Roundup: Historians' Take

Jonathan Zimmerman: The Trouble with Schools of Education

[Zimmerman is a professor of education and history at New York University's Steinhardt School.] In 1963, journalist James Koerner published a scathing critique of American schools of education. Charged with preparing future teachers and principals, ed schools were falling down on the job. Courses were "puerile, repetitious, dull and ambiguous"; faculty were "inferior," even "anti-intellectual" - and so were their students, who imbibed a thin pseudoacade

Dan Irving and Jennifer Evans: Why Canada Should Protect Gender Identity

[Dan Irving is sexuality studies minor program co-ordinator and Jennifer Evans is associate professor of history at Carleton University.] Canada is well positioned to make a landmark statement in the coming weeks to recognize gender identity within the Criminal Code and the Human Rights Act. Since New Democratic MP Bill Siksay’s private member’s bill was presented to the Commons justice committee in the summer, it has garnered the support of the Canadian Bar Association and the majo

Daniel K. Gardner: Air Quality in Beijing is 'Crazy Bad'

[Daniel K. Gardner is Dwight W. Morrow professor of history and director of the Program in East Asian Studies at Smith College and the author of ChinaMusings.com.] The US Embassy in Beijing monitors air quality hourly and issues reports on BeijingAir Twitter feed. One Friday late last month, (Nov. 19) the air in Beijing was so polluted, so smoggy, that the tweet had no established term to describe it. So, it simply reported that the air was “crazy bad.” I suspect we all pretty much

Steve Hochstadt: What's With the Pipe, Glenn?

[Steve Hochstadt of Jacksonville is a professor of history at Illinois College. His column appears every Tuesday in the Journal-Courier.] A few days ago, Glenn Beck accused George Soros, a Holocaust survivor, of turning in Jews to the Nazis. Now some people want his head, calling him an anti-Semite. I don’t agree. His head is worth nothing. Beck’s history lesson shows exactly why. Beck doesn’t like Soros. Soros is one of the world’s biggest donors to libera

Timothy Garton Ash: A Banquet of Secrets

[Timothy Garton Ash is professor of European studies at Oxford University, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of "Facts Are Subversive: Political Writing From a Decade Without a Name."] It is the historian's dream. It is the diplomat's nightmare. Here, for all to see, are the confidences of friends, allies and rivals, garnished with American diplomats' frank, sometimes coruscating assessments of them. Over the next couple of weeks, new

John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr: Black and White and Red All Over

[John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr are coauthors, with Alexander Vassiliev, of Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (Yale University Press).] The New York Times may be the paper of record, but its record leaves much to be desired when the issue is Soviet espionage in the United States. Where the Times is not obscuring the historical record, it is willfully obtuse. Consider Charles Isherwood’s recent review of the newly opened play After the Revolution. The glowing notice i

Tom Engelhardt: The National Security State Cops a Feel

[Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book is The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books).]It’s finally coming into focus, and it’s not even a difficult equation to grasp.  It goes like this: take a country in the grips of an expanding national security state and sooner or later your “safety” will mean your humiliation, your degradation.  And

Mark Lilla: The Beck of Revelation

[Mark Lilla is Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. He is the author of G.B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern (1993) and the editor of New French Thought: Political Philosophy (1991). His latest book is The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West.] The weather cooperated with Glenn Beck on the August morning of his “Restoring Honor” rally. Or maybe it was a higher force. The skies were clear, it was hot but not Washington unbearable, and the crowd, pr

Henry Yu: Maclean's Must Answer for Racial Profiling

[Henry Yu is a professor of history at the University of British Columbia.] In the weeks since the Maclean's article ' Too Asian'? was published, there have been a lot of opinions expressed. As a historian, I would like to point out some problems of just having an opinion without understanding what has led to some of the emotional reactions to the article, especially among those who have grown up in Canada. The problem was not just the simplistic racial profiling which

Ann Blair: Information Overload, the Early Years

[Ann Blair is a professor of history at Harvard University and the author of ”Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age,” recently published by Yale University Press.] Worry about information overload has become one of the drumbeats of our time. The world’s books are being digitized, online magazines and newspapers and academic papers are steadily augmented by an endless stream of blog posts and Twitter feeds; and the gadgets to keep us participating in

Julian E. Zelizer: Anxieties of 'Modern Times' Still with Us

[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.] Princeton, New Jersey (CNN) -- A new restored version of "Modern Times," one of the greatest films in the Hollywood canon, has recently been released. The film, which came out in 1936

David Greenberg: Calvin Coolidge: Right-Wing Rock Star?

[David Greenberg is a professor of history at Rutgers University and the author of "Nixon’s Shadow" and "Calvin Coolidge." In 2010-11, he is a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.] ...To most people today, Coolidge is little more than a cartoon. If he’s remembered at all, he’s the grim-faced "Silent Cal," the man said by Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter Alice to have looked as though he had been weaned on a pickle.

Michael Kazin: Obama Needs Unions to Reenergize White Working Class

[Michael Kazin is co-editor of Dissent and a professor of history at Georgetown University. He is completing a history of the American left to be published in 2011 by Knopf.] John Judis has always been a shrewd reader of election returns. In “You’ve Got Them All Wrong, Mr. President,” his deconstruction of “independent” voters makes clear how meaningless it is for President Obama or anyone else to credit such a huge clump of undifferentiated leaners with the power to decide who runs

Charles K. Armstrong: Respond to North Korea with Renewed Talks

[Charles K. Armstrong is the Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies in the Social Sciences at Columbia University.] The skirmish between North and South Korea over Yeonpyeong, an island in the disputed zone between the two sides, has brought new danger to a standoff that has been escalating for more than two years. It happened just two days after North Korea revealed a sophisticated uranium enrichment program to three American visitors from Stanford University, an

Mark LeVine: Obama: Getting 'Poned' Bibi Style

[Mark LeVine is a professor of history at UC Irvine and senior visiting researcher at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden. His most recent books are Heavy Metal Islam (Random House) and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books).] If you don't have a child between 7 and 13 years old, you're probably furrowing your brow right now, wondering what the word "pone" could possibly mean. It hasn't made it into respectable

Michael Schwarz: Congress Has Strayed from Constitution

[Michael Schwarz is an assistant professor of history at Ashland University and a fellow of the Ashbrook Center.] There may not be a silver lining in every dark cloud, but it often seems that way in American politics. The outgoing 111th Congress, which a majority of American voters has judged to be one dark storm cloud, leaves behind it at least one silver lining: As a result of its actions, a serious political conversation began. Alarmed by the sudden expansion of gove

B.R. Myers: North Korea Will Never Play Nice

[B.R. Myers, the director of the international studies department at Dongseo University, is the author of “The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves — and Why It Matters.”] WHILE it is cowardly and foolish not to resist an act of aggression, the best way to deal with a provocation is to ignore it — or so we are taught. By refusing to be provoked, one frustrates and therefore “beats” the provoker; generations of bullied children have been consoled with this logic. And so it

Ilan Pappé: Blueprint for a One-State Movement

[Ilan Pappé is professor of history at the University of Exeter in the UK, where he is also co-director of the Exeter Center for Ethno-Political Studies, and director of the Palestine Studies Centre. He is author of the bestselling The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, A History of Modern Palestine, The Israel/Palestine Question, and is a long time political activist.] <em>An excerpt from <a target="_blank" href="http://www

Deborah Blum: Arsenic and Tom Turkey

[Deborah Blum's latest book is"The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York"] In the mid-19th century in Europe, a rather strange theory arose — the idea that eating arsenic could improve one's health. It originated with the discovery that peasants in the Austrian mining region of Styria liked to mix a little of the poison into their morning coffee. As reported in 1855, the miners had discovered that exposure to arsenic — an element naturally occurri

Andrei Lankov: North Korean Blackmail

[Andrei Lankov is a professor at Kookmin University in Seoul and the author of several books on North Korea.] SEOUL — Last week, Siegfried Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory was invited to visit the North Korean nuclear research center in Yongbyon. He was shown a uranium enrichment plant whose sophistication and likely output is well in excess of what most experts suspected about the North Korean uranium program. Then on Tuesday, North Korean artillery s