Roundup: Historians' Take

Gary Leupp: More Disinformation on Iran

[Gary Leupp is a Professor of History, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion, at Tufts University and author of numerous works on Japanese history. He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu.]Jim Lobe and Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com have both posted columns about the latest episode in the neocons’ relentless Iran disinformation campaign. A Canadian paper, the National Post, published an article on May 19 by Iranian-American journalist Amir Taheri reporting that o

Jim Sleeper: What's Happened to the Great University?

[Jim Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale, holds a doctorate in education from Harvard and was a Shorenstein Center fellow there in 1998.]"Despite our confidence in our national greatness, the American tradition is both nebulous and surprisingly infertile," wrote Theodore Goff, a Yale junior, in January on his application to a seminar I teach there. Still waters run deep, thought I as I followed his soundings in civic-republican seas across the semester. I told Goff that his

Abbas Amanat : The Persian Complex

[Abbas Amanat is a professor of history at Yale and author of the forthcoming "In Search of Modern Iran."] IT is easy to label Iran's quest for nuclear energy a dangerous adventure with grave regional and international repercussions. It is also comforting to heap scorn on President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for his earlier denial of the Holocaust and his odious call for the obliteration of the state of Israel. The rambling intransigence expressed in his recent letter to Presiden

Vincent J. Cannato: A Harvard prof reflects on the hollowness of higher ed

[Mr. Cannato teaches history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.] Are American universities now in their golden age? Many rank as the leading research institutions in the world. A college education is within reach for more Americans than ever before. Applications continue to rise as colleges attract the best and the brightest from the U.S. and from overseas. And yet it is hard not to get the feeling that there is something amiss at American schools. Recent headl

Jonathan Zimmerman: Should School Kids Have Cell Phones?

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of the forthcoming book "Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century."] Let's get one thing straight about the Great New York Cellphone War: It's not about "safety." It's about anxiety. Last month, New York officials stepped up their efforts to bar students from carrying cellphones into public schools. In a stubborn defense of the policy, Mayor

Neve Gordon: Bitter Wine for Israel's Bedouins

The crowded room felt like a sauna, a natural effect of the scorching sun hitting the tin roof and the lack of a fan or air conditioner to ease the desert heat. Everyone was talking about the "Wine Route," the Israeli government's plan for a series of farms and wineries designed to draw tourists to the Negev, and the latest insult to its marginalized Bedouin population. "It is high time to strategize," one person said. "There is no way to oppose it," a

Juan Cole: Critique of US Policy in Iraq

Bush Administration policies in Iraq have largely been a failure. It has created a failed state in that country, which is in flames and seething with new religious and ethnic nationalist passions of a sort never before seen on this scale in modern Iraqi history. The severe instability in Iraq threatens the peace and security of the entire region, and could easily ignite a regional guerrilla war that might well affect petroleum exports from the Oil Gulf and hence the health of the world economy.

Juan Cole: The Black Psy-Ops Campaign against Iran

The Iranian regime is despicable in its lack of respect for basic human rights and in its regimentation of its citizens into a rigid theocracy. But it is no more of a threat to the United States than Burma or the Congo, both of which are just as oppressive. Iran has a very weak military and just isn't a serious threat to any other country. Its values are not US values. But if we are going to do things like send Marines into Iran to force Iranian women to wear bikinis at the beach, we are going

Daniel Pipes: Democrats, Republicans, and Israel

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] Middle Eastern issues will likely play a role of unprecedented importance in the American mid-term elections less than a half-year away. Three topics head the agenda: the course of the Iraq war, the proper response to Iran's nuclear ambitions, and the soaring price of fu

Steven Aftergood: The Bush Administration's Use of State Secrets to Block the Flow of Information Is Unprecedented

The state secrets privilege has been invoked by the Bush Administration with greater frequency than ever before in American history in a wide range of lawsuits that the government says would threaten national security if allowed to proceed. In virtually every case, the use of the privilege leads to dismissal of the lawsuit and forecloses the opportunity for an injured party to seek judicial relief. Most recently, a lawsuit brought by Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen wh

Thomas Blanton: The lie behind the secrets

GOVERNMENT secrecy in the name of national security has reached record-setting proportions. In case after case, the government has used it as an excuse to thwart lawsuits by whistle-blowers and people with grievances against the United States. There was, for instance, the FBI linguist who alleged corruption and malfeasance inside her translation unit. There was the African American CIA officer who reported racial discrimination inside the agency, and the Syrian Canadian who was &qu

David Greenberg: Democrats struggle to shape a post-9/11 foreign policy,

EARLIER THIS MONTH, two contenders for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination stood together to stop what they saw as a dangerous drift in their party's stance on national security. At the National Press Club on May 9, Indiana Senator Evan Bayh summoned Democrats to dig in for ''what will in all likelihood be a generation-long struggle against jihadism and radical, suicidal terror." Former Virginia governor Mark Warner agreed that his partymates had to refute Karl Rove's taunt that the

Juan Cole: Another Fraud on Iran ... No Legislation on Dress of Religious Minorities

Maurice Motamed, the representative of the Iranian Jewish community in Iran's parliament, has strongly denied the rumors started by Canada's National Post that the Iranian legislature has passed a law requiring members of religious communities to wear identifying badges. The report was al

Richard White: Border Crossing (Immigration Debate)

[Richard White, Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University, is president of the Organization of American Historians.] Except for the immigrants themselves, the current public discussion usually involves the usual suspects and is idiotically simple. It is about principles: secure borders and punishing lawbreakers on one side and economic justice and the rights to citizenship on the other. Or, alternatively, it is about economic calculations: immigrants do or

James E. Young & Michael Van Valkenburgh: Last Chance for Ground Zero

IMAGINE our country today without the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, without the open and painstaking competition that gave veterans, their families and the rest of us a place unlike any other to mourn our losses of that era. As difficult and adversarial as that process was at times, it was necessary. Our need for a memorial at ground zero is no less profound, as is our need to stick by the plan for the World Trade Center Memorial devised more than two years ago, no matter how difficult that may be.

Timothy Burke: ACTA Report, “How Many Ward Churchills?”

[Mr. Burke, a historian at Swarthmore, is a member of the HNN blog, Cliopatria.] Are you interested in defending academic standards? Let me tell you what I consider to be a few important academic standards. These apply across the disciplines. 1. Careful collection of evidence. 2. Constraining claims or arguments to the evidence available. 3. Proportionality of argument or analysis, especially in making demands for action or changes in practice. 4. Careful definition of

Liam Brockey: When Celestial Kingdoms Collide (Vatican & China)

[Liam M. Brockey, an assistant professor of history at Princeton, is the author of the forthcoming "Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724."] ONCE again, one of the world's largest countries is at loggerheads with one of the world's smallest. Yet before thinking of David and Goliath, remember that in one way, both are equally large — China and the Vatican each claim the nominal allegiance of about a fifth of humanity. The recent standoff between these

Juan Cole: George W. Nixon

George W. Bush's Iraq misadventure has made him among the least-liked presidents in modern history, according to an ABC News/ Washington Post poll. Even Lyndon B. Johnson in the dark days of 1967-1968 was at 43 percent! And he had to decline to seek a second term over it! With regard to public approval of him, Bush is down to 33%. And only 17% say they strongly approve of his performance. (And probably they aren'

Daniel Pipes: Mr. Olmert Visits Washington

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] It's a grand occasion when a new Israeli prime minister makes an inaugural visit to Washington. He typically meets with the president, addresses a joint meeting of Congress, appears on plum television shows, talks to influential audiences, and consults privately with a ran

Tom Engelhardt: The Billion-dollar Gravestone

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War. His novel, The Last Days of Publis