[Robert Dallek is the author of "An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963." His latest book is "The Lost Peace: Leadership in a Time of Horror and Hope, 1945-1953.]

Every year since 1990, the Gallup poll has asked Americans to assess all the presidents since John F. Kennedy. And every year, Kennedy comes out on top. In the most recent survey measuring the popularity of the nine presidents since JFK, 85 percent said they approved of Kennedy’s leadership; Ronald Reagan was second with a 74 percent rating. Predictably, Richard Nixon came last with only 29 percent; even George W. Bush, who rivaled Nixon for the dubious distinction of least popular, commanded 47 percent approval. And poor Lyndon Johnson, who did more to change the country for the better with his civil rights, Medicare and aid to education laws than any president since Franklin Roosevelt but who remains burdened by Vietnam, stood just ahead of Bush with 49 percent.

The great...

[Mr. Davis is a member of Parliament.]

Today marks the 30th anniversary of the inauguration of U.S. President Ronald Reagan. One wonders how the man who, by sheer force of belief, ended the Cold War without a shot being fired would have responded to 9/11 and to the global financial crisis.

Born in a rented apartment in Tampico, Illinois, few could have predicted that the son of a shoe salesman would become one of the most revered political figures of his generation. His first career was as an actor with Warner Bros., spending many years featuring in B-movies, where, he joked, "the producers didn't want them good, they wanted them Thursday."

When the 69-year-old Reagan became president, he encountered a barrage of intellectual snobbery from the European and East Coast establishments. The then British ambassador to the U.S., Sir Nicholas Henderson, opined that "Reagan believes there are simple answers to complex problems. The main worry...

[Diane Mutti Burke is an associate professor of history at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and the author of “On Slavery’s Border: Missouri’s Small-Slaveholding Households, 1815-1865.”]

In March 2008, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama urged Americans to begin a long overdue conversation about race.

Difficult as it is, this conversation must begin with slavery. Most Americans think they understand the institution, although few have studied slavery in all its complexity. The tentacles of slavery reached far into American public life, yet the practice also involved intensely personal, even intimate, relations.

As is often the case, it is the local context that matters most. As Missourians and Kansans attempt to define our identities — and perhaps, in some cases, to assuage our guilt over the past — we often minimize the effect of slavery and segregation in our collective memories.

Missourians long have suggested that theirs...

[Matthew Pinsker is Associate Professor of History and Pohanka Chair in American Civil War History at Dickinson College. He has written two books about Abraham Lincoln and currently is working on a book about the Underground Railroad.]

The Underground Railroad was a metaphor. Yet many textbooks treat it as an official name for a secret network that once helped escaping slaves. The more literal-minded students end up questioning whether these fixed escape routes were actually under the ground. But the phrase “Underground Railroad” is better understood as a rhetorical device that compared unlike things for the purpose of illustration. In this case, the metaphor described an array of people connected mainly by their intense desire to help other people escape from slavery. Understanding the history of the phrase changes its meaning in profound ways.

Even to begin a lesson by examining the two words “underground” and “railroad” helps provide a tighter chronological...

[Irving Abella is the Shiff Chair of Canadian Jewish History at York University and co-author of None Is Too Many.]

On May 15, 1939, 907 desperate German Jews set sail from Hamburg on a luxury liner, the St. Louis. They had been stripped of all of their possessions by the Nazis, hounded out of their homes, their businesses and now their country. Their most prized possession was the Cuban entry visa each carried. Yet they considered themselves lucky – they were leaving a country where living as a Jew had become impossible.

When they reached Havana, their luck ran out. The Cuban government refused them admission. For the next week, the frantic passengers vainly sought a port that would allow them entry. Every country in South America refused. The U.S. response was even more cruel; it sent a gunboat to shadow the St. Louis in case it got close enough to allow passengers to swim ashore.

Only Canada remained.

A desperate plea for permission...

[Daniel Hannan is a writer and journalist, and has been Conservative MEP for South East England since 1999.]

Further evidence of the unwisdom of experts. A major survey of British academics has come up with a ranking of US presidents. In top place, predictably, is that old despot Franklin D Roosevelt.

What a perfect illustration of how received opinion tends to be wrong. Roosevelt is praised for having rescued the US from recession through the New Deal. In fact, the New Deal almost certainly prolonged the slump. Its mass of regulations encouraged cartels and crony capitalism, burdened businesses and deterred employers from taking on workers. In 2004, two economists at the UCLA, Harold L Cole and Lee A Ohanian, conducted a major study which concluded that the New Deal had in fact lengthened the recession by seven years:

President Roosevelt believed that excessive competition was responsible for the Depression by reducing prices and wages, and by...

[Clarence B. Jones, a scholar in residence at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, is a co-author, with Stuart Connelly, of the new book "Behind the Dream: The Making of the Speech That Transformed a Nation," from which this essay is adapted.]

It was the late spring of 1963, and my friend Martin was exhausted. The campaign to integrate the public facilities in Birmingham had been successful but also tremendously taxing. In its aftermath, he wanted nothing more than to take Coretta and the children away for a vacation and forget - forget the looming book deadline, the office politics of his ever-growing Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the constant need to raise funds.

But a date for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom had been nailed down - Aug. 28 - and Martin realized he couldn't plan such a massive undertaking with the usual endless interruptions. No, if this march were going to come...

[James Ledbetter is the editor in charge of Reuters.com, and author of Unwarranted Influence: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Military Industrial Complex, to be published in January by Yale University Press.]

This January marks the fiftieth anniversary of Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address, the speech that launched the phrase “military-industrial complex” into the English language. It will no doubt be an occasion for critics of military spending to decry not only massive wartime expenditures in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also nuclear-weapons programs that have outlived their original targets, and burgeoning weapons sales abroad. Indeed, it has become fashionable in recent years—for example, in the 2005 documentary Why We Fight—to draw a straight line from Eisenhower’s warning about the “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” to the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s, through to the antiwar opponents of George W...

[Vincent J. Cannato is an associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.]

Fifty years ago today, Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his farewell address to the nation. With the exception of George Washington’s speech, most presidential farewell addresses have been unmemorable affairs. But Eisenhower’s has had the greatest impact, all because of one phrase: “the military-industrial complex.”

Eisenhower used the term only once in the speech, warning that the nation “must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
In an earlier draft of the speech, Eisenhower’s used the clunky phrase “military-industrial-congressional complex.” Eisenhower took out “congressional” so as not to upset those on Capitol Hill.

In the years that followed, Eisenhower’s speech took on a...