Roundup: Historian's Take
Follow Roundup: Historian's Take on RSS and TwitterThis is where we place excerpts by historians writing about the news. On occasion this page also includes political scientists, economists, and law professors who write about history. We may from time to time even include English profs.
SOURCE: Arizona Republic (2-14-13)
Matthew C. Whitaker is an ASU Foundation professor of history and founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Arizona State University.
Time magazine recently announced the selection of President Barack Obama as its Person of the Year. It did so, for a second time, because, as Richard Stengel argued in his editorial preface, “We are in the midst of historic cultural and demographic changes, and Obama is both the symbol and in some ways the architect of this new America.” Obama is Time’s Person of the Year, he wrote, “for finding and forging a new majority, for turning weakness into opportunity and for seeking, amid great adversity, to create a more perfect union.”
Indeed, Arizona State University’s Center for the Study of Race and Democracy for years has studied the “Age of Obama” and foretold the influence of America’s stunning demographic changes. February, Black History Month, presents us with an opportunity to pause and reflect upon these changes and what they mean for a society still grappling with race and pluralism.
Blackness, as personified by the Obama family, embodies the type of hybridity that defines all Americans. We are a fusion of humanity, but Obama’s ascendency has helped educate millions about just how diverse we are. Thanks to Obama, we see that Blackness, and a diverse racial lineage, are not antithetical. In fact, multiraciality is what helps to make African-Americans who we are....
SOURCE: Religion and Politics (2-24-13)
Daniel Bornstein is Professor of History and Religious Studies and the Stella Koetter Darrow Professor of Catholic Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the vice-president of the American Catholic Historical Association, and will assume the presidency in 2014. He is the author of The Bianchi of 1399: Popular Devotion in Late Medieval Italy and the editor of Medieval Christianity, volume 4 of A People’s History of Christianity.
The resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, announced for February 28, is an action virtually without precedent. No pope has resigned in modern times. No pope has ever resigned for reasons of failing health. And hardly any pope—only one, really—has ever resigned the papacy voluntarily. Early examples are shrouded in obscurity, but were all obviously constrained in one way or another. Pontian (230-235) is said to have resigned after being exiled: he evidently recognized that he could not function as bishop of Rome while performing slave labor in the mines of Sardinia. Marcellinus (296-304) had the misfortune to be bishop of Rome during the great persecution of Christians under the emperor Diocletian. He reportedly bent to imperial pressure and offered sacrifice to the pagan gods; and as a consequence, he was either deposed or forced to abdicate.
Even under Christian emperors, popes could run afoul of the political authorities and be forced from office. Benedict V (964) lasted barely a month in office before being deposed by the Holy Roman Emperor Otto I. Henry III deposed Benedict IX and two rival popes in 1046, ending a brief but messy schism and initiating a sweeping reform of the church. As part of that reform, in 1059 Pope Nicholas II decreed that popes would henceforth be elected by the chief clergy of Rome—the College of Cardinals—which has been the standard procedure for papal elections ever since. The Council of Constance (1414-1418) dealt with the Great Western Schism, which since 1378 had divided the Catholic Church between two (and after 1409, three) competing popes. Invoking the conciliar theory—the idea that supreme authority in the earthly Church lies not in the papacy, but in the assembled body of the faithful as represented by an ecumenical council—the council was able to pressure all three papal claimants to resign, and then to restore unity with the election of Pope Martin V in 1417. None of these popes left office willingly....
SOURCE: National Review (2-28-13)
NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His The Savior Generals will appear in the spring from Bloomsbury Books. © 2013 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
Republicans and Democrats are blaming one another for impending cuts to the defense budget brought about by sequestration. But with serial annual deficits of $1 trillion–plus and an aggregate debt nearing $17 trillion, the United States — like the insolvent Rome and exhausted Great Britain of the past — was bound to reexamine its expensive overseas commitments and strategic profile.
The president’s nomination of Chuck Hagel for defense secretary was a sort of Zen-like way of having a Republican combat veteran orchestrate a reduced military. In fact, Barack Obama has nurtured a broad and diverse constituency for his neo-isolationist vision. Budget hawks concede that defense must suffer its fair share of cuts. Libertarians want their republic back and hate the big-government baggage that comes along with a big military’s involvement overseas. Leftists agree, adding that the U.S. has neither the moral authority nor the wherewithal to arrange events overseas. For liberals, a scaled-back military presence abroad means more entitlements at home. For each F-22 Raptor not built, about another 20,000 families could receive food stamps for a year.
SOURCE: Truthout (2-28-13)
Peter Dreier is professor of politics and chair of the Urban and Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. His new book, "The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame," was just published by Nation Books.
On Friday, March 1, tens of millions of children and their parents will be reading Dr. Seuss books as part of Read Across America Day, sponsored by the National Educational Association (NEA) in partnership with local school districts and some businesses. The NEA, which started the program 16 years ago to encourage reading, was smart to tie the program to Dr. Seuss, who remains - more than two decades after his death - the world's most popular writer of modern children's books. Theodor Seuss Geisel (1904–1991) - Dr. Seuss' real name - wrote and illustrated 44 children's books, characterized by memorable rhymes, whimsical characters and exuberant drawings that have encouraged generations of children to love reading and expand their vocabularies. His books have been translated into more than 15 languages and have sold more than 200 million copies. They have been adapted into feature films, TV specials and a Broadway musical. He earned two Academy Awards, two Emmy Awards, a Peabody Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.
What few Americans know is that, despite his popular image as a kindly cartoonist for kids, Dr. Seuss was also a moralist and political progressive whose views suffuse his stories. Some of his books use ridicule, satire, wordplay, nonsense words and wild drawings to take aim at bullies, hypocrites and demagogues. He believed that children's books should be both entertaining and educational. His most popular children's books included parables about racism, anti-Semitism, the arms race, and the environment. His books consistently reveal his sympathy with the weak and the powerless and his fury against tyrants and oppressors. Many Dr. Seuss books are about the misuse of power - by despots, kings, or other rulers, including parents who arbitrarily wield authority. His books teach children to think about how to deal with an unfair world. Rather than telling them what to do, Geisel invites his young readers to consider what they should do when faced with injustice. Generations of progressive activists may not trace their political views to their early exposure to Dr. Seuss, but without doubt this shy, brilliant genius played a role in sensitizing them to abuses of power....
SOURCE: Tikkun (2-26-13)
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 (Yale University Press).
Will raising the minimum wage put more money in the pockets of America’s working poor? Or will it have the opposite effect, throwing more poor people out of work?
That’s the question we ask whenever anyone proposes a hike in the minimum wage, as President Obama did in his State of the Union Address. But it’s also the wrong question, diverting us from the biggest one of all: what are the rights that we share as human beings?
Minimum-wage opponents say we all have the right to pursue our own happiness—and to maximize our self-interest—so long as we respect others’ right to do the same. Proponents counter that everyone has a right to certain necessities of life—food, clothing, and shelter—and that no one can be happy if some of us are deprived.
And the proponents have Pope Benedict XVI on their side....
SOURCE: NY Daily News (2-22-13)
Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of education and history at New York University. He is the author of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory.”
In 1941, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People released a report condemning racist school textbooks in New York City. Music books routinely referred to blacks as "darkeys," while literature anthologies called them "coons" or "Sambos." Worst of all, American history textbooks depicted slavery as a genteel institution developed by benevolent white Southerners to "civilize" savage, ignorant Africans.
All of these books were profoundly offensive to the city's African-American population, of course. But they were also full of lies, as NAACP secretary Walter White emphasized. "This study was made not on a basis of racial sensitiveness or pride," White wrote, describing the NAACP's textbook report, "but on the highest plane of historical accuracy and objectivity." Indeed, the report drew on research by pioneering black historian Carter G. Woodson to refute the textbooks' cheery portrait of life under slavery.
I thought of this episode as I read about the furor against Jane Youn, the P.S. 59 school teacher who asked her fourth graders to come up with math problems that drew on their social studies coursework. One of their questions asked how many slaves would remain on a ship, if some of them perished in a revolt; another asked how many times a slave would be whipped over the course of a month, assuming five daily floggings....
SOURCE: CNN.com (2-22-13)
Jim Cullen is chairman of the history department at the Fieldston School in New York and author of "Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions" (Oxford University Press).
(CNN) -- If, as many observers believe, Daniel-Day Lewis wins the Academy Award for best actor on Sunday, he will become the first man to win three (Meryl Streep has done this; Maggie Smith might match her if she wins for her turn in Quartet). Such an honor would ratify Day-Lewis' standing not simply as one of the greatest actors of his time, but for all time.
Like Robert De Niro, Day-Lewis is seen as the quintessential method actor, a commitment he has taken to extremes in his well-known penchant for embodying his characters even when the cameras aren't rolling. Day-Lewis also is notable for the extraordinary breadth of roles he has played.
He first came to global attention in 1985 when he appeared simultaneously as the priggish Cecil Vyse in the Merchant-Ivory film adaptation of E.M. Forster's 1907 novel "Room with a View" as well as Johnny, the gay East End punk, in Stephen Frears' brilliantly brash "My Beautiful Launderette."...
SOURCE: ReaderSupportedNews (2-24-13)
Ruth Rosen, a former columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Times, is Professor Emerita of History at the University of California Davis and a Scholar in Residence at the University of California Berkeley. Her most recent book is The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America.
The feminist writer Susan Griffin called rape "The All American Crime" in Ramparts Magazine in 1971. She was the first feminist to explain that men rape children, elderly and disabled women, not just girls dressed in mini-skirts. In other words, she challenged the belief that that rape was a sexual act, fueled by men's irrepressible sexual drive. Instead, she argued that rape was an assault against a woman, fueled by the desire to control and harm her, not a sexual act at all.
While I became a professor of history at the University of California a few years later, an elderly woman was raped by a man who stalked the campus looking for prey. He finally found a woman in her 90s and raped her in Davis's Central Park. (I can't find the newspaper story, but I remember the terror he caused among the town's women.) In 2012, a 43-year-old man raped a 73-year-old woman in New York City's Central Park and even boasted about how many elderly women he had raped. So, no, rape is not a sexual act.
Griffin was right. Even more, we now know that rape is the universal crime. Men don't need seductive young bodies scantily dressed to incite them to use their overwhelming power over a vulnerable woman. Even though rape has been declared illegal in war as a means of demoralizing an enemy, the Balkan wars revealed the creation of "rape camps" on all sides....
SOURCE: NYT (2-24-13)
Manisha Sinha is a professor of Afro-American studies and history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of “The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina” and the forthcoming “The Slave’s Cause: Abolition and the Origins of America’s Interracial Democracy.”
On the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, discussion over who freed the slaves, fueled by movies like “Lincoln,” have become commonplace. While historians have debated the relative roles of Abraham Lincoln and the slaves themselves in the coming of emancipation, few have paid attention to the abolitionists, the forgotten emancipationists in the story of black freedom.
Actually, they’re hidden in plain sight, even in contemporary emancipation narratives. In Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” which may well win the Academy Award for Best Picture this evening, they are represented by the lone figure of the Radical Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens. In Quentin Tarantino’s fictional western on slavery, “Django Unchained,” perhaps by the articulate German bounty hunter posing as a dentist (Christoph Waltz’s character isn’t pure fantasy; many “Forty Eighters,” refugees from the failed 1848 revolution in the German states, were political radicals and staunchly antislavery). In fact, the idea of a Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery, the subject of Lincoln, originated with abolitionists.
The problem with movies like “Lincoln” is not that they depict passive black characters — in fact most black characters in the movie are drawn in a nuanced fashion — but that nearly all characters in the movie, including Lincoln himself, are devoid of their proper historical context, particularly the abolitionists and the even larger political antislavery movements. Emancipation was not simply a presidential and congressional game; it was the long and hard-won result of decades of black and white activism before and during the war....
SOURCE: CNN.com (2-11-13)
Timothy Stanley is a historian at Oxford University and blogs for Britain's The Daily Telegraph. He is the author of "The Crusader: The Life and Times of Pat Buchanan."
(CNN) - Journalists have a habit of calling too many things "historic" - but on this occasion, the word is appropriate. The Roman Catholic Church is run like an elected monarchy, and popes are supposed to rule until death; no pope has stepped down since 1415.
Therefore, it almost feels like a concession to the modern world to read that Benedict XVI is retiring on grounds of ill health, as if he were a CEO rather than God's man on Earth. That's highly ironic considering that Benedict will be remembered as perhaps the most "conservative" pope since the 1950s - a leader who tried to assert theological principle over fashionable compromise.
The word "conservative" is actually misleading, and the monk who received me into the Catholic Church in 2006 - roughly a year after Benedict began his pontificate - would be appalled to read me using it. In Catholicism, there is no right or left but only orthodoxy and error. As such, Benedict would understand the more controversial stances that he took as pope not as "turning back the clock" but as asserting a living tradition that had become undervalued within the church. His success in this regard will be felt for generations to come....
SOURCE: Informed Comment (Blog) (2-21-13)
Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History and the director of the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Michigan. His latest book, "Engaging the Muslim World," is just out in a revised paperback edition from Palgrave Macmillan.
The resignation of Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali in Tunisia has created a political crisis that the elected government will have to deal with. Jebali is a politician of the Muslim religious right, from the Ennahda Party, and had led an Ennahda-dominated cabinet in coalition with two smaller secular parties, Moncef Marzouki’s social democratic Congress for the Republic and another small partner.
The Jebali government was shaken by the assassination of secular opposition figure Chokry Belaid, a severe critic of the religious right. Many secular Tunisians openly accused Ennahda of the act (though without proof), withdrawing the public confidence necessary for Jebali to rule from that party. He therefore sought a shake-up of his cabinet, installing non-party technocrats to produce a government of national unity. The Ennahda Party parliamentarians, however, rejected that step. They have the largest bloc of members of parliament, around 40%, but are not a majority.
When Jebali found his proposal blocked, he stepped down Tuesday night. In essence, he treated his party’s rejection of his plan as a vote of no confidence. In parliamentary systems, prime ministers have to step down all the time when they lose a vote of no confidence. I see Jebali’s move as positive. He or someone else will have to try to form a government, being nominated by elected president Marzouki for the task.
Actually Jebali is not the first post-revolution prime minister to step down, and while the political crisis is regrettable (and especially the assassination that caused it), the political process is not. Tunisia was ruled by strongmen for most of its post-independence history, but now has leaders who need the support of parliament and of the people. As we see in Belgium or Italy, getting such support is not always straightforward. But that’s politics, and politics of a parliamentary sort are good, and much better than corrupt, oppressive, inflexible strong men.
SOURCE: National Review (2-20-13)
Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, and the recently published A Matter of Principle. He can be reached at cbletters@gmail.com.
What a pleasure it is, in the wake of Presidents’ Day, to write something upbeat about President Obama. As disappointing as I found his second inaugural address, I am pleased to disagree with commentators from right to left who found fault with his State of the Union message last week. I thought it was pretty good. For the first time in my observations, he actually seemed to take the deficit seriously, though he could not avoid recourse to refuge in his old mouse-hole of the serried ranks of unnamed economists “who say we need $4 trillion in deficit reduction to stabilize our finances.” I don’t believe there are such economists; they are the flip side of the “economic royalists, monopolists, and war profiteers” that FDR used to rail against in the Thirties, to the delight of his followers. (There were no war profiteers or “malefactors of great wealth” in the U.S. in the Thirties. But it was a convenient cul-de-sac into which he could sweep public anger, where it could harmlessly dissipate itself — though it still rankles with the contemporary nincompoop Right, which holds that FDR didn’t alleviate the Depression but won four straight terms through electoral flimflam.)
To President Obama’s phantom gallery of economists is imputed the view that if the country cuts just $400 billion a year from what the deficit will be if no changes are made to taxing and spending, for ten years, all will be well. No, it won’t: The accumulated deficit, which was $10 trillion four years ago, and is $17 trillion today, will be $27 trillion in ten years on that scenario, and, in the words of Douglas MacArthur (referring to nuclear war), “Armageddon will be at our door.”...
SOURCE: National Review (2-21-13)
NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His The Savior Generals will appear in the spring from Bloomsbury Books
In his first term, President Obama was criticized for trash-talking the 1-percenters while enjoying the aristocracy of Martha’s Vineyard and the nation’s most exclusive golf courses.
Obama never quite squared his accusations that “millionaires and billionaires” had not paid their fair share with his own obvious enjoyment of the perks of “corporate jet owners,” “fat cat bankers,” and Las Vegas junketeers.
Now, that paradox has continued right off the bat in the second term. In the State of the Union, Obama once more went after “the few” and “the wealthiest and the most powerful,” whom he blasted as the “well-off and the well-connected” and the “billionaires with high-powered accountants.”...
SOURCE: The New Republic (2-6-13)
Michael Kazin’s most recent book is American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation. He is co-editor of Dissent and teaches history at Georgetown University.
Contrary to what everyone who loved—or hated—his inaugural address seems to think, President Obama has yet to demonstrate that he is determined to launch a new liberal era.
The big speech did gesture in that direction. Obama declared, in the style of FDR, that “our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.” The line about equality being “the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall” was a welcome salute to three of the most prominent civil rights movements in American history. And not since Lyndon Johnson has a president spoken about poverty with such apparent conviction and specificity: “We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American; she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own.”
But to believe that Obama has truly revived the great tradition of egalitarian reform is to neglect the distinction between two species of modern liberalism: that which promotes the equality of rights and that which works toward a greater equality of opportunity and wealth. The latter, the social variety, emerged from the class tumult of the Gilded Age and inspired such key New Deal measures as Social Security, the WPA, and the National Labor Relations Act. The former harks back to the abolitionists and early feminists; it demands that the promise of individual liberty be extended to every American, regardless of their skin color, national origin, gender, or whom they happen to love....
SOURCE: Jerusalem Post (2-19-13)
The presence of a reported 50,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Syria to support President Bashar Assad is an indication of what Iran and Hezbollah have in mind – the preservation of Syria as a strategic asset in the regional power struggle. Losing Syria would leave Hezbollah isolated in Lebanon; a Syrian-Lebanese alliance, on the other hand, would allow Hezbollah to fortify Iranian interests in both countries.
A future Syrian government would then comprise a Sunni-Hezbollah alliance, similar to the political structure in Lebanon, without Assad and the Alawites, who would become a minority protected by Hezbollah. Following the Lebanese model, Hezbollah in Syria would be a state-within-a-state, with its own army and political structure, allied with a weak, fragmented Islamist Sunni-dominated state. For Hezbollah this is the perfect solution; it allows them to function covertly without the inconveniences of diplomatic restrictions.
Hezbollah can and will attack Israel, as it did in the Second Lebanese War (2006), protected by its parent state and entrenched within Syria, with vastly expanded capabilities....
SOURCE: Omaha World-Herald (2-18-13)
I taught a course last month in the United Arab Emirates, which isn’t a democracy. But according to an Emirati guy I met there, the United States isn’t much of a democracy, either.
“Anyone you don’t like, you just assassinate him with a drone,” he told me. “Shoot first, ask questions later.”
But now lots of people are asking questions about U.S. drone strikes, especially after the recent confirmation hearings for John O. Brennan. Nominated by President Barack Obama to direct the Central Intelligence Agency, Brennan defended the CIA’s targeted killings in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere as essential to national security....
SOURCE: Sightings from the Martin Marty Center (2-15-13)
R. Scott Hanson teaches history and religion at Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania and is the author of City of Gods: Religious Freedom, Immigration, and Pluralism in Flushing, Queens -- New York City, 1945-2001 (New York: NYU Press, under review).
It did not receive much attention on Monday, January 21 during President Obama’s second inauguration, but some were alarmed when the reporter at the private pre-inaugural worship service at St. John’s Episcopal Church noted that Rev. Andy Stanley, who gave the sermon, referred to the President as “Pastor in Chief.” In an interview with Christianity Today several days after the inauguration, Stanley said his remark had been taken out of context by some reporters, clarifying that it had come from being impressed by the President’s visit with families after the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy. Stanley had said, "Mr. President, I don't know the first thing about being President, but I know a bit about being a pastor. And during the Newtown vigil on December 16th after we heard what you did—I just want to say on behalf of all of us as clergy, thank you." And added, "I turned to Sandra [Stanley’s wife] that night and said, 'Tonight he's the Pastor in Chief.'" Other commentators also referred to President Obama as pastor in chief after being moved by his separate visits with each family who lost a child and by his speech to those gathered in mourning.
Later on Monday, President Obama’s inaugural address did even more to cast him as Pastor in Chief with his use of religious language and themes. He used the word “God” five times (and twice more with “His” and “He”), which is just short of Reagan’s record of eight in 1985. Obama also mentioned “our creed” five times, giving the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence significance as a kind of civil religion. Finally, he ended by saying, “Thank you, God Bless you, and may He forever bless these United States of America.”
It may strike some as alarming that the president would be referred to as a Pastor in Chief or that he would make frequent use of religious language in such a public ceremony, but this association is something President Obama shares with many of his recent predecessors. Religious language in presidential inaugural addresses has become increasingly more explicit in the twentieth century, particularly since World War II.
As I reported in an earlier Sightings column in 2001, The earliest American presidents came from Protestant backgrounds but were heavily influenced by Enlightenment philosophy as young men and were Deists by the time they entered politics. Since their generation had made the separation of church and state a fundamental American principle they were quite hesitant, and very creative, when naming God. Washington referred to "that Almighty Being who rules over the universe," Adams to "the Protector in all ages," and Jefferson to "that Infinite Power." But with Presidents Monroe and Pierce, we see the beginning of a trend with the actual use of "God." Lincoln mentioned God six times in his second inaugural address (and eight more times with He, His, the Almighty, and the Lord), and he was daring in his use of Scripture to judge the Confederacy near the end of the Civil War. Such references to God then appear in subsequent addresses, steadily increase in the twentieth century, and reach a record high with Reagan in 1985.
It has also become almost obligatory since Reagan (1981) to end every inaugural address (and State of the Union address now, too) with some combination of "God bless you" and "God bless America"—a move from asking for, appealing to, or seeking divine guidance to asking God to bless the people and country. Eisenhower (1953) and George H. W. Bush (1989) even led the people in prayer. George W. Bush, who was well known for his “born-again” evangelical Christian background, also caused a stir when he alluded to plans in his 2001 inaugural address to begin an Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (renamed the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships by President Obama). At the same time, Bush and Obama were careful to be inclusive of other world religions in their addresses, and Obama also made room for “non-believers” in his first inaugural address. Obama's second address took place on MLK Day, and some were reminded of an oratorical style that reflects the prophetic black preaching tradition of someone like King.
The result of such changes has lent recent addresses an ever more sermon-like quality, with the president as a kind of pastor to the people. But why? Perhaps such language gradually became less taboo, as presidents have felt more and more free to employ it. Or it may also stem from the increasing intimacy of the event. Thanks to the media, inaugurations have moved from the confines of Congress (last with J.Q. Adams in 1825) to radio (Coolidge, 1925) and then finally to television (Truman, 1949). Founding fathers like Jefferson and Madison would no doubt be very pleased by President Obama’s powerful reinterpretation of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution for our times, but it is likely they would be uncomfortable with the label of pastor in chief and the common trend among recent presidents to employ more explicit religious language in their addresses.
SOURCE: Philadelphia Inquirer (2-11-13)
Jonathan Zimmerman is Professor of Education and History and Director of the History of Education Program, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.
Now that women can assume combat roles in the military, I've got a question for you: Whose daughters will do the combatting?
Not mine. And not yours, either, if they live in a leafy, upper-middle-class suburb like the one where my two girls have grown up.
That's because the military draws overwhelmingly from the middle and lower-middle classes of our society. And that's what most of our news coverage has ignored, in the rush to congratulate the Pentagon for removing the ban on women in combat.
Let's be clear: the Pentagon should be congratulated. Thousands of female medics, drivers, and other servicewomen have already seen battle overseas. But they have often been blocked from key promotions because they lacked official "combat" designations....
SOURCE: East Asia Forum (2-13-13)
Dr John Blaxland is Senior Fellow at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, the Australian National University.
Rikki Kersten is Professor of modern Japanese political history in the School of International, Political and Strategic Studies at the College of Asia and the Pacific, the Australian National University.
The recent activation of Chinese weapons radars aimed at Japanese military platforms around the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands is the latest in a series of incidents in which China has asserted its power and authority at the expense of its neighbours.
The radars cue supersonic missile systems and give those on the receiving end only a split second to respond. With Japanese law empowering local military commanders with increased discretion to respond (thanks to North Korea’s earlier provocations), such incidents could easily escalate. In an era of well-established UN-related adjudication bodies like the International Court of Justice (ICJ), how has it come to this? These incidents disconcertingly echo past events.
In the early years of the 20th century, most pundits considered a major war between the great powers a remote possibility. Several incidents prior to 1914 were handled locally or successfully defused by diplomats from countries with alliances that appeared to guarantee the peace. After all, never before had the world been so interconnected — thanks to advanced communications technology and burgeoning trade. But alliance ties and perceived national interests meant that once a major war was triggered there was little hope of avoiding the conflict. Germany’s dissatisfaction with the constraints under which it operated arguably was a principal cause of war in 1914. Similarly, Japan’s dissatisfaction helped trigger massive conflict a generation later....
