OCCUPY WALL STREET, the protest encampment at Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, has many historical inspirations. After all, the tactic of sitting down and refusing to move was used by angry veterans marching on Washington in the early Depression years, striking automobile workers in the late 1930s and civil rights protesters in the 1960s. But there is a local precedent, one that few people remember today: the sit-ins and “occupations” that followed New York City’s deep budget cuts in 1975 and 1976.

In the spring of 1975, amid a recession and mounting anxiety about municipal bookkeeping, the banks that had long marketed the city’s bonds refused to do so any longer. To regain access to the bond market, and under pressure from Albany and Washington, Mayor Abraham D. Beame proposed a series of austerity budgets, slashing funds for schools, libraries and firehouses and, for the first time, charging tuition for the City University of New York.

Leaders of public sector unions organized a mass march on Wall Street to protest the cuts. They criticized the First National City Bank (forerunner of Citibank) for failing to support the city in its hour of need. They urged members to cancel their accounts and withdrew union funds from the bank....

Arthur Herman is the Pulitzer Prize-finalist author of Gandhi and Churchill.

Ten years ago today, the first American Special Forces landed in Afghanistan as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. Five weeks later, the fighting was over, as Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda fled across the border into Pakistan and the Taliban regime collapsed.

Some obvious questions demand answers: Why that victorious tide of war became reversed? Why we are still fighting there a decade later -- and what do we hope to achieve? And, on the other hand, what happens if we don’t stay -- if a war-weary America gives up on that rugged, forbiddingly primitive country and its tough, valiant people?

Make no mistake: Afghanistan is now the vital front line in our fight with Islamicist terrorism; abandoning it now could make the difference between ultimate victory and suffering another, even more deadly, 9/11.

Certainly we’ve made a host of mistakes until now. For one, it was never clear whether the goal of Operation Enduring Freedom was to destroy al Qaeda, topple their Taliban protector or to establish a new government in its place. Somewhat to our surprise, we ended up doing all three so quickly that no one was prepared for what came next…

Miss Shlaes, author of the forthcoming "Coolidge" (HarperCollins), joined the George W. Bush Institute this week as director of its economic growth project.

Sometimes two separate news events turn out to be related. That's the case with the Wall Street protesters and the extraordinary mourning at the death of Steve Jobs.

Some protesters have praised Jobs as the billionaire who was different—unlike the callous Wall Streeters, he was "beneficial to society." There's a second connection. More than anything else, the Wall Street protesters feel powerless, mere individuals against great banks. Maybe the mourning over the Apple founder is so intense precisely because Jobs gave individuals power. It's hard to think of a gift more empowering than your own personal computer.

Also fueling the grief is a more general suspicion that another Jobs won't come along soon. He was a creature of his times, the late 1970s, the 1980s and 1990s. There wasn't merely Jobs; there was also that economy in which he and other venture-capital recipients operated. Americans fear that the opportunities Jobs enjoyed won't come again.

It's worthwhile therefore to go back and look at what happened in those years, and then to look at how policy changes may have affected innovating firms that received venture capital.

The era didn't start well. The mid-1970s were a dead period. Then suddenly, from 1977 to 1978, new private capital devoted to venture capital increased by 15 times, to $570 million in 1978 from $39 million the year before....

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. He is the editor of The Short American Century: A Postmortem, to be published next year.

In the United States, despite a Constitution that mandates the separation of church and state, religion and politics have become inseparable. To lend authority to their views, presidential aspirants of both parties regularly press God into service. They know what he intends.

So the claims made by Republican front-runner Mitt Romney in a recent speech at the Citadel managed to be both striking and unexceptionable. "God did not create this country to be a nation of followers," Romney announced. "America must lead the world." Absent the "clarity of American purpose and resolve, the world becomes a far more dangerous place," with freedom itself in jeopardy. To avert this catastrophe, Romney declared, "this century must be an American century," with the United States economically preeminent and wielding "the strongest military in the world."

Whence do these insights derive? "Why should America be any different than scores of other countries around the globe?" Romney asked rhetorically. His answer captures the essence of our present-day civic religion: "I believe we are an exceptional country with a unique destiny and role in the world."..

 

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University and lives in Narberth. He is the author of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory" (Yale University Press).

Last week, I bumped into one of my students on her way to the "Occupy America" protest near Wall Street. I told her I was glad she was participating in the most exciting political development I'd seen in years. "You're right," she replied cheerily. "It's like our own Arab Spring."

No, it isn't. Such analogies demean demonstrators in the Middle East, who have risked torture and death. And they discount America's rich tradition of free speech, which has been on vibrant display since the Occupy America movement began.

...By every measure - income, home ownership, education - the gap between our haves and have-nots has widened. That's why I'm a fan of the Occupy America demonstrators, who have shone a bright light on these facts.

But it's also why I deplore facile comparisons to the Arab Spring, which harm the credibility of anyone who makes them. Consider that an estimated 2,900 people have already lost their lives in Syria alone, according to the United Nations' human rights office. More than 800 died in the protests in Egypt, and nearly 500 in the demonstrations in Tunisia, Yemen, and Bahrain....

Peter A. Coclanis is Albert R. Newsome Distinguished Professor of History and director of the Global Research Institute at UNC Chapel Hill.

Food and foodways are often linked closely with place, culture and memory. What would Indian cuisine be without chili peppers, Italian cuisine without tomatoes and the Swiss without chocolate? That in each one of these cases the food so closely identified with a particular place and culture was native not to that place or culture, but to the Americas is one of the key takeaways from Charles C. Mann's provocative new book, "1493."

Although globalization has been well talked about for decades, scholars have been tireless in pointing out that globalization is neither new nor irreversible. Because these scholars often write for their peers rather than for general audiences, their findings seldom make it off campus, which makes works by smart, accessible journalists such as Mann so valuable. Mann also wrote "1491," a best-selling history of the Americas before Columbus.

In "1493" Mann makes the case that Columbus' profound significance relates to the fact that his landing on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola (in what is now the Dominican Republic) marked the true beginnings of globalization....

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

...In some ways, Obama is looking back to President Harry Truman's 1948 campaign against Republican Thomas Dewey. In a stunning come-from-behind campaign, where most of the pollsters were wrong in their predictions, Truman railed against the "Do-Nothing Congress" and appealed to core Democratic constituencies such as organized labor to win re-election.

But this style of campaign poses many risks to the president in 2012. Obama does not have the same kind of huge foreign policy record that helped Truman neutralize the GOP in 1948, a campaign that came one year after the Truman Doctrine and the same year as the Marshall Plan....

A populist, anti-Washington campaign is at odds with the Obama whom the nation has seen up close since January 2009. While the president clearly shares many concerns with the left wing of the party, it's also clear that he is much more comfortable staying close to the center. He governs much more like President Bill Clinton than one might have expected from his 2008 primary campaign. Obama is a pragmatist and a politician, less concerned about ideological purity than about political outcomes.

The president's relationship with the left has been extremely tense. During a series of legislative battles, including the one over health care reform, Obama kept his distance from the base of his party in an effort to find legislation that could win over the handful of centrists in his own party and the GOP. Some members of his administration, including former press secretary Robert Gibbs, have made tough statements about the need for liberals to be more realistic about their goals.

Unlike Truman, who had his own problems with the left, Obama cannot point to a huge record from his party of successful policies that have bolstered the security of America's middle class. When Truman ran in 1948, FDR and the New Deal were still fresh on the minds of most voters....

Yoni Appelbaum is a social and cultural historian of the United States. He is a doctoral candidate at Brandeis University, and a lecturer in history at Babson College. He previously contributed to TheAtlantic.com under the name Cynic.

For the first time in a century, monetary policy stands at the center of our political debate. A number of leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination are vying to persuade voters of the depth of their hostility to the Federal Reserve. Last month, Texas Governor Rick Perry suggested that further action from the Fed might be "treasonous," and that if it were pursued, "we would treat [Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke] pretty ugly down in Texas." Rick Santorum called for a "sound-money Federal Reserve," Newt Gingrich labeled the Fed "dangerous" and Michele Bachmann accused it of wielding "almost unlimited power over the economy." And then there's the Fed's most passionate critic, Ron Paul, who accuses it of being "a full time counterfeiting operation to sustain monopolistic financial cartels."

The idea that it is not merely mistaken, but positively immoral, for the federal government to manipulate the money supply is as old as the republic. It has found its greatest popularity during moments of economic crisis, as voters search for a single identifiable cause, and cure, to the tangled problems they face. That poses an almost-irresistible temptation to politicians hoping to win office by tapping popular frustrations. But they are playing with fire. The last time a major political party fused moral fervor and monetary policy in this fashion, it plunged a stalling economy back into recession and sentenced itself to two decades of political irrelevance.

THE LESSONS OF 1896

The Depression of 1893 paralleled, in many ways, our current plight. It started as a financial panic, and soon deepened into the worst economic crisis the nation had ever faced. Confidence plummeted, banks failed, businesses went bankrupt, and unemployment soared.

The economic crisis struck amidst a simmering political insurgency. The People's Party, better known as the Populists, had enjoyed considerable success in the election of 1892, particularly in agricultural regions that were already suffering economically. To build on its triumphs, the party searched for a defining issue that could speak to the economic malaise. Out of the mass of proposals emerged a single, simple idea that almost all factions could back: bimetallism....