Roundup: Historians' Take

Dan P. McAdams: Republicans Owe Much of Their Success to the Use of the Narrative of Redemption

Dan P. McAdams, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (11-29-04):[Dan P. McAdams is a professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University and author of The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.]Democrats woke up November 3 to see that they no longer lived in the America they had always imagined. They hoped a well-informed and self-intere

Paul Johnson: Bush's Election Is a Smack at Intellectuals

Paul Johnson, in the WSJ (Nov. 23, 2004): Whatever else the re-election of Bush signifies, it was a smack in the face for the intelligentsia. Like a crazed Kappelmeister sitting at a nightmare organ, they pulled out all the stops, from the bourdon in lead to the fiffaro, not excluding the trompeta magna, and what emerged, far from being a thanksgiving gloria in excelsis, was a lugubrious marche funèbre. In America they were all at it, from old Chomsky to that movie-maker who

Eric Foner's Reflections on the Boston Convention

Katrina vanden Heuvel, in the Nation (July 25, 2004):As convention time approached, I asked one of America's most prominent historians, Eric Foner, for some political history about Boston and Massachusetts....Host for the very first time to a national convention, Boston is a perfect place to reflect on this country's alternative tradition of visionary thinking. It is a city, according to Fon

Michael Ignatieff: Why Bush Won

Lynda Hurst, in the Toronto Star (Nov. 20, 2004): Michael Ignatieff is not in the best of moods. A double espresso helps. A bit. On this brief lecture tour of Toronto, the Canadian historian, prolific author and Harvard professor has clearly been encountering people who dismiss the newly re-elected president of the U.S. as "a dumb, ignorant Texas hick," and it raises his hackles because he says underestimating George W. Bush is a monumen

Tom Engelhardt: The Swamp that Is Iraq

Tom Engelhardt, at his bog (Nov. 19, 2004): [Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is a co-founder of The American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture among other books.] Here was our tactical kindness: By threatening the invasion of Falluja

Howard Zinn: About This Misguided War on Terrorism

Howard Zinn, in the Progressive (Nov. 2004):Mr. Zinn's latest book is Voices of a People's History of the United States (Seven Stories Press) with co-editor Anthony ArnoveI am calling it "our" war on terrorism because I want to distinguish it from Bush's war on terrorism, and from Sharon's, and from Putin's. What their wars have in common is that they are based on an enormous dec

Eliot Cohen: Why Colin Powell Won't Go Down as a Great Secretary of State

Eliot Cohen, in the WSJ (Nov. 17, 2004):[Mr. Cohen, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins, is the author of "Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime" (Anchor, 2003).]To the role of secretary of state, Colin Powell brought enormous popularity in the U.S. and abroad, charisma and the instincts and habits of a sk

Anthony Pagden: We Don't Want a Real Empire Even If We Sometimes Act Like One

Anthony Pagden, in the LAT (Nov. 14, 2004): [Anthony Pagden is professor of political science and history at UCLA and the author of "Peoples and Empires" (Modern Library).]In the 1960s, as Europe's once-proud empires shed their remaining colonies, "empire" became a dirty word. The Soviet Union alone was one, and an evil one at that. Only enemies of the United States used the slanderous term against this country and its "imperialist" policies.

Daniel Pipes: Why It Took Just One Death at the Hands of an Islamist in Holland to Arouse the People There

Daniel Pipes, in the NY Sun (Nov. 16, 2004): "Education by murder" describes the slow and painful way people wake up to the problem of radical Islam. It took 3,000 deaths to wake up Americans, or at least to wake up the half of them who are conservative. Likewise, it took hundreds of deaths in the Bali explosion to semi-wake up Australians; it took the Madrid assault for Spaniards, and the Beslan atrocity for Russians. Twelve workers beheaded in Iraq awoke the Nepal

Benny Morris: Arafat's Ambiguous Legacy

For all his sly buffoonery - it was almost impossible to get him to answer a question properly - Yasir Arafat was a man with a vision. And when speaking in Arabic he often charted it for his audiences. He wanted, simply, to "end the occupation" and "redeem Palestine." Arab listeners, inside and outside Palestine, understood what he was saying. Many Westerners thought, or preferred or pretended to believe, that he was talking about the West Bank and Gaza Strip,

Rick Perlstein: Why Bush Won

Rick Perlstein, in the Village Voice (Nov. 9, 2004): Amid the left's general dismay, a major anniversary just came and went without much notice. Thirty-five years ago last week Richard Nixon delivered his famous "Silent Majority" speech. In deep doo-doo after the biggest anti-war march in American history—a march in which middle-class squares far outnumbered wild-eyed hippies—Nixon went on TV b

Walter Russell Mead: The Democrats' Loss Was Catastrophic

An interview with Walter Russell Mead conducted by Bernard Gwertzman, at the website of the Council on Foreign Relations:What are your first impressions of President Bush's re-election?I think it is a catastrophic result for the Democrats. The party lost seats in the Senate, lost seats in the House, did not pick up any go

Daniel Pipes: Arafat's Passing May Bring on the Greatest Crisis in Israeli-American Relations

Daniel Pipes, in the NY Sun (Nov. 9, 2004): "I think it's very important for our friends, the Israelis, to have a peaceful Palestinian state living on their border. And it's very important for the Palestinian people to have a peaceful, hopeful future." So spoke President Bush just two days after his re-election, just exactly

Robert Dallek: Bush Should Use His 2nd Term to Clean Up the Mistakes of the 1st

Robert Dallek, in the Belfast Telegraph (Nov. 5, 2004): One of the ugliest elections in American presidential history is over but the deep divide in the country is anything but.For all the talk about the economy, job losses, budget deficits and health insurance as well as terrorism, Iraq, and the character flaws of both men - one a flip-flopper and the other a flimflam man - the compelling iss

Mark LeVine: We Are All Israelis Now

Mark LeVine, guest blogging at juancole.org (Nov. 5, 2004): [Mark LeVine, History, University of California, Irvine] Three years ago, as the pungent odor of what was left of the World Trade Center slowly pervaded my neighborhood, I wrote a piece called “We’re all Israelis Now.” I didn’t invent the idea; in the hours since the attacks I had heard several commentators say essentially the same thing, although our meanings were in fact diametrically opposed. For them, the S

Tom Engelhardt: The Election Night Hangover of a Lifetime

Tom Engelhardt, editor of TomDispatch.com (Nov. 4, 2004): [Mr. Engelhardt is the author of THE END OF VICTORY CULTURE and co-editor of HISTORY WARS, THE ENOLA GAY AND OTHER BATTLES FOR THE AMERICAN PAST.] How can I not start on a personal note today? Election night was a roller coaster. I had written http://www.tom

Gene Gerard: A Mandate? What Mandate?

Gene Gerard, HNN book editor (Nov. 5, 2004): Over the course of the last two days, since the election, various members of the media have said that President Bush now has a mandate. Presumably, this is attributable to the fact that Bush received precisely one percentage point about 50 in the popular vote. And to be fair, he is the first president to achieve a popular vote exceeding 50% since his father’s election in 1988. But there is evidence suggesting that the mandate Bush receive

Robert Dallek: Can't We Just Get Along?

Robert Dallek, Los Angeles Times, 02 Nov. 2004 [Robert Dallek is a presidential historian, and recently authored"An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963" (2003, Little Brown).] In 1968, after rioting at the Democratic convention in Chicago underscored the bitter divide in the United States over the Vietnam War, a French travel agency urged its customers to"see America while it lasts." Today's antagonism rivals what happened in 1968. Although we've not seen m

Joshua Brown: A Lot Can Happen in Two Years (Illustration)

Garry Wills: The End of the Enlightenment?

Garry Wills, in the NYT (Nov. 4, 2004): This election confirms the brilliance of Karl Rove as a political strategist. He calculated that the religious conservatives, if they could be turned out, would be the deciding factor. The success of the plan was registered not only in the presidential results but also in all 11 of the state votes to ban same-sex marriage. Mr. Rove underst