[Nelson Lichtenstein is the MacArthur Foundation professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he directs the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy. He is the author of "The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business" and editor, with Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, of the forthcoming "The American Right and U.S. Labor: Politics, Ideology, and Imagination."]

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has won an important battle against public employees in his state, but the war -- and here we might justifiably call it the class war -- is far from over. By pushing through the state Legislature a bill stripping most public employees of their collective bargaining rights, Walker has become a hero to the Republican right.

But the outcome of this legislative melodrama is turning out to be of secondary import to the larger shift in political sentiment that the Wisconsin events have set in motion. The irony here is that as Republican officeholders attack public sector unions in Wisconsin and other Northern states that were once union bastions, including Ohio, Idaho, Indiana and Pennsylvania, public support for collective bargaining remains strong....

Right-wing assertions of a conspiracy between public employee unions and friendly officials represent a triumph of ideology over experience. Government officials, even those elected with union backing, have hardly been patsies when it comes to negotiations with state and municipal employees.

We've had plenty of union-management battles in the public sector, going all the way back to the strikes of teachers, garbage collectors, and social workers who led the way to the formation of municipal unions in the 1960s and 1970s. And in more recent years, tough bargaining sessions, full of layoff threats and midnight deadlines, have preceded the compromises that are embodied in virtually every public employee collective bargaining contract....

[Lewis Pyenson is a professor of history at Western Michigan University. This essay was adapted from a presentation to the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge.]

Recently, after an absence of many decades, I returned to the place of higher learning where I began studying physics. I hardly recognized the laboratories.

In my time, they were given over to model experiments, such as a ballistic pendulum (in which a rifle delivered a bullet into a block of wood, verifying action-and-reaction), Kater's pendulum (for measuring the acceleration resulting from gravity), or the stroboscopic trajectory of a projectile (the parabolic arc). Senior students were encouraged to redesign classic experiments with minor updates. A friend and I built an apparatus for detecting electron spin; we designed a special magnetic pole face, and fabricating it cost us a great deal of time with a Bridgeport milling machine. There were unexpected and prosaic hazards, such as the time I watched a future Nobel laureate sorting hundreds of resistors that he had knocked off their rack.

But all that is a world apart from the original experimental work now expected of undergraduates with their sophisticated, prefabricated gadgets. Now undergraduates design original experiments, like simulating the magnetic fields in the sun's corona....

My generation is the last to have been educated by the genetic method. That is to say, we learned science by repeating stages of science past, beginning with Newton's and Boyle's laws, on to Lavoisier's chemistry, then 19th-century wave phenomena, and finally 20th-century nuclear physics. To reinforce a sense of the past, our textbooks featured vignettes of people in odd costumes who first carried out the investigations we were repeating. The general idea was that science developed immanently from a community of truth-seekers. We joined the community by tracing the development of their ideas from the somewhat remote past. Our task was to recover, insofar as possible, the way that old knowledge had emerged....

My recent tour of an undergraduate physics laboratory persuades me that the genetic method of instruction is gone, a casualty of the passing of the Modern Age. In place of model experiments based on historical examples, we now encourage students to explore particular situations using a variety of techniques. Rather than emphasizing the development of one discipline, we ask students to look everywhere for solutions to problems—in effect promoting the deconstruction of disciplinary knowledge and welcoming the classical, virtuosic breadth of Newton and Leibniz....

[Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of "Jimmy Carter," published by Times Books, and editor of a book assessing former President George W. Bush's administration, published by Princeton University Press.]

Republicans are looking ahead -- some with glee and others with fear -- to the presidential election in 2012....

But Republicans have also expressed a significant amount of hesitation about jumping into the race. Christie still says he is not planning to run. Gingrich has been going back and forth. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has delayed a decision and Sen. John Thune of South Dakota has already dropped out....

Most of them, even the optimists, realize that there is a rough road ahead. With all the challenges that President Obama confronts, he won't be easy to beat.

The fact is that it has been extremely difficult in recent history to defeat presidential incumbents who decide to run for a second term. Since Herbert Hoover lost to Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, only three incumbents have been defeated in their re-election bid -- Gerald Ford in 1976, Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George H.W. Bush in 1992. Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson announced they would not run in the middle of the primaries....

History should give Republicans some pause as they start to think about their choice. None of this means Obama is a lock for re-election. After all, conditions can change and new voices can rapidly emerge in today's media. But it's going to take a special candidate and a change in the political environment for a Republican to win.

[Juan Cole, who maintains the blog Informed Comment, is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan and author, most recently, of Engaging the Muslim World.]

Muammar Qaddafi is still trying to play the al-Qaeda card, arguing that his murderous regime is what stands between Europe and the emigration to it of thousands of Muslim extremists. He told Turkish television that his regime is a key element of stability in the Eastern Mediterranean, and its fall would bring chaos there, including to Israel.

So, who knew? Qaddafi is the guarantor of Israel’s security and that of Europe? It is a desperate attempt to induce caution with regard the growing move in the West toward some sort of military intervention to prevent Tripoli from massacring the rebels.

Interestingly, Qaddafi’s language seems calculated to appeal to the far right in Europe and Israel, which views all Muslims as potential terrorists. It is an attempt to build a Qaddafi-National Front-Likud-Peter King front against the democracy movement in the Middle East. Qaddafi also sent an envoy Wednesday to the military council that is running Egypt. Since the pro-rebel tribe Awlad Ali dominates Salloum, the Egyptian city on the Libyan border, the rebels presumably are getting some supplies from their Egyptian allies. Qaddafi is probably keen to cut them off. His fear-mongering about al-Qaeda might have some purchase with right wing officers such as Omar Suleiman.

Aljazeera Arabic points out that the rebel forces, far from being “al-Qaeda,” are mostly disgruntled youth from major Libyan tribes such as Zintan. The keywords preferred by statements from such tribes are secular ones– the nation, the people, the army. Muslim fundamentalists speak of the “umma” or the ‘community of believers’ when they talk about the nation, whereas those imbued with civil discourse use terms like the ‘watan’ (originally a translation of the French ‘patrie’ or fatherland), and speak of ‘the people’ (sha’b) rather than ‘the believers.’ It is this civil language that the rebels speak, in all the communiques I’ve seen....

[Nelson Lichtenstein is a professor of history and director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He is the author of The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business (Metropolitan Books, 2009) and the editor, with Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, of The American Right and U.S. Labor: Politics, Ideology, Imagination, forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press.]

When he was still President Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, now mayor-elect of Chicago, famously quipped: "Never allow a crisis to go to waste."

Republican governors in Wisconsin, New Jersey, Ohio, and other states have certainly taken that advice to heart. By emphasizing, and in some cases manipulating, the red ink flowing through so many state budgets, they have leveraged the crisis to strike a body blow at the public-sector unions that represent so many teachers, professors, social workers, and municipal employees. The collective-bargaining rights of the police and firefighters, often a privileged caste, are also being threatened in some states.

Unionists and Democrats denounce this as opportunism, and in Wisconsin they have made the case that there is hardly a fiscal crisis at all, that public-employee wages and pensions are not out of line with those in the private sector, and that collective bargaining works pretty well. Neither the Wisconsin Counties Association nor the League of Wisconsin Municipalities was consulted by Gov. Scott Walker when he drew up the anti-union legislation that he claims is necessary for the solvency of his state's counties, towns, and cities. Nor do officials of either group support the governor's initiative.

But it would be a mistake to see the contemporary GOP offensive against the unions as some kind of hasty and ill-planned gambit. Walker's rhetoric and his legislative program reflect and refract a multidecade barrage by conservatives—in politics, academe, think tanks, and corporate management—designed to eviscerate trade unionism so that it will, in effect, simply wither away. Their assault, both ideological and political, has depended neither upon the presence or absence of a fiscal crisis at the state level nor, for that matter, upon the profitability or competitiveness of those American companies threatened by global competition. The collective organization of workers, private or public, stands athwart their vision of how markets should work and the polity should function....

[Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University, is the author, most recently, of The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood.]

Suddenly, to be an Arab has become a good thing. People all over the Arab world feel a sense of pride in shaking off decades of cowed passivity under dictatorships that ruled with no deference to popular wishes. And it has become respectable in the West as well. Egypt is now thought of as an exciting and progressive place; its people’s expressions of solidarity are welcomed by demonstrators in Madison, Wisconsin; and its bright young activists are seen as models for a new kind of twenty-first-century mobilization. Events in the Arab world are being covered by the Western media more extensively than ever before and are being talked about positively in a fashion that is unprecedented. Before, when anything Muslim or Middle Eastern or Arab was reported on, it was almost always with a heavy negative connotation. Now, during this Arab spring, this has ceased to be the case. An area that was a byword for political stagnation is witnessing a rapid transformation that has caught the attention of the world.

Three things should be said about this sea change in perceptions about Arabs, Muslims and Middle Easterners. The first is that it shows how superficial, and how false, were most Western media images of this region. Virtually all we heard about were the ubiquitous terrorists, the omnipresent bearded radicals and their veiled companions trying to impose Sharia and the corrupt, brutal despots who were the only option for control of such undesirables. In US government-speak, faithfully repeated by the mainstream media, most of that corruption and brutality was airbrushed out through the use of mendacious terms like “moderates” (i.e., those who do and say what we want). That locution, and the one used to denigrate the people of the region, “the Arab street,” should now be permanently retired....

[Samuel Moyn, who teaches European history at Columbia University, is author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard, 2010).]

WHEN EGYPTIANS entered the streets, Barack Obama began to flirt with a shift in a long-standing American policy, before events overtook him and forced his hand.

Nearly two years ago, revolts had broken out after a stolen election in Iran, but Obama didn’t claim “human rights” were being violated. Instead, he said that while the United States could not interfere, it “bore witness” to the Iranian insurgents and the repression they might face.

In fact, as several observers have noted, all through his presidency Obama had soft-pedaled the common American notion that U.S. interests and humanity’s aspirations coincide. And no wonder, given the global consensus that Obama’s predecessor had confused the two, especially after the failure to find weapons of mass destruction led George W. Bush to prioritize the goal of democracy and the “freedom agenda” as a rationale for war.

But when it came to Egypt, Obama turned the page. He clearly announced: “The universal rights of the Egyptian people must be respected, and their aspirations must be met.”

Because he came to link himself with a thirty-year wave of international human rights, Obama’s message—like the Tunisian, Egyptian, and now Libyan events themselves—has so far been interpreted in ways that fit recent historical parallels. Neoconservatives have already begun to claim that Bush was right; the Middle Eastern earthquake, they say, vindicates their view that democracy defined and shepherded by the West, if necessary at gunpoint, is how the end of history comes about. Liberals respond that it only shows the need for a multilateral and internationalist renaissance of human rights, after Bush’s betrayal of the idea....

[Jon Wiener teaches US history at UC Irvine. His most recent book is Historians in Trouble.]

Joseph Nye of Harvard’s Kennedy School wrote in the New Republic in 2007 that Muammar Qaddafi was interested in discussing “direct democracy.”

Anthony Giddens of the London School of Economics wrote in the Guardian the same year that Libya under Qaddafi could become “the Norway of North Africa.”

Benjamin Barber of Rutgers University wrote in the Washington Post, also in 2007, that Libya under Qaddafi could become “the first Arab state to transition peacefully and without overt Western intervention to a stable, non-autocratic government.”

Great minds think alike? Actually, no: all were being paid by Libyan money, under a $3 million per year contract with a consulting group which promised to “enhance the profile of Libya and Muammar Quadhafi” in Britain and the US.

One more thing: none of them said in the New Republic, the Guardian, or the Washington Post that they were being paid by Libyan money. That seems to be a clear violation of journalistic ethics – at least that’s what the then-editor of the New Republic, Franklin Foer, told David Corn of Mother Jones about Nye: “If we had known that he was consulting for a firm paid by the government, we wouldn’t have run the piece.”...

[The author, a former assistant professor of history, is a writer and journalist living in Jerusalem.]

Two enormous appetites have suddenly arrived at the Middle East’s table: democracy and consumerism. Ravished from years of famine and abuse, the people revolted and opened the doors to the well-stocked pantry and kitchen. Yet despite having overthrown tyrants, they are not now unruled. Two strict overseers are watching: Islamists and the military. Crowded with tribes, Sunnis and Shiites, and colonialist operators who function like combinations of parasites and predators, the well-laden table is still a game of who gets full plates and who survives.

Revolutions taking place in countries that have been ruled by dictators and exploited by foreigners are breathtaking in the possibilities that they offer. But they can, like so many others before, become hideous monsters of abuse and destruction.

Americans and Europeans have dined at this table for years, supplying abundant feasts for tyrants who served their interests. A mild rebuke here and there, but the weapons kept pouring in; good for business was the polite mannered morality that determined the menu.

And now, having watched this partying from the window, the youngsters have come in for their share. A demographic necessity, they want education, decent jobs, freedom to express themselves, gender equality, and all the other things they see on TV. Their weapons are small: communication devices they hold in their hands, videos and computers, promising that dreams come true....

Western foreign policies, guided by maintaining political and economic hegemony, have ignored the social and moral content of their assistance and funds. As long as there is no connection between the money and what it does, the West will contribute to future disasters. Economic interests that exploit natural resources should promote nation-building, not private portfolios; that should direct Western foreign policy. There needs to be synergy that is sympathetic to social needs and problems.

Recent uprisings have opened the table to many new guests. It would be a terrible waste to make people scramble for crumbs, when they could eat with dignity and self-respect....