Roundup: Historians' Take

Source: Christian Science Monitor

Feb 7, 2008

Jonathan Zimmerman: At Africa Cup of Nations, lingering bias against blacks

[Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of history and education at New York University, is teaching this semester at NYU's study-abroad program in Accra, Ghana. He is the author of "Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century."] Accra, Ghana Last Sunday, my family and I watched host Ghana squeak by arch rival Nigeria to advance to the semifinals of the Africa Cup of Nations tournament. Then we saw a post-game press conference with Ghana's coach, whose look

Source: Jerusalem Post

Feb 7, 2008

Daniel Pipes: How to Turn Gaza Over to Egypt

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] "Listen to me carefully," President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt instructed an interviewer on Jan. 30."Gaza is not part of Egypt, nor will i

Source: Deborah Lipstadt at her blog

Feb 6, 2008

Deborah Lipstadt: Stanley Fish nails it ... "Hillary hatred" is just like antisemitism

I have, by and large, kept this blog free of political matters. [I did blog about Ron Paul's antisemitism and racism.] The past few weeks I have been marveling [depressingly so] about the attacks on Hillary Clinton. They ranged from comments about her dress, ankles, laugh, and singing ability. She's too liberal. She's too much of a hawk. She cries in public. She doesn't show emotions. Even the noted and well-respected [deservedly so] commentator, David Gergen, spent ti

Source: Altercation (blog)

Feb 6, 2008

Eric Alterman: What Super Tuesday Means

1) Having spent $1.16 million per delegate, Mitt Romney is now toast. His conversion to conservatism was unconvincing -- except perhaps to the men and women of easy virtue at National Review -- and a significant proportion of evangelical Christians will refuse to vote for a Mormon. So Mitt was wasting his money from the start. I kept saying that, but at the time, nobody else, save Thompson, was plausible either. 2) Nobody really knows who is in a better position to win the Democrati

Source: TomDispatch.com

Feb 5, 2008

Tom Engelhardt: The Spectacle of Campaign 2008

[Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.] "Drawing from the best resources on national and

Source: TPM Cafe

Feb 5, 2008

Ruth Rosen: Why would a feminist vote for Obama?

Some people are stunned that I have already voted for Barack Obama and that I signed a "Feminists for Obama" statement which now includes over a thousand rather distinguished names. They know I've been involved in the women's movement since 1967 and have spent my life teaching and writing about the history of women and gender ever since. So why, they ask, didn't I cast a vote for Hillary Clinton? Am I filled with self-hatred as a woman? No. In fact, there is nothing I'd ra

Source: Foreign Policy in Focus

Feb 4, 2008

Stephen Zunes: Behind Obama and Clinton

[Stephen Zunes, a Foreign Policy In Focus analyst, is a professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco.] Voters on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party are rightly disappointed by the similarity of the foreign policy positions of the two remaining Democratic Party presidential candidates, Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama. However, there are still some real discernable differences to be taken into account. Indeed, given the

Source: Britannica Blog

Feb 4, 2008

David P. Redlawsk: Did Iowa matter?

[David P. Redlawsk is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Iowa and Director of the University of Iowa Hawkeye Poll.] Well, it’s been four weeks since the Iowa Caucuses. I considered writing my analysis of the caucus results immediately after it was over, but in retrospect I am glad other things intervened. Of course a month still doesn’t provide that much perspective, but given the pace of this yea

Source: WaPo

Feb 4, 2008

Susan Dunn: The Case for Disunity

[Susan Dunn teaches at Williams College. She was editor of "Something That Will Surprise the World: The Essential Writings of the Founding Fathers" and co-author, with James MacGregor Burns, of "The Three Roosevelts."] "United we stand; divided we fall," Patrick Henry wrote in 1785. Other Founders also extolled unity. "If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all," quipped Thomas Jefferson. "There is nothing w

Source: Letter from Kathleen Dalton to a journalism student who wanted to know "what do you think would change if a woman was president?"

Feb 4, 2008

Kathleen Dalton: What Would Change If a Woman Were President?

[Ms. Dalton is the author of Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life (Vintage).]

Source: Nation

Feb 4, 2008

Eric Foner: Debating who is more oppressed, blacks or women, is a fool's game

[Eric Foner, a member of The Nation's editorial board, is DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University and author, most recently, of Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction.] The controversy inspired by Hillary Clinton's remark crediting Lyndon Johnson with the civil rights movement's successes seems to have subsided. Contrary to much recent punditry, this contretemps does not prove that the Democratic primary has been reduced to a zero-sum game of i

Source: Memphis Commercial Appeal

Feb 3, 2008

Michael K. Honey: The legacy of MLK ... Defending the right to organize

[Michael K. Honey is Haley Professor of the Humanities at the University of Washington, Tacoma, and author of"Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign" (W.W. Norton).] The legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. casts a shadow over events in our country, and never more appropriately so than in this electoral season of 2008. In a real sense, King paved the way for Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign of hope. Using the Bible and the Constituti

Source: WaPo

Feb 3, 2008

Rick Perlstein: Getting Past the '60s? It's Not Going to Happen.

[Rick Perlstein, a senior fellow at the Campaign for America's Future, is the author of"Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America," to be published in May.] One of the most fascinating notions raised by the current presidential campaign is the idea that the United States can and must finally overcome the divisions of the 1960s. It's most often associated with the ascendancy of Sen. Barack Obama, who has been known to entertain it himself. Its most gauzy champion is p

Source: TPM Cafe

Feb 2, 2008

Jim Sleeper: Why It Should Be Obama vs. McCain

[Jim Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale and a writer on American civic culture and politics, is the author of The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York (W.W. Norton, 1990) and Liberal Racism (Viking, 1997).] Mario Cuomo drew the distinction between “the poetry of campaignin

Source: http://www.logosjournal.com (winter 2008)

Feb 1, 2008

Dick Howard: Obama's appeal

[Mr. Howard, Ph.D., is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, SUNY at Stony Brook.] ...The attractiveness of the Obama candidacy lies in its post-racial nature. It is as if the call of the Civil Rights Movement for integration and equality among all Americans had been realized; the old coalition politics, in which African Americans had become merely another interest group wanting its share of the pie, could finally be transcended. While Hillary Clinton’s victory might break what s

Source: Dissent Magazine (Winter 2008)

Feb 1, 2008

Nicolaus Mills: Who Passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964?

[Nicolaus Mills is a professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and author of Like a Holy Crusade: Mississippi 1964—The Turning of the Civil Rights Movement in America and most recently, Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America s Coming of Age as a Superpower.] LIKE SO many of my generation who did voter registration work in the South during the 1960s, I have been saddened by the debate that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama sparked over whether Martin Luther Kin

Source: China Beat

Feb 1, 2008

Susan Brownell: Beijing Olympics FAQ #2: Would a boycott succeed?

[Susan Brownell is the author of Training the Body for China, which is widely recognized as the single best work by a scholar on Chinese sports.] I can say with some certainty that in the current geopolitical climate, calls for an Olympic boycott will be unsuccessful - though I suppose they make for good headlines. The advocacy groups who are calling for boycotts have no direct control over the organization of the Olympic Games. In order for a boycott to succeed, the organizations t

Source: Salon

Feb 1, 2008

Juan Cole: Blowback from the GOP's holy war

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] For much of January, one might have thought that the Republican candidates for president were already competing against a single opponent. Not one called Hillary or Barack, but with a moniker even more chilling in the eyes of hard-line Republicans: Islamic fascism. The American public, worri

Source: Origins

Feb 1, 2008

Saul Cornell: The Second Amendment Goes to Court

Few issues in America public life are more emotionally charged than guns and no subject within this political maelstrom is more bitterly contested than the Second Amendment. Although it is hard to imagine this issue heating up any further, it is about to get red-hot. Earlier this year, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia struck down the District of Columbia’s local gun-control law on Second Amendment grounds. The D.C. Court is only the second Appeals Court to affirm th

Source: A version of this commentary first appeared in the Austin American-Statesman January 31, 2008.

Jan 31, 2008

Tom Palaima: What we've lost in the Iraq war

[Tom Palaima is a classics professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a regular contributor of commentaries and reviews to the Austin American-Statesman and the Times Higher Education Supplement.] It is said that the first casualty of war is the truth. I am not so sure we can identify the first casualty of Operation Iraqi Freedom so easily. According to the Center for Public Integrity, truth was a casualty well before our soldiers crossed into Iraq on March 20,