Valerie Strauss writes The Answer Sheet for the Washington Post.

This being Labor Day, it seems like a good time to look at the way the history of the labor movement is taught in U.S. schools. Unfortunately, it isn’t — at least, not much, and when it is, it is too often inaccurately portrayed.

State content standards sometimes ignore the movement almost completely, and textbooks either do the same thing or else treat inadequately the role labor has played in the creation of the American middle class and the raising of living standards in the country.

Why? Scholars say that the answer is largely because unions are unfavorably viewed by the business community as well as by some politicians — and that this has spilled over into the treatment of the subject in textbooks because of the political way that textbook content is approved in the states.

So how distorted are the textbooks?

A 2011 report by the nonprofit Albert Shanker Institute titled “American Labor in U.S. History Textbooks: How Labor’s Story is Distorted in High School History Textbooks,” says the answer is “a lot,” and that the problem goes back at least to the 1930s....

Owen Jones is a columnist for The Independent.

Preeti Nalwa is a Non-Resident Kelly Fellow at the Pacific Forum CSIS, a Japan Foundation Doctoral Fellow and PhD candidate at the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Delhi.

Stephen Bates is a staff writer at the Guardian. 

Stuart D. Goldman is a Russian specialist and a scholar in residence at the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research. This article is based on his book, NOMONHAN, 1939: The Red Army’s Victory That Shaped World War II (U.S. Naval Institute Press).

John Oliff is a professor of New Testament, Greek and Theology. He is married and has five wonderful daughters. He is employed at Biblical Theological Seminary and Eastern University. In additional to his professional career he is deeply involved in teaching and training biblical studies at his local church, The Well in Feasterville, PA.

Rafael Medoff is director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and the coauthor with Sonja Schoepf Wentling of the new book Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Origins of the 'Jewish Vote' and Bipartisan Support for Israel.

David Pilling is the Financial Times' Asia editor.

When the Democratic Party of Japan took power three years ago, it promised a radical overhaul of foreign policy. It wanted to rebalance relations with the US and China, by addressing its "over-dependence" on the former and its strained relations with the latter. In a world moving from US unipolarity to multipolarity, in the words of Yukio Hatoyama, then prime minister, Japan would rediscover Asia as its "basic sphere of being".

It was a grand vision. Today it lies in shreds. That became clearer this week with Tokyo’s replacement of its ambassador to Beijing after a flare-up in Sino-Japanese tension. Anti-Japanese protests erupted across Chinese cities at the weekend after a renewed war of words over the Japanese-administered Senkaku islands, called Diaoyu by China.

Since the Democratic party came to power it has failed to forge closer relations with China. Its relations with the US, easily its most important ally, are near rock-bottom following years of US frustration at its foot-dragging over military-base agreements. Japan is not only replacing its ambassador to Beijing. It is also sending new envoys to Washington and to Seoul, the latter following a parallel territorial dispute with South Korea.

There are obvious reasons for Tokyo’s continuing painful relations with Asia, much of which it tried to conquer seven decades ago. Arguments over territory, history textbooks, war memorials, fishing rights and oil deposits are just some. At the root of all these is Japan’s wartime conduct and its inability – at least in the eyes of its neighbours – to repent properly for what it did...

Ray Takeyh is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

More than thirty years after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to power—and two decades after his passing—the Islamic Republic remains an outlier in international relations. Other non-Western, revolutionary regimes eventually eschewed a rigidly ideological foreign policy and accepted the fundamental legitimacy of the international system. But Iran’s leaders have remained committed to Khomeini’s worldview. The resilience of Iran’s Islamist ideology in the country’s foreign policy is striking. China’s present-day foreign policy isn’t structured according to Mao’s thought, nor is Ho Chi Minh the guiding light behind Vietnam’s efforts to integrate into the Asian community. But Iran’s leadership clings to policies derived largely from Khomeini’s ideological vision even when such policies are detrimental to the country’s other stated national interests and even when a sizable portion of the ruling elite rejects them.

Many Western observers of Iran don’t understand that its foreign policy has been fashioned largely to sustain an ideological identity. Thus, we can’t understand Iran’s foreign relations and its evident hostility by just assessing its international environment or the changing Mideast power balance. These things matter. But Iran’s revolutionary elite also seeks to buttress the regime’s ideological identity by embracing a confrontational posture.

The question then becomes why the Iranian leadership continues to maintain this ideological template so long after its revolutionary emergence. After all, other revolutionary regimes, after initially using foreign policy for ideological purposes, later moved away from that approach. Why has China become more pragmatic but not Iran? The answer is that the Islamic Republic is different from its revolutionary counterparts in that the ideology of its state is its religion. It may be a politicized and radicalized variation of Shia Islam, but religion is the official dogma. Thus, a dedicated core of supporters inevitably remained loyal to this religious ideology long after Khomeini himself disappeared from the scene. Revolutionary regimes usually change when their ardent supporters grow disillusioned and abandon the faith. It is, after all, much easier to be an ex-Marxist than an ex-Shiite. In one instance, renouncing one’s faith is political defection; in the other, apostasy. Although the Islamic Republic has become widely unpopular, for a small but fervent segment of the population it is still an important experiment in realizing God’s will on earth.

To understand this, it helps to review some pertinent Iranian history, beginning with the thought and actions of Ayatollah Khomeini...