Roundup: Historians' Take

Walter Russell Mead: Is Fear The Father Of Us All?

[Walter Russell Mead is Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. He blogs at The-American-Interest.com.] If a specter haunts the chancellories of America, it isn’t communism and it isn’t Karl Marx. It’s Thucydides, the chronicler of the 30 year Peloponnesian War between ancient Sparta and Athens that led to the comprehensive defeat of the world’s first great democrati

Linda K. Kerber: Can the 14th Amendment Defend Itself?

[Linda K. Kerber is May Brodbeck Professor in the liberal arts, and professor of history, lecturer in law in the Department of History at the University of Iowa. She is also the author of "No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship" (Hill & Wang).] The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution clearly states that all people born in the United States are citizens. But some Republicans, in their wide-ranging attack on illegal immigrants,

Steven Fielding: Back to the Future? Austerity in 1931 and 2011

[Steven Fielding is Professor of Political History and Director of the Centre for British Politics in the School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham. He is writing a book for Bloomsbury on fiction and British politics. Steven.Fielding@nottingham.ac.uk] How similar is the current economic crisis to the one that hit the UK and the rest of the world before 1939? There have certainly been many comparison

Stanley Kutler: Activist Judges Strike Again

[Stanley Kutler is the author of “The Wars of Watergate” and other writings.] Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen may have created a new gold standard for constitutional ignorance. The recent decision by a Florida federal judge to strike down the whole of the new federal health care law, a decision at odds with two other rulings, prompted Van Hollen to declare that “effectively, Wisconsin was relieved of any obligations or duties that were created” under terms of the law. Eve

James D. Le Sueur: Egypt and the Middle East, Stuck in the Past

[JAMES D. LE SUEUR is Professor of History at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. He is the author of Algeria Since 1989: Between Terror and Democracy.] Gamal Abdel Nasser pledged to thrust Egypt into the postcolonial time zone in 1952, when he wrested control of the government from the Egyptian monarch and the British Empire. As he wrote in his autobiographical essay, Egypt's Liberation, "The revolution marked the realization of a great hope felt by the people of Egypt sinc

Michael Kazin: American Exceptionalism is a Flawed Idea, but Obama Should Still Use It

[Michael Kazin is a professor of history at Georgetown University and co-editor of Dissent. His next book, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation, will be published in August (Knopf).] Has the United States always been an exceptionally free and virtuous nation? If you have to ask the question, you are already well on the road to unpatriotic perdition—or so every Republican about to run for president seems to think. “Don’t kid yourself with the lie,” Rick Santorum recently

E. Randall Floyd: Democracy in the Land of Caliphs and Conquerors

[E. Randall Floyd is the author of more than 15 books and a former history professor at Augusta State University. He resides in Kurdistan, where he is a professor of history at the American University of Iraq-Sulaimani, and is working on several new books.] SULAIMANI, Iraq --- The rugged brown hills of northern Iraq are a long way from the lush gardens of Augusta, but this quiet and ancient land of caliphs and conquerors has been my home for the past year and a half. I

Jonathan Zimmerman: A Little Shame Goes a Long Way

[Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of history and education at New York University. He is the author, most recently, of Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory (Yale University Press).] Shame on us! The cat is finally out of the bag about what our students are learning, and it isn't pretty. It's more like a dog, or maybe a pig. A warthog, even. I'm talking about the much-discussed Academically Adrift by my New York University colleagu

Niall Ferguson: Egypt: How Obama Blew It

[Niall Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard University and a professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School.] The statesman can only wait and listen until he hears the footsteps of God resounding through events; then he must jump up and grasp the hem of His coat, that is all.” Thus Otto von Bismarck, the great Prussian statesman who united Germany and thereby reshaped Europe’s balance of power nearly a century and a half ago. Last week, for

David Schultz: What "Original Intent" Would Look Like

[David Schultz is a Hamline University professor in the School of Business and a professor of law at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of more than 25 books and 70 articles on American politics, policy, and law, including a two volume constitutional law text book, "Constitutional Law in Contemporary America," published by Oxford University Press (2010).] With reverence and awe, Michele Bachmann and the Tea Party pay homage to the original Constitution and frame

Max Boot: We Could Still 'Lose' Iraq

[Max Boot is a contributing editor to Opinion and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is writing a history of guerrilla warfare and terrorism.] My kids — the oldest is 13 — seem to think that anything that happened in the pre-iPad era is ancient history and therefore of little relevance to them. The American public and politicos must tacitly agree. How else to explain the sudden disappearance of Iraq from our public discourse? Remember Iraq? That cou

Walter Russell Mead: Mubaraks, Mamelukes, Modernizers and Muslims

[Walter Russell Mead is Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. He blogs at The-American-Interest.com.] Pharaoh Hosni is out; the Mubarak dynasty is done. This had to happen and, whatever comes next, the downfall of an undemocratic leader well past his sell-by date is a good thing in and of itself. The nation of Egypt is not a personal possession to be handed down li

Victor Davis Hanson: Reflections on the Revolution in Egypt

[Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.] For nearly three weeks, the Biden/Clinton/Obama policy concerning the tottering Mubarak regime was contradictory, incoherent, and predicated entirely on the perceived pulse of the demonstrations. Finally, the confused administration seemed to have realized that U.S. foreign policy must center

Allen C. Guelzo: Mr. Lincoln’s Economics Primer

[Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College. This article first appeared in the Dec. 20, 2010, issue of National Review.] Abraham Lincoln’s greatest love was politics, but his intellectual passion was for what the 19th century called “political economy” — the way economics and politics intersected in society and government. According to his law partner William Herndon, Lincoln “liked political economy, the study of it,” and Shelby Cullo

Noah Feldman: Sometimes, Justice Can Play Politics

[Noah Feldman, a professor at Harvard Law School, is the author of “Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of F.D.R.’s Great Supreme Court Justices.”] WHAT is it about those robes? They are only flimsy bits of wools, enlivened in a few cases by some very European lace at the collar. Yet the moment our Supreme Court justices put them on, a segment of the concerned public imagines that they have become priests consecrated to the sacred order of the Constitution. Recently, Ju

Mark LeVine: Twenty-Eight Hours in Tahrir

[Mark LeVine is a professor of history at UC Irvine and senior visiting researcher at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden. His most recent books are Heavy Metal Islam (Random House) and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books).] I arrived at Tahrir a little later than normal yesterday, at around 4. I had spent the day trying to manoeuvre around Cairo by foot and taxi to visit various human rights organisations, to assess the situation

Andrew J. Bacevich: Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘Known and Unknown’

[Andrew J Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His most recent book is ‘Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War’ (Metropolitan)] Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. Adorning the dust jacket of Known and Unknown is a carefully staged photograph of its author, decked out in jeans, work shirt and sleeveless fleece jacket. He leans against a gate, mountains in the background. The image is quintessentially American.

Gabriel Herman: Morality Isn't Everything

[Gabriel Herman is a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.] ...Victorious military leaders have left behind piles of dirt that make Galant's land affair appear insignificant. During a drunken party Alexander the Great drove his spear through a close friend (who was also his lover ) only because the man criticized him. When Julius Caesar wasn't waging war, he committed adultery with his enemies' wives and sometimes also with his friends' wives. (When he was wagi

Rashid Khalidi: The Promise of Real Democracy in Egypt

[Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University and the author of six books on Middle Eastern history, including "Palestinian Identity," "Resurrecting Empire," and "Sowing Crisis." Khalidi is a former advisor to Palestinian negotiators at the Madrid and Washington peace talks and is the editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies.] As revolutionary events sweep Egypt, and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stubbornly ins

Richard Bulliet: The Military-Mubarak Complex

[Richard Bulliet is professor of history at Columbia University and author of “Islam: The View from the Edge” and “The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization.”] “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” So said President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961. Americans understood this warning to refer to the incestuous relations between high-ranking military officers and the arms industry. In