Roundup: Historians' Take

Simon Schama: Why America Should Care About the Collapse of European Unity

Simon Schama is a professor of history and art history at Columbia University.  He has been an essayist and critic for The New Yorker since 1994, his art criticism winning the National Magazine Award in 1996. Parts III and IV of his new series, The American Future: A History, air Tuesday night at 8 p.m. on BBC America.In September 1946, much of Europe had been reduced to smoking rubble. Bitter hardship and gnawing hunger were the lot of millions. The curtain had come down on one monstrous theater of violence and cruelty only to have it rise on others. Unnumbered multitudes languished in displaced-persons camps, with millions more living as refugees from their ancestral lands and homes. An immense Soviet Army had brought liberation, but along with it a contagion of rape and the sinister prospect of new Stalinist tyranny lurking like a predator in the shadows, waiting to pounce on the wasted, fragile democracies.

Adam Hochschild: What Gingrich Didn’t Learn in Congo

Adam Hochschild is the author of “King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa.”NEWT GINGRICH seldom misses a chance to note that he is a historian. He lards his speeches with references to obscure events in the American past, talks about his time teaching at West Georgia College (not one of those effete Ivies), and has declared that the more than $1.6 million in fees he earned from Freddie Mac was for his work not, heaven forbid, as a lobbyist, but as a historian. And last year he was in the news for saying President Obama exhibited “Kenyan, anticolonial behavior.”Mr. Gingrich would be our first president with a Ph.D. since Woodrow Wilson. Does his work as a historian tell us anything about him? Or, for that matter, anything about why, despite certain events in 1776, he considers “anticolonial” an epithet? To address these questions, a good place to start is his 1971 Tulane doctoral dissertation: “Belgian Education Policy in the Congo 1945-1960.”

Walter Russell Mead: Mission Sort of Accomplished in Iraq

Walter Russell Mead is the Henry Kissinger senior fellow for US foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. He also writes a blog for the American Interest.In one of the Bush Administration’s most infamous moments, President Bush boarded an aircraft carrier under a giant “Mission Accomplished” banner just as the serious problems in Iraq were beginning to emerge. Eight years later, Vice President Biden has visited Iraq to deliver a much more subdued speech with the same message — America has largely achieved its goals in Iraq, and is now preparing to leave. From the Wall Street Journal:“The real way people gain influence other than through force is having an influence on the institutions, the formation of the institutions and the function of the institutions,” Mr. Biden said in an interview during his flight from Baghdad to Iraq’s Kurdish region in the north. “And that’s the U.S.” [...]

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: When Memes Collide: Tank Man, Pepper Spray Cop

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and the author, most recently, of "China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know," published this year by Oxford University Press. His commentaries and reviews have appeared in a wide range of academic journals, as well as in general interest periodicals such as Time and Newsweek.Thanks to quick-thinking protesters and bystanders carrying cellphone cameras, Web surfers around the world quickly learned the story of what happened at UC Davis on November 18. The event began with students concerned about local issues (university budget cuts and tuition hikes) and a national struggle (Occupy Wall Street) staging a sit-down protest. When they refused to budge, the day’s most dramatic moments came, as campus police wielding canisters of pepper spray gassed the unarmed youths, then removed them from the area.Still and moving images of this confrontation appeared online within minutes. One of the still photographs, which showed Lt. John Pike spraying students nonchalantly, went viral and has become the best-known icon of the OWS movement.

Tom Engelhardt: Lessons From the Dead in a No-Learning-Curve World

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s as well as The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, The United States of Fear (Haymarket Books), has just been published.He was 22, a corporal in the Marines from Preston, Iowa, a “city” incorporated in 1890 with a present population of 949.  He died in a hospital in Germany of “wounds received from an explosive device while on patrol in Helmand province [Afghanistan].”  Of him, his high school principal said, “He was a good kid.” He is survived by his parents.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Newt Gingrich, Pseudo-Historian

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory."Who knew my profession could be so lucrative?That was my bemused first reaction to Newt Gingrich admitting that he took $300,000from the mortgage giant Freddie Mac in exchange for his "advice as a historian." Now sources are reporting that his total fee might have been as high as $1.8 million, which is more than some historians will make in a lifetime.

Max Boot: The Iran Threat

Max Boot is a contributing editor to Opinion and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is completing a book on guerrilla warfare.In retrospect, weakness in the face of aggression is almost impossible to understand — or forgive. Why did the West do so little while the Nazis gathered strength in the 1930s? While the Soviet Union enslaved half of Europe and fomented revolution in China in the late 1940s? And, again, while Al Qaeda gathered strength in the 1990s? Those questions will forever haunt the reputations of the responsible statesmen, from Neville Chamberlain to Bill Clinton. The answer to the riddle — why did the West slumber? — becomes easier to grasp if we think about present-day relations with Iran. The Islamic Republic has been attacking the West, and in particular the United States, since the day of its birth. A central feature of the 1979 revolution, after all, was the storming of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. The resulting hostage crisis allowed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to consolidate power and drove out more moderate leaders. This is the direct inspiration for Tuesday's storming of the British Embassy in Tehran. If violating diplomatic immunity worked once, why not again?..

Victor Davis Hanson: A Tale of Two Surges

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom.

Fouad Ajami: Egypt and the Fruits of the Pharaohs

Fouad Ajami is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and co-chair of Hoover's Working Group on Islamism and the International Order.Egyptian history plays tricks with its interpreters. This ancient society is known for the stability given it by the Nile, a well-mannered and orderly river, and by a pharaonic culture where the rulers were deities. But this timeless image is largely false. Egypt's peasant society has been prone to violent upheavals. Order has often hung by a thread, as a proud people alternate between submission and rebellion.We are now in the midst of one of these alternations. On Feb. 11, Egypt's last pharaoh, Hosni Mubarak, bent to the will of his people and relinquished power. What we are witnessing in Egypt today is not the consequence of democracy but rather a half-century of authoritarianism. The chaos and the lawlessness issue out of the lawlessness of the former regime. As crony capitalism had its way with the economy, the military elite, the officer corps, had to be given its share of the loot. Having turned away from war and military adventures abroad, they were rewarded with economic enterprises and privileges of their own—exclusive clubs, vacation homes, land grants, you name it.

Robert Dallek: Why John F. Kennedy’s Legacy Endures

Robert Dallek is the author of “An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963.” He wrote this letter to the New York Times.“The Enduring Cult of Kennedy,” by Ross Douthat (column, Nov. 27), is anti-Kennedy overkill.No serious historian would suggest that John F. Kennedy’s unfinished presidency deserves to be ranked with those of Washington, Lincoln or Franklin D. Roosevelt. But he deserves better than Mr. Douthat gives him.True, it took President Lyndon B. Johnson to win passage of President Kennedy’s four great legislative initiatives — a tax cut, Medicare, federal aid to education and civil rights — but he put them on the table and would have been well positioned to pass them after his more than likely re-election in 1964....

Austin Bay: Is It Time for Indo-Pakistani Reunification?

Austin Bay is the author, most recently, of Ataturk: Lessons in Leadership from the Greatest General of the Ottoman Empire.The post-World War Two partition of British India was a blood-drenched mess. Since partition, India has prospered. Bangladesh, the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war’s bastard child, remains wretched. For three decades a low-grade civil war has afflicted Pakistan, pitting urban-based modernizers against Islamist extremists reinforced by militant hill tribes. The Taliban attack on Pakistan’s Karachi naval base in May 2011 reprised the hill versus urban paradigm. Pakistan’s civil war divides its intelligence and security services, which is one reason the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff can argue (with confidence) that an element within Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency supported the September 2011 Taliban assault on America’s embassy in Kabul.In retrospect, splitting British India into East and West Pakistan and India may have been one of the 20th century’s greatest geostrategic errors....Biographer Stanley Wolpert contends Mahatma Gandhi opposed partition. Wolpert wrote that Gandhi never accepted the partition plan and “realized too late that his closest comrades and disciples were more interested in power than principle.” A Hindu extremist assassinated Gandhi. Spilled blood.

Walter Russell Mead: Cairo ... Paris of the East?

Walter Russell Mead is the Henry Kissinger senior fellow for US foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. He also writes a blog for the American Interest.With the accelerating euro crisis in Europe, the geopolitical revolution in Asia and increasing doubts about the Chinese economy, the increasingly misnamed Arab Spring sometimes has to struggle for airtime these days.  But the struggle in Egypt has entered a new phase, one which will test the strength of the various groups struggling to control the country in the wake of President Mubarak’s fall from power.Those of us old enough to have attended college back when even liberal arts and humanities professors routinely taught subjects that actually matter can dredge up our studies of the French Revolution and the subsequent 200 years of European and global reflection on the meaning and politics of that revolution to help us get to grips with what is happening in Egypt.

James Livingston: It's Black Friday: Spend for Your Soul

James Livingston is a professor of history at Rutgers University and the author, most recently, of "Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture is good for the Economy, the Environment and Your Soul." We like to think that the holidays bring out the best in us, that they are like the feasts and festivals of our archaic past, when we celebrated a successful hunt or a bountiful harvest. So why do we treat Black Friday — when the season to be jolly officially commences with ritualized ferocity — as the occasion for serious lamentations about the "commercialization of Christmas" and the moral emptiness of the mall? You already know the answer: because consumerism is bad for us. But that's not really the case. Our demonization of consumer culture and admiration for the principle of "saving for a rainy day" are self-defeating, particularly in an economic downturn. To renew growth and to address the moral possibilities of our time, we need to save less, spend more and get used to the fact that consumer culture is better for our souls than the parsimonious alternatives. And what better time to embrace that realization than Black Friday?

William J. Astore: Giving Thanks to Our Public Servants

Professor Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (United States Air Force), writes regularly for TomDispatch and can be reached at wjastore@gmail.com.Having served in the military for twenty years and having police officers and other civil servants in my family and among my closest friends, I’d like to give thanks to our public servants on this Thanksgiving day. They sacrifice for us; sometimes they even put their lives on the line for us; and despite their flaws they generally uphold high standards.And that’s precisely the point: Public servants like our police are here "to protect and to serve" all of us, especially those among us who are most vulnerable. Likewise, our military is here to defend our Constitution and our way of life while protecting innocents from harm.  They are not, and must not be allowed to become, legions of robocops or warriors. Rather, they must always be servants of our democracy, assemblies of citizens who just happen to need weapons to perform their duties. Whether they be citizen-sheriffs or citizen-soldiers, the emphasis must always be on "citizen."

Timothy Garton Ash: And Now, Bang Go Britain's Tabloids

Timothy Garton Ash, a contributing editor to LA Times Opinion, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and professor of European studies at Oxford University.Like a truth commission, the official inquiry into the phone-hacking scandal exposes story after story of intrusion and intimidation. But this is Britain, so the unchecked power that created this culture of fear was not the military or secret police; it was tabloid newspapers. Most tabloid editors and proprietors are still in denial. They invoke free speech and the public interest while condemning a few bad apples (a small orchard by now). But one former editor has faced up to the difficult past.

Sheldon Garon: Why We Spend, Why They Save

Sheldon Garon, a professor of history and East Asian studies at Princeton, is the author of “Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves.”CHRISTMAS is nearly upon us. Americans, once again, are told that it’s our civic duty to shop. The economy demands increased consumer spending. And it’s true. The problem is that millions of lower- and middle-income households have lost their capacity to spend. They lack savings and are mired in debt. Although it would be helpful if affluent households spent more, we shouldn’t be calling upon a struggling majority to do so. In the long run, the health of the economy depends on the financial stability of our households.

John Fea: Is a Historian Worth $1.6 Million?

John Fea chairs the History Department at Messiah College in Grantham, PA, and is the author of Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? A Historical Introduction (Westminster John Knox Press, 2011). He blogs daily at philipvickersfithian.com.Thanks to Newt Gingrich, people are talking about how much a historian is worth.In a recent GOP presidential debate in which Gingrich was asked to explain why he earned $300,000 from Freddie Mac, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives claimed that he had given the mortgage company advice in his capacity as a historian. Later it was revealed that Gingrich had actually received between $1.6 and $1.8 million for his supposed work as a historical consultant.By one definition, Gingrich is a historian.... He taught history at West Georgia College (now University of West Georgia) and, believe it or not, was influential in starting an environmental studies program there. When he did not receive tenure at West Georgia he set off on a political career.

Daniel Amsterdam: Down and Out (Again): America's Long Struggle with Mass Unemployment

Daniel Amsterdam is an historian of American politics whose research focuses on social policy, state development and cities. He teaches at The Ohio State University.Periodic spikes in unemployment are as American as the Big Mac.From the early years of the nineteenth century through World War II, the American economy tanked at least every decade or two. U.S. history textbooks are filled with boldfaced subheadings that begin “The Panic of…” followed by an assortment of years, whether 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893 or 1907.As the twentieth century progressed, the U.S. economy continued to sour with remarkable regularity: in 1914, 1920, and, of course, during the Great Depression. A long stretch of prosperity and stability followed World War II.But by the end of the 1960s, the U.S. economy’s historic case of the wobbles had returned. Hard times defined the ‘70s, the early ‘80s as well as the late ‘80s and the early ‘90s.Now here we are again, dealing with the consequences of what is universally described as the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. In the fall of 2009, the national unemployment rate peaked at 10.1 percent and today remains at a distressingly high level, just over nine percent.

Fouad Ajami: Why Are We Still Backing Hamid Karzai?

Fouad Ajami is a senior fellow at The Hoover Institution at Stanford University and co-chair of the Working Group on Islamism and the International Order.“The lion doesn’t like it if a foreigner intrudes into his house. The lion doesn’t like it if a stranger enters his house. The lion doesn’t want his children to be taken away by someone else in the night, the lion won’t let it happen.” Thus spoke Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Wednesday to the loya jirga, his country’s traditional council of elders and notables. He warmed up to the theme and the image. “They should not interfere in the lion’s house: just guard the four sides of the forest. They are training our police. Their assistance is good for Afghanistan.”

Niall Ferguson: The European Union Is Doomed

Niall Ferguson, a professor of history at Harvard University, is most recently the author of Civilization: The West and the Rest.European politics has become a giant Jenga game. Since June 2010 governments have fallen in the Netherlands, Slovakia, Belgium, Ireland, Finland, Portugal, Slovenia, Greece and Italy.The question is not: Who will be next? That’s easy. (Spain’s Socialist government will be pulverized in this weekend’s elections.) The real question is: When will the Jenga tower topple?Many people assume that the tipping point will come when one country — most likely Greece — leaves or is ejected from Europe’s monetary union. But the scenario that worries Eurocrats is different. They fear that a country could leave the European Union itself.This is by no means an irrational anxiety. Under E.U. law, it would be much easier for Britain to leave the European Union than for Greece to leave the euro zone.Thus the process of European integration has reached a richly ironic point: The breakdown of the European Union is now more likely than the collapse of the single currency that was supposed to bind it together.This is not surprising…