A Connecticut historian who has refuted American Indian land claims across the country testified Monday in federal court that the Shinnecock Nation has no right to build on a parcel of land in Southampton that the tribe is eyeing for a casino.

Freelance historian James Patrick Lynch said the 79 acres, known as the Westwood property, were legally handed over by the Shinnecocks as part of a 1659 restitution agreement for arson crimes committed by a few tribal members. Lynch said the land was signed over then by tribal leader Wyandanch, a Montauk. That claim led several Shinnecocks in the courtroom to raise their eyebrows at each other, but tribal leaders did not respond later to requests for comment.

"The Shinnecocks have not maintained a continuous and exclusive use of the Westwood lands in Southampton," said Lynch, who in previous hearings acknowledged he has never found a valid American Indian land claim out of several from California to the East End.

But the Shinnecocks' lawyer, Christopher Lunding of Manhattan, said he will call a Yale University historian who will show that the original land purchase from the tribe was invalid. Lunding said land purchases from American Indians were prohibited by the General Court of the Colony of Connecticut, which had authority over that part of Long Island at the time.

"The deeds under which they say it was sold were void," Lunding said.

"That is not an argument that has been made by the tribe at any point in history prior to this case," answered Michael Cohen, lead attorney for the Town of Southampton.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Max Boot , the author of the award-winning The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power. A senior fellow in national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a weekly foreign-affairs columnist for the Los Angeles Times, he lectures regularly at numerous military schools and advises the Department of Defense on transformation issues. He is the author of the new book War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History: 1500 to Today.

FP: Max Boot, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Boot: Thanks for the invitation to share my views.

FP: What motivated you to write this book?

Boot: I wrote War Made New to provide historical perspective on the challenges we face in coping with warfare in the Information Age. Ever since America's victory in the 1991 Gulf War--a victory made possible by stealth aircraft, smart bombs, GPS locators, and other advanced technologies--there has been a lot of heated debate over how and whether the U.S. military should transform itself to meet future threats.

I don't have any easy answers, but I do try to introduce ordinary readers to this important discussion by looking at how previous Great Powers have coped with epochal changes--the Gunpowder Revolution (1500-1700), the First Industrial Revolution (1850-1914), the Second Industrial Revolution (1917-1945), and now the Information Revolution (1970 to the present). To make this debate more vivid and less theoretical, I build my narrative around a series of battles, starting with the French invasion of Italy in 1494 and concluding with the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, which illustrate the changing nature of warfare.

There has been a great deal written on these subjects, of course. But much of it is in the specialized literature and unfamiliar to the normal reader. War Made New tries to bring together a lot of writings on disparate subjects—ranging from the distant past to the near future, and from warfare to politics to economics—in a single, readable narrative. That is something no one else has attempted, at least not recently.

FP: Can you talk a bit about how revolutions in military affairs have changed the world?

Boot: Revolutions in Military Affairs (RMAs) have played a central role in shaping the history of the past 500 years. The Gunpowder Revolution led to the rise of the West, because European states proved more adept than their rivals in harnessing cannons, muskets, multi-masted sailing ships and other breakthrough technologies. In 1450, at the dawn of the Gunpowder Age, Europeans controlled only 14% of the world’s land surface. By 1914, following not only the Gunpowder Revolution but also the Industrial Revolution, the sphere of European control had swelled to 84% of the world. This was in many ways the big story of the last 500 years.

But not everybody within Europe benefited equally. Gunpowder armies were much more expensive to equip, train, and maintain than the knights who had wielded power in the Middle Ages. Feudal lords didn’t have enough money to compete effectively in gunpowder warfare. This required the resources of a super-lord—a king or queen. Thus the dictates of the battlefield proved a powerful impetus for the growth of nation-states. In the words of one political scientist, “War made the state, and the state made war.” Many small states were left behind by this process. From Scotland to Navarre, from the Italian city states to Poland, countless political entities that could not harness effective military power were either temporarily or permanently swallowed up by their more powerful neighbors. In fact the map of Europe is still largely set in the pattern drawn in the Gunpowder Age.

The two Industrial Revolutions placed fresh strains on states and forced them to become even more effective in mobilizing military power—or pay the consequences. A number of states that were powerful in the Gunpowder Age were not able to industrialize effectively and collapsed by the end of World War I, the major war of the First Industrial Age. Think of the Romanoffs, Habsburgs, and Ottomans: all ancient dynasties swept away. Outside of Europe, the First Industrial Age furthered the European hegemony of the world. But by the time the Second Industrial Age was well under way (the 1940s), Europeans had succeeded in spreading their destructive technology and their even more destructive ideologies (nationalism, communism, etc.) to the farthest corners of the planet, thereby undermining the very empires they had founded. Thus Europeans wound up losing a series of colonial wars to their former subjects.

The Information Revolution--which has its origins in advances in computer technology dating back to the 1940s but which got going in earnest in the late 1970s--has already produced its share of upheavals. You can argue about why the Soviet Union collapsed when it did but surely a large part of the explanation is that we had a Silicon Valley and they did not. By the early 1980s the Soviets realized they were falling further and further behind the United States in the application of computer technology for economic and military purposes. They tried to reform but failed, precipitating the collapse of the Soviet Empire. The United States, in some measure due to its mastery of Information Age warfare (demonstrated so convincingly in the 1991 Gulf war), was left standing alone atop the world as an undisputed hegemon.

This is of course only a brief survey of the impact of RMAs and it’s possible to quibble with this interpretation or that, but it is hard to dispute that these upheavals have been major moving forces throughout history—a role that they continue to play.

FP: What challenges does America face in coping with Information Age warfare?

Boot: America is the undisputed master of conventional warfare in the Information Age. No one can stand against our armed forces in a “fair” fight. Those who have tried, whether Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic, have wound up defeated and on trial for their lives. Our undisputed primacy in conventional conflict is largely due to the lead we have taken in applying information technologies to the battlefield. No one else has such an array of precision-guided munitions (“smart bombs”), surveillance systems (JSTARs, AWACS, Predators, Global Hawks, etc.), communications networks, command posts, and other sophisticated systems to match those employed by the United States. The use of these technologies, operated by smart, dedicated volunteers, has allowed the U.S. to smite such adversaries as the Serbian and Iraqi armies at scant cost to itself.

Unfortunately, our smarter enemies have learned from such experiences that it is fruitless to oppose the United States on a conventional battlefield. They are pursuing other strategies, ranging from acquiring weapons of mass destruction (Iran, North Korea ) to employing terrorist tactics (al Qaeda, Hezbollah), to negate our firepower superiority. There is nothing new about this; regular armies have been frustrated by irregular warfare since the days of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. What’s new today is the scope and destructive potential of our foes. Unlike most past guerrillas, they are no longer confined to one country or one region. Today insurgents can operate around the world, thanks to the proliferation of the Internet, cell phones, jumbo jets, and other Western technologies. Our Islamist foes are in fact waging a global insurgency against the West.

This presents a novel challenge for which the American armed forces and the American government more broadly are not well configured. Our institutions were designed to wage conventional, nation state adversaries in the Industrial Age—in World War II and the Cold War. They were not designed for combating bands of super-powerful terrorists organized in loose-knit networks.

One of the major themes of War Made New is that it’s not enough to acquire first-class technology. You also need the right organizational structure, training, and leadership to take advantage of that technology. When it comes to Information Age warfare, our enemies have in some respects made the transition more effectively than we have. We need to turn our rigid government hierarchies into more adaptive, decentralized networks able to keep up with our enemies.

The campaign waged in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001—chronicled in War Made New—suggests how effective a more nimble military can be. A few hundred special operators backed up by the world’s most advanced technology helped the Northern Alliance to topple the Taliban in just two months. Unfortunately our military has seldom been so improvisational—or so effective—in the years since. That’s something we should try to correct.

FP: What would your advice be to the American administration in its military efforts in the terror war in general and in Iraq in particular?

Boot: War Made New doesn’t lay out an agenda for how we should retool the government for the war on Islamist terror networks, but let me suggest a few ideas here.

For a start we need to make the interagency process more effective—to get various government departments, such as State, Defense, and CIA, to work more closely together. The lack of such cooperation proved a major hindrance in Iraq. This may require legislation along the lines of the 1986 Goldwater Nichols Act, which brought greater unity to the different branches of the armed forces.

Another urgent priority: to create a government agency tasked with rebuilding war torn societies. Since the end of the Cold War, we have been engaged in nation-building an average of once every 18 months under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Think of Panama, Somalia, Haiti, northern Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq. Yet each time we have had to start from scratch, because we do not have a cadre of experts devoted to such work. Much of the burden falls on the armed forces, which is not well trained for this task. We paid a heavy price in Iraq for our lack of preparedness: the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance charged with running postwar Iraq was created just two months before the invasion took place. To avoid such fiascos in the future, we need a permanent agency that develops plans for dealing with potential trouble spots years in advance and has a cadre of experts, civil as well as military, on call.

We also need to enhance knowledge of foreign languages and cultures within not only our armed forces but also within other branches of governments. This is another weakness exposed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. To correct it, we need a multifaceted effort akin to the crash program we undertook early in the Cold War to enhance knowledge of Russia and China. We need to upgrade language training from elementary school to college; to change curricula at military schools to emphasize learning about foreign countries; to send more military officers to study abroad; to ease the frenetic pace of job-hopping within the military where officers are often moved after two or three years in one assignment, and thus don’t have time to become really expert in another country; and to reward officers who acquire in-depth knowledge of foreign lands. (Foreign Area Officers are worth their weight in gold, but they qare often slighted by promotion boards that favor combat leaders above all.) We also need to revise anachronistic security clearance procedures that make it difficult or even impossible to hire for sensitive positions people who have spent years living in foreign countries or who have relatives living there.

There is much more that needs to be done in other areas such as improving Information Operations (the Pentagon has no assistant secretary in charge of this vital area), expanding the size of the active duty army and Marine Corps, beefing up civil affairs and psychological warfare detachments, and increasing the number of special operators.

Above all we need to realize that few if any insurgencies have ever been defeated simply by killing insurgents. This is a mistake we made initially in Iraq, where we focused too much on “kinetic” operations instead of on providing basic security and economic development to the people. We managed to capture Saddam Hussein and to kill Abu Musab Al Zarqawi but it made little difference in the long run. We need to be careful not to repeat this same mistake in the broader war on Islamist terrorism. Manhunting has its place but it’s not going to be enough to win this struggle. To do that we need to support more effective governance structures throughout the Muslim world to prevent radicals from gaining power. That is a giant task, and one for which the U.S. government is not very well configured right now. President Bush and his successors need to continue the process of reform (internal and external), whatever happens in Iraq.

FP: Max Boot, thank you for joining us.

Boot: My pleasure.

An Op-Ed in tomorrow's Washington Post may set of an intriguing debate, pro and con. On the front page of the Post's Outlook section, famed Columbia University historian Eric Foner proposes George W. Bush as the worst president in our history.

Foner opens by noting that such rankings have long been a favorite among historians, with changes in rankings (Truman up, Teddy Roosevelt down, etc.) setting off near-seismic rumblings. He describes some of the consensus losers, for example: "At a time of national crisis, Pierce and Buchanan, who served in the eight years preceding the Civil War, and Johnson, who followed it, were simply not up to the job. Stubborn, narrow-minded, unwilling to listen to criticism or to consider alternatives to disastrous mistakes, they surrounded themselves with sycophants and shaped their policies to appeal to retrogressive political forces....

"Even after being repudiated in the midterm elections of 1854, 1858 and 1866, respectively, they ignored major currents of public opinion and clung to flawed policies. Bush's presidency certainly brings theirs to mind."

Then there's Nixon, "mostly associated today with disdain for the Constitution and abuse of presidential power. Obsessed with secrecy and media leaks, he viewed every critic as a threat to national security and illegally spied on U.S. citizens. Nixon considered himself above the law.

"Bush has taken this disdain for law even further. He has sought to strip people accused of crimes of rights that date as far back as the Magna Carta in Anglo-American jurisprudence."...

[Historian and journalist Ruth Rosen teaches at UC Berkeley and is a senior fellow at the Longview Institute.]

Bettina Aptheker's engrossing memoir,"Intimate Politics," is about breaking free -- emotionally, politically and intellectually -- from her father, Herbert Aptheker, the most famous Marxist historian in the United States, whose 1943 book"American Negro Slave Revolts" shattered the image of happy, complacent slaves.

She adored her political, erudite father, who was a well-known Communist."When I was a little girl I wanted to be just like my father," Aptheker writes."Whatever he did, I did, or tried to do." And one thing that Herbert Aptheker did extremely well, according to Bettina, was to deny any reality he didn't want to acknowledge.

Emulating her father, then, meant sharing his denial of the many questionable political realities, evading intellectual complexities she could not yet articulate, ignoring her own feminist observations of women's lives, restraining her sexual desire for women and, most of all, repressing childhood memories of her father's sexual abuse.

Determined to be his loyal, perfect daughter, Aptheker writes that she repressed this memory, so that she could function in her father's world. Her denial allowed her to become one of the few female leaders of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in 1964 and to play a major role in the trial of her childhood friend and comrade Angela Davis, who was acquitted of murder charges. Her denial of her deepest desires and memories also allowed her to marry and raise two children.

But denial eventually catches up. Outside, Bettina Aptheker appeared confident and productive. Inside, she lived with constant anxiety and serious depression."Incest survivors know despair," she writes."It is not your ordinary run-of-the-mill despair. ... It's a different feeling. All through childhood, all through my twenties, I had this feeling. It was bottomless, endless, bone-deep, down to the marrow. I choked on it, fell prostrate with it. It was connected to a self-loathing so deep, so limitless, so without end that suicide seemed the only possible relief."

As she began to sift through her childhood materials and memories to write this book, Aptheker suddenly remembered what she had repressed all those years. The memory was not recovered by therapy; it just suddenly appeared, and she collapsed to the ground:

"My father and I played other games too, beside baseball. I was three or four years old when we began playing 'choo-choo train.' ... My father was behind me, and then the train arrived 'at the station,' and we had to wait for the 'passengers' to get off and on. Our train rocked back and forth, back and forth, and my father had his right arm tightly around me. He was the 'locomotive' even though he was behind me. Our train shuddered just before it was supposed to leave 'the station,' except it didn't leave. ... And then he stood me up and we went into the bathroom and he washed me off, very gently. It didn't hurt. He never hurt me. And I knew not to tell. As I grew bigger we played different games, but they all had the shudder. Older still, I knew it was not a game. I still knew not to tell because he told me 'terrible things will happen.' My father stopped molesting me when I was thirteen and we moved to a new house."

Soon after I read this shocking revelation, a colleague asked me whether it was really necessary for her to reveal this incest to the world. The answer, I believe, is that Bettina Aptheker's life and intellectual biography make no sense without understanding what she suffered and repressed. Although she describes this incest in one short account, it is a thread running through her efforts to become her own person.

Her revelation is not an act of vengeance. Nor does she write with rancor, but rather with boundless love and forgiveness that grew as she acknowledged her love for women, embraced feminism and moved in new intellectual directions. She never brought it up for discussion with her father. On the contrary, it was Herbert Aptheker, during the last year of his life, who asked if he had hurt her during her childhood. She told him the truth, and assured him that she had long forgiven him. He believed her, but couldn't remember the events. Gradually, that changed:"After his heart attack, still in the hospital, he said, 'you've forgiven me.' It wasn't a question. It was a statement. I said, 'Yes, I have forgiven you.' He made the statement repeatedly in the months following, reassuring himself. That was how I came to realize that he had hid own knowledge of the incest. It was always present in his consciousness, just under the surface, as it had been in mine."

To be a successful and loyal daughter, Bettina Aptheker needed to repress these childhood memories. As she freed herself of her father's rigid Marxist worldview, she gained a new freedom to integrate a feminist analysis into her intellectual work, to embrace aspects of her Jewish heritage, as well as Buddhist practices, and to create a lasting partnership with a woman who"taught her the meaning of hope."

Though she describes episodes of debilitating despair, Aptheker's stunning memoir is not primarily about incest; it is ultimately a political, intellectual and emotional story of one woman's redemption. Once read, it is not easily forgotten.

The answer, it turns out, may be a bit more than you think. Money.com recently reported that the history majors from the class of 2006 earned an average of $33,071 (a 4.2 increase over the year before). That was more than 5 percent above the average for students who majored in the fields of English, sociology, and psychology.

Of course, a student strictly interested in earnings will probably find the average starting salaries for students with professional degrees more appealing. Business majors earned an average of almost 25 percent more out of college than history majors, and the salaries for students with science and engineering degrees were significantly higher.

These differences seem to diminish a bit over time. According to a new federal survey of college graduates who received their baccalaureate degrees in the 1992–93 academic year, history majors were earning an average of $54,662 ten years after the degree. That was just $1,000 less than the average for all fields, and well above the average of for those who majored in one of the other humanities ($48,162) or education ($39,424).

The gap in average salaries between men and women who majored in history is rather troubling, however. Men reported an average salary of $62,662, while female history majors reported an average of just $42,364. That 48 percent gap is almost twice the difference for graduates from other humanities fields. And unlike students in most of the other fields, the gap did not really narrow when we filter the data down to graduates with full-time jobs.

JOYCE APPLEBY
Joyce Appleby is a professor emerita of history at the University of California at Los Angeles and a past president of the American Historical Association. Her works include Thomas Jefferson; Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans; and A Restless Past: History and the American Public , a collection of essays and addresses published last year.

H. W. BRANDS
H. W. Brands is the Dickson, Allen, Anderson Centennial Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Theodore Roosevelt, and Andrew Jackson, and his most recent book is The Money Men: Capitalism, Democracy, and the Hundred Years’ War Over the American Dollar.

ROBERT DALLEK
Robert Dallek is the author of Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945, which won the Bancroft Prize; a two-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson; and An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963. This spring, HarperCollins will publish his new book, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power.

ELLEN FITZPATRICK
Ellen Fitzpatrick is the Carpenter Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire. Her works include History’s Memory: Writing America’s Past, 1880–1980 and Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform.

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN
Doris Kearns Goodwin won the Pulitzer Prize for No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roose velt: The Home Front in World War II. She is also the author of The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys; Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream; and most recently Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, which won the Lincoln Prize.

JOHN STEELE GORDON
John Steele Gordon is the author of Hamilton’s Blessing: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Our National Debt and The Great Game: The Emergence of Wall Street as a World Power, 1653–2000. His most recent book is An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power.

DAVID M. KENNEDY
David M. Kennedy is a professor of history at Stanford University and the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945. He won the Bancroft Prize for Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger.

WALTER McDOUGALL
Walter McDougall is a professor of history and international relations at the University of Pennsylvania. He won the Pulitzer Prize for The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age. His other works include Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter With the World Since 1776;Let the Sea Make a Noise: A History of the North Pacific From Magellan to MacArthur; and most recently Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History, 1585–1828.

MARK NOLL
Mark Noll is the McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. His works include The Civil War as a Theological Crisis; The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys; and America’s God, From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln.

GORDON S. WOOD
Gordon S. Wood is the Alva O. Way University Professor and a professor of history at Brown University. He won the Pulitzer Prize for The Radicalism of the American Revolution and the Bancroft Prize for The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787. His latest book is Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different.

[Robert N. Proctor is a professor of the history of science at Stanford University.]

WHEN the former K.G.B. agent Alexander V. Litvinenko was found to have been poisoned by radioactive polonium 210 last week, there was one group that must have been particularly horrified: the tobacco industry.

The industry has been aware at least since the 1960s that cigarettes contain significant levels of polonium. Exactly how it gets into tobacco is not entirely understood, but uranium “daughter products” naturally present in soils seem to be selectively absorbed by the tobacco plant, where they decay into radioactive polonium. High-phosphate fertilizers may worsen the problem, since uranium tends to associate with phosphates. In 1975, Philip Morris scientists wondered whether the secret to tobacco growers’ longevity in the Caucasus might be that farmers there avoided phosphate fertilizers.

How much polonium is in tobacco? In 1968, the American Tobacco Company began a secret research effort to find out. Using precision analytic techniques, the researchers found that smokers inhale an average of about .04 picocuries of polonium 210 per cigarette. The company also found, no doubt to its dismay, that the filters being considered to help trap the isotope were not terribly effective. (Disclosure: I’ve served as a witness in litigation against the tobacco industry.)

A fraction of a trillionth of a curie (a unit of radiation named for polonium’s discoverers, Marie and Pierre Curie) may not sound like much, but remember that we’re talking about a powerful radionuclide disgorging alpha particles — the most dangerous kind when it comes to lung cancer — at a much higher rate even than the plutonium used in the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Polonium 210 has a half life of about 138 days, making it thousands of times more radioactive than the nuclear fuels used in early atomic bombs....