to help her prepare for a computer-science test for school. She produced a study sheet with several terms that she would have to define, including mouse, point, click and drag. I suppress

Robert S. McElvaine: America's 40 Years War at an End

[Historian Robert S. McElvaine is Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts and Letters at Millsaps College. His latest book, Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America, has just been published by Crown. He is currently at work on a new history of America in the 1960s, Oh Freedom! (Norton).] How fitting--even how poetic--it is that Barack Obama has clinched the Democratic presidential nomination during the week in which w

Bruce Schulman & Julian Zelizer: Senator Sam's Challenge to Presidential Power

[Bruce Schulman, Boston University, and Julian E. Zelizer, Princeton University, are the editors of Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the Seventies (Harvard University Press).] During the past month, there has been some rumbling on Capitol Hill about reinvigorating investigations into the Bush administration. House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers warned that Karl Rove would face contempt of Congress if he did not appear before his colleagues to talk about the

Julian Zelizer: Veep choice ... A balancing act

[Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the co-editor of “Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s” (Harvard University Press) and is completing a book on the history of national security politics since World War II.] ... The running mate selection is more important today than it was in previous decades, because the power of the office has vastly expanded. The transformation of the vice presidency began in the 1950s w

Harry Boyte & Steven Hahn: Obama picks up message that RFK popularized

[Harry Boyte is founder of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the University of Minnesota and author of the forthcoming "The Citizen Solution: How You Can Make a Difference." Steven Hahn teaches history at the University of Pennsylvania and is author of the forthcoming "The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom."] The furor over Hillary Clinton's remark about Robert Kennedy's assassination has obscured a deeper comparison between Barack Obama and the l

Jeremy Young: So You Want To Run A Third-Party Presidential Campaign?

Okay, so maybe you don’t. But some folks do. In the past month, America’s three largest third parties – the Libertarians, Greens, and Constitutionists – have chosen their presidential nominees. As someone who’s always been a bit of a third-party junkie, I thought it would be interesting to do a post on the history of third party presidential campaigns. The (rather lengthy) result follows.First of all, let’s look at the raw data. Below, I’ve compiled a table of every third-party

Juan Cole: The First Web 2.0 President?

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] The NYT leads this morning with "Obama Claims Nomination; First Black Candidate to Lead a Major Party Ticket." You can see from my headline that I put a different emphasis. I'm not one of those politically correct, color-blin