Roundup: Historians' Take

Juan Cole: Libby was the Small Fish ... Bush really Commuted the Sentences of Rove and Cheney

George H. W. Bush called those who leak the names of CIA operatives"the most insidious of traitors."In his son's administration, CIA covert operative Valerie Plame's name was leaked to the press to pu

Michael Kazin: Rove fails where his hero succeeded

[Michael Kazin teaches history at Georgetown University. He is author, most recently, of "A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan" (Knopf, 2006).] It may be admirable to model oneself on a successful figure from the political past. Who wouldn't want to write like Lincoln, transform policy like FDR and inspire his followers like Reagan and Debs? But to equal the accomplishments of one's idol is a far more difficult task. History, after all, has a way o

Frederick W. Kagan and Kimberly Kagan: The New Strategy in Iraq

[Frederick W. Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Kimberly Kagan is executive director of the Institute for the Study of War.] The new strategy for Iraq has entered its second phase. Now that all of the additional combat forces have arrived in theater, Generals David Petraeus and Ray Odierno have begun Operation Phantom Thunder, a vast and complex effort to disrupt al Qaeda and Shiite militia bases all around Baghdad in advance of the major clear-and-ho

Glenn C. Loury: Why Are So Many Americans in Prison? Race and the transformation of criminal justice

[Glenn C. Loury is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences in the department of economics at Brown University. He is the author of The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, and he was a 2002 Carnegie Scholar. ] The early 1990s were the age of drive-by shootings, drug deals gone bad, crack cocaine, and gangsta rap. Between 1960 and 1990, the annual number of murders in New Haven rose from six to 31, the number of rapes from four to 168, the number of robberies from 16 to 1,784—

Walter McDougall: Will “Europe” Survive the 21st Century?

[Walter McDougall is co-chair, with David Eisenhower, of FPRI’s History Institute for Teachers and, with James Kurth, of FPRI’s Center for the Study of America and the West. He is also the Alloy-Ansin Professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago in 1974 and is a veteran of the Vietnam War. His books include

Michael B. Katz: Why Aren't U.S. Cities Burning?

[Sociologist Michael B. Katz is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent book, co-authored with Mark J. Stern, is One Nation Divisible: What America Was and What It Is Becoming (Russell Sage Foundation, 2006). This article is based on the author’s presidential address to the Urban History Association in January 2007. A much longer and fully documented version will appear in the Journal of Urban History (January 2008).] The summer of

Johann N. Neem: The Jeffersonian tradition and American philanthropy

[Johann N. Neem is assistant professor of history at Western Washington University.] "The earth belongs in usufruct to the living; . . . [and] the dead have neither powers nor rights over it," proclaimed Thomas Jefferson in 1789. Jefferson's claim is a radical one: the wealth and power of past generations should not determine present and future ones. To maintain democratic equality across generations, Jefferson argued, private fortunes must be broken up by eliminating prim

Victor Davis Hanson: Blissfully Uneducated

[Victor Davis Hanson is professor emeritus at California State University, Fresno, where he initiated the classics program.] Is “ho”—the rapper slang for the slur “whore”—a bad word? Always, sometimes, or just when an obnoxious white male like Don Imus says it? But not when the equally obnoxious Snoop Dogg serially employs it? Is the Iraq war, as we are often told, the “greatest mistake” in our nation’s history? Because Israel and the United States have a b

Rick Perlstein: How the chief justice misconstrued history in the school race cases

[Mr. Perlstein is the author of BEFORE THE STORM: BARRY GOLDWATER AND THE UNMAKING OF THE AMERICAN CONSENSUS.] Justice Roberts, "restricting the ability of public school districts to use race to determine which schools students can attend," wrote for the plurality of Scalia, Thomas, and Alito that, "Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin." If I were a high school teacher and

Dmitry Shlapentokh: Why Putin Needs Solzhenitsyn

[The writer is associate professor of history at Indiana University South Bend in the United States.] AT THE Russia Day awards ceremony on June 12, President Vladimir Putin gave the most prestigious national honour, the State Prize, to Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Calling the world-renowned Solzhenitsyn a man of great erudition, Mr Putin mentioned only one of his works in his award speech: a compendium of rare words and expressions in the Russian language. The

Juan Williams: Don’t Mourn Brown v. Board of Education

[Juan Williams, a senior correspondent for NPR and a political analyst for Fox News Channel, is the author of “Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America.”] LET us now praise the Brown decision. Let us now bury the Brown decision. With yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling ending the use of voluntary schemes to create racial balance among students, it is time to acknowledge that Brown’s time has passed. It is worth

Juan Cole: Bush Turns Iraq into Israel/Palestine

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com/.]Bush said in a speech on Thursday that he hopes Iraq will be like Israel, a democracy that faces terrorist violence but manages to retain its democratic character: In Israel, Bush said, 'terrorists have taken innocent human life fo

Mary L. Dudziak: Roberts misreads Brown and its history in today's school case

[Mary L. Dudziak is Judge Edward J. and Ruey L. Guirado Professor of Law, History and Political Science, University of Southern California.] There is much to be said about the uses of history in today’s important case, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1. History mattered to the Supreme Court in grappling with the role of race in student assignment, but history became a battleground, as Justices disagreed over both the lessons of hi

Lawrence Mead: America will prevail

[Lawrence Mead is a professor of politics at New York University. This is an extract from the Centre for Independent Studies' John Bonython lecture he delivered in Sydney last night.] TO read the newspapers, one would believe US power was in steep decline. There are prophets of error, the many critics who believe US foreign policy has gone seriously wrong, especially in Iraq. And there are prophets of weakness, such as Yale historian Paul Kennedy, who wrote even before the end of th

Donald Worster: Fiddling While America Burns

[Donald Worster, author of books including “Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas,” is an environmental historian at the University of Kansas. He wrote this comment for the Land Institute’s Prairie Writers Circle, Salina, Kan.] The United States is the richest, most powerful nation in history — this you have heard many times before. What you have not heard so often is that America has also been, for nearly 200 years, the safest, most secure nation ever. Far from being awar

Jonathan Zimmerman: In a Free-Speech Ruling, Justice Thomas Misstates the Purpose of Education

[JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN wrote "Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century."] WHAT ARE schools for? For the last decade, I've taught a history course with that title at New York University. My students and I examine the different purposes that Americans hav

Juan Cole: Surging toward disaster in Iraq

Earlier this week Sen. Richard Lugar, the senior Republican from Indiana, dismissed the U.S. "surge" in Iraq as unlikely to succeed. He condemned any illusions about staying the course. "We have overestimated what the military can achieve, we have set goals that are unrealistic, and we have inadequately factored in the broader regional consequences of our actions," Lugar said from the Senate floor. His alarm has been illustrated by the difficulties the U.S. and I

Eric Rauchway: Dick Cheney v. Aaron Burr

[Eric Rauchway is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, and the author, most recently, of Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America and Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America. ] Last week marked the bicentennial of the last time Americans thought a vice president posed a constitutional threat to the United States (no, the merely peculative Spiro Agnew does not count): On June 24, 1807, a grand jury returned an indictment for t

Juan Cole: Ahmadinejad: "I am not anti-Semitic"

Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul continue to show themselves among the few in Congress with any integrity and backbone. They declined to go along with a resolution charging Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad with incitement to genocide, given his alleged call for Israel to be 'wiped off the face of the map.' As most of my readers know, Ahmadinejad did not use that phrase in Persian. He quoted an old saying of Ayatollah Khomeini calling for 'this occupation regime over Jerusalem"

Michael Kazin: Bloomberg Might Want to Think Hard About Running as an Independent

[Mr. Kazin teaches history at Georgetown University and is the author of many books including, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan.] The historian Richard Hofstadter once wrote that third parties in