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The Vietnam War as You've Never Seen It ... From Hanoi: Interview with Lien-Hang Nguyen

by David Austin Walsh

North Vietnamese First Secretary Le Duan and Prime Minister Pham Van Dong in Hanoi in 1969.Few historians can can claim that their first book was met with near-universal acclaim, received prestigious national prizes, an offer to write an op-ed for the New York Times, and an invitation to speak at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.

What If Nixon Had Been President During the Cuban Missile Crisis?

by Harvey Simon

Credit: Flickr/Wikimedia Commons/HNN.Fifty years ago this month, the world got lucky. With a show of force and a secret trade, President John F. Kennedy persuaded Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to dismantle a clandestine nuclear missile base the U.S. had discovered in Cuba without a single shot -- or missile -- being fired.Ever since, scholars, statesmen and academics have plumbed the Cuban Missile Crisis for lessons about leadership, nuclear weapons and international relations, focusing on the possible miscalculations or accidents that could have sparked World War III during those tense thirteen days in 1962.But these what-if scenarios leave out the most revealing counterfactual of all: Would there have been war without Kennedy as president?

Obama Wasn't the First President Who Hoped to Bridge the Partisan Divide

by Ray Raphael

Obama was not the first president to arrive at the office with hopes of bridging a partisan divide, only to see the center collapse and the chasm widen. George Washington was.The nation had divided over ratification, and the first president wanted to heal the wounds. Although allied to the Federalists, he broke with them and supported a Bill of Rights to appease Anti-Federalists, who had opposed the new Constitution. Transcendent leadership to check partisan bickering -- that’s exactly what the framers of the Constitution had hoped the president would provide, and that’s why they finally decided, less than two weeks before they adjourned, that the president should not be elected by Congress. They did not want him subject to the “intrigue” and “cabal” they suspected would characterize that body.

Historian's Take: The Vice-Presidential Debate

Ruth Rosen, a former columnist for the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle, is a Professor Emerita of History at U.C. Davis and a scholar in residence at the Center for the Study of Right-Wing Movement at U.C. Berkeley. Her most recent book was “The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America.” Well before the vice-presidential debate began, even the president had agreed that he had failed to expose Mitt Romney’s lies and had allowed his opponent to present himself as a supporter of universal health insurance, Social Security and Medicare, none of which is true.

Return of the Paranoid Style

by Marc-William Palen

Joseph McCarthy with Roy Cohn, 1954. Credit: Library of Congress/New York World-Telegram/Wikimedia Commons.The Bureau of Labor statistics just announced that unemployment has dropped below 8 percent, the lowest since Barack Obama entered the Oval Office. The new numbers proffer a timely boon to the Obama campaign. For some, however, it appears too timely.Romney supporters are already claiming that the Obama administration somehow fabricated the statistics for political gain, that nobody “is immune to being bent by Obama and the Democrats.” Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, immediately alleged that the Obama camp manipulated the numbers, while at the same time admitting there was “no evidence to prove that.”All this despite the fact that the Bureau of Labor is insulated from the Obama White House.

How Mormons and African Americans Criss-Crossed Political Identities

by David Prior

Political cartoon from Puck, 1877.The 2012 election is marked by a paradox common to politics across much of the globe. Partisans invoke, appeal to, and claim to embody national unity and the public good as they engage in a divisive power struggle. Whether we view the current slate of candidates as conflicted, manipulative, or both, they hardly stand out for celebrating their country as a community in one breath while positioning their opponents on the outskirts in the next.

A Historian Taught by History

by Ronald Radosh

The death late last month of Eugene D. Genovese was a loss not only to the world of professional historians, but to American intellectual life as a whole and especially to the conservative intellectual movement. Best known for his prize-winning 1974 book Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, Genovese transformed the way in which scholars came to understand the slave South. Arguing that a conflict existed between a bourgeois North and a pre-capitalist South, he wrote about the effects of the policies of the Southern slave-owning class. He used the concept of “hegemony” derived from the work of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci to argue that the slave-owners created a social structure in which slaves, despite their subordinate role, were able to build their own communal space and assert their humanity.

Overwrought Empire

by Tom Engelhardt

General Miles Dempsey (arms crossed) leads a "strategic seminar" at Quantico. Credit: D. Myles Cullen/Department of Defense. Americans lived in a “victory culture” for much of the twentieth century.  You could say that we experienced an almost 75-year stretch of triumphalism -- think of it as the real “American Century” -- from World War I to the end of the Cold War, with time off for a destructive stalemate in Korea and a defeat in Vietnam too shocking to absorb or shake off.

How History Shaped Barack Obama’s View of National Identity

by Robin Lindley

Barack Obama campaigning in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 5. Credit: Flickr/Obama for America.Whether your ancestors came here on the Mayflower or a slave ship; whether they signed in at Ellis Island or they crossed the Rio Grande -- we are one people. We need one another. Our patriotism is not rooted in ethnicity, but in a shared belief of the enduring and permanent promise of this country. -- President Barack Obama April 2011 Commencement address at Miami Dade CollegeThroughout his political career, President Barack Obama has spoken vigorously and repeatedly about his vision of a civic national identity that will lead to a more inclusive and united nation, and on his belief that the common good must be pursued -- that our policies cannot focus solely on maximizing individual gain.

Hey Mitt, When Are You Going to Apologize to My Parents?

by Ron Briley

Mitt Romney listens to Barack Obama during the first presidential debate on October 3. Credit: Flickr/University of Denver.As the focus of the presidential campaign shifts to the debates, I am still awaiting the apology that Republican nominee Mitt Romney owes my deceased parents.Romney’s description of the 47 percent who fail to pay federal income taxes as mooching freeloaders who believe they are victims and entitled to handouts denigrates the memory of my mother and father, who worked hard all their lives to escape poverty and whose final years were made a bit more comfortable with programs such as Social Security and Medicare. Their son -- me -- was able to become the first in the family to attend college due to the student loan program. The values instilled in me by parents include honesty, hard work, responsibility, and a sense of citizenship. Poor all their lives, they were a model of integrity who would be insulted by a politician labeling them as irresponsible.

Eric Hobsbawm's Brilliance ... and His Blindspot

by Kelsey McKernie

Eric Hobsbawm in 2009. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.Just a few days after Eugene Genovese’s passing, another prominent Marxist historian has died. Eric Hobsbawm, one of the most influential British historians of any political persuasion, lost his battle with pneumonia and leukemia on Monday, October 1, at the age of 95. He leaves behind a large family, well over a score of books, and a very controversial legacy -- for unlike Genovese, who left behind his Marxist beginnings and moved toward Catholic traditionalism, Hobsbawm remained an unrepentant Marxist to the very end.Born in Alexandria, Egypt to a Jewish father of Polish heritage and a Viennese mother, Hobsbawm was raised first in Vienna and then in Berlin. He joined the Sozialistischer Schülerbund (“Socialist Schoolboys”) at the age of twelve, and the Communist Party in 1936, three years after his family moved to Britain.

A Policy Lesson from Reagan for Obama and Romney

by William Lambers

U.S President Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev at the Hofdi House in Reykjavik, Iceland on October 11, 1986, during the Reykjavik Summit. Credit: Flickr/CTBTO/Ronald Reagan Library.When President Obama and candidate Mitt Romney take to the stage for a foreign policy debate on October 22, nuclear weapons are sure to come up, especially Iran's ambitions for the Bomb. But the debate should also focus on the countries that actually have nukes, including Russia, China, North Korea, and rivals India and Pakistan.As President Eisenhower once said, nuclear weapons are the only thing that can destroy the United States. Americans will want to hear how the next president plans to control the thousands of nuclear weapons that exist around the world.

Barack's Lost Idealism

by Jim Sleeper

The audience at the History Colorado presidential debate watch party listens to President Barack Obama's answer to a question. Credit: Flickr/University of Denver.When President Obama was deep into debt-ceiling negotiations two summers ago, sparing no effort at old-fashioned deal-making as well as honest dialogue across a newly gaping ideological abyss that showed how weak mutual respect and trust have become in our public (and private) discourse -- The New York Times published an essay, "What Happened to Obama's Passion?," by the political psychologist Drew Westen, that fired up liberal Democrats but infuriated Obama's neoliberal apologists among pundits captive to the Washington Beltanschauung, or Beltway worldview that I characterized right here.

Why Aren’t We More Worried About Pandemics?

by Jonathan Gifford

Soldiers from Fort Riley, Kansas, in a hospital ward ill with Spanish Flu. Credit: U.S. Army/Wikimedia Commons.

Why Obama Lost the First Debate

by Robert Brent Toplin

Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan shake hands during their fateful meeting in 1980.President Barack Obama did not lose the first presidential debate with Mitt Romney simply because he failed to deliver key talking points in a clear and strong manner. Obama's problem was more fundamental: he did not adequately recognize that there is a significant difference between a stump speech and a televised debate. If Obama had looked back at history, he would have seen that candidates succeed when they recognize that televised debates are a form of theater. A look at very recent history -- the 2012 debates in the Republican primaries -- could have given Obama useful insights on the theatrics of effective debating.During Obama’s televised confrontation with Mitt Romney, the president spent very little time looking directly into the camera -- that is, into the eyes of the American people. Over much of the ninety-minute event, Obama spoke to the moderator, Jim Lehrer. Richard Nixon made a similar mistake in his debate with John F. Kennedy in 1960. Nixon, a former college debater, spoke to his opponent, while Kennedy frequently looked directly at the audience.

Historian's Take: The First Presidential Debate

Ruth Rosen, a former columnist for the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle, is a Professor Emerita of History at U.C. Davis and a scholar in residence at the Center for the Study of Right-Wing Movement at U.C. Berkeley. Her most recent book was “The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America.” For weeks, President Obama and former Governor Mitt Romney have sparred with partners, immersed themselves in piles of position papers, practiced remaining cool, and in the case of Romney, memorized unforgettable zingers that he never used. But each knew they had the same task: to persuade viewers that they genuinely cared about the lives of ordinary Americans.To do that, Obama had to justify his record, sound like a president instead of a professor, and to explain that the same Republican policies advocated by Mitt Romney caused the economic crisis he inherited. Obama did avoid sounding professorial, but he failed to explain the Republican origins of the American’s financial crisis in a crisp and lucid manner.

Post-Mortem on the Muhammad Protests

by Daniel Pipes

Islamic flag at a protest outside the U.S. embassy in Qatar, September 14, 2012. Credit: Flickr/Omar Chatriwala.As Muslim crowds dissipate and American diplomatic missions return to normal activities, here are three final thoughts on the riots that began this Sept. 11 and killed about thirty:

Eugene D. Genovese, R.I.P.

by Paul Gottfried

Betsey and Eugene Genovese in an undated photograph from the 1960s. Credit: Tina Trent.

Eric Hobsbawm, 1917-2012

Eric Hobsbawm in 2009. Credit: Wikipedia. Table of Contents Michael Burleigh Niall Ferguson Eric Foner Roy Foster Stephen Kotkin Catherine Merridale David Priestland Timothy Snyder Associated Press Commonweal Guardian (UK) New York Times Jonathan Jones Ed Miliband   Michael Burleigh

Affirmative Action's Unlikely Allies

by Matthew Johnson

Lee Bollinger, former president of the University of Michigan and current president of Columbia University, talks with Admiral Mike Mullen in 2010. Credit: DoD/Mass Communication Specialist Chad J. McNeeley.On October 10, the Supreme Court will hear Fisher v. University of Texas, the fifth affirmative action admissions case to reach the Court in forty years. One way to view this case is to place it in the long history of resistance to affirmative action in the United States. But a look at the amicus curiae (friends of the court) briefs reveals a parallel story about affirmative action that we don’t often discuss. Supporting the University of Texas and its use of race in admissions decisions is a group of unlikely bedfellows: university presidents, corporate executives, and military officials. As much as we like to tell the story of affirmative action through the lens of backlash, the emergence of this coalition helps explain why race-conscious admissions practices -- albeit in limited forms -- have survived the legal onslaught.