Roundup: Historians' Take

Jonathan Tremblay: Discrimination and Tradition: A History of the Ordination of Women

[Jonathan Tremblay is a historian and a Breaking News Editor for the History News Network.]The Church of England lost fifty priests and as many as 600 of its faithful this week. These priests turned their backs on Canterbury and York and returned to the papacy in Rome. After centuries of schism between the Protestant Church of England and the Roman Catholic seat of power, these priests defected to the Vatican for one very simple reason, because the Church of England has accepted

Robert Darnton: How Google Can Save America's Books

[Robert Darnton is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard and director of the Harvard University Library. 
His new book, Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris, will be published in November. (October 2010).] Google represents the ultimate in business plans. By controlling access to information, it has made billions, which it is now investing in the control of the information itself. What began as Google Book Search is theref

Shelly Chan: Let's Talk About Race, Canada

[Shelly Chan is an assistant professor at the Department of Pacific and Asian Studies and a member of the Asian Canadian working group at the University of Victoria. Born and raised in Hong Kong, she moved to Canada with her family as a young adult. She received her B.A. and M.A. from the University of British Columbia and her Ph.D. in modern Chinese history from the University of California, Santa Cruz.] Talking about race in Canada is a lot like talking about sex in the old days.

Juan Cole: Scammed in Afghanistan

[Juan Cole, the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan, maintains the blog Informed Comment. His most recent book, just out in paperback, is “Engaging the Muslim World.”] The announcement by the New York Times that one of the supposedly prominent Taliban with whom the Karzai government has been negotiating turns out to be an impostor is only the latest depressing indication that the whole Afghanistan boondoggle is shot through with flimflam

William Astore: Scope or Grope? The Wrong Approach to Homeland Security

[Professor Astore writes regularly for TomDispatch.com and can be reached at wjastore@gmail.com.] It's that time of the year again: Thanksgiving week, when Americans take to the roads and the air to visit kith and kin and to give thanks. Too bad that many of those taking to the air have an unfortunate choice: Submit to so-called"Porno Scanners" that essentially strip you of your clothes, exposing your body to prying eyes as well as to a level of radiation that may be less than benign;

Victor Davis Hanson: In Defense of Defense

[Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.] Two bedrock beliefs of traditional conservatism are fiscal discipline and strong national defense. Likewise, two general rules of budgetary reform in times of economic crisis are, first, to scale back expenditures rather than raise taxes, and, second, to look at defense for some of the deepest

Julian E. Zelizer: Palin Pioneers Reality Campaigning

[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.] ...During its first week, "Sarah Palin's Alaska" attracted almost five million viewers, the best that a premiere has done on the TLC network.... The launch of the show has felt very m

Niall Ferguson: In China's Orbit

[Niall Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard University and a professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School. His next book, "Civilization: The West and the Rest," will be published in March.] ...Despite the painful interruption of the Great Depression, the U.S. suffered nothing so devastating as China's wretched mid-20th century ordeal of revolution, civil war, Japanese invasion, more revolution, man-made famine and yet more ("cultural&qu

Gregory Johnsen: A False Target in Yemen

[Gregory Johnsen is a doctoral candidate in Near Eastern studies at Princeton and writes the blog Waq al-Waq.] ...[Anwar al-Awlaki] is far from the terrorist kingpin that the West has made him out to be. In fact, he isn’t even the head of his own organization, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. That would be Nasir al-Wuhayshi, who was Osama bin Laden’s personal secretary for four years in Afghanistan. Nor is Mr. Awlaki the deputy commander, a position held by Said Ali a

Daniel Pipes: Oklahomans Say No to Sharia

[Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.]As Americans learn more about Islam, the aspect they find most objectionable is not its theology (such as whether Allah is God or not) nor its symbolism (such as an Islamic cultural center in lower Manhattan) but its law code, called the Sharia. Rightly, they say no to a code that privileg

Lara Brown: The Tea Partiers and the Lessons of History

[Lara Brown, Ph.D., is assistant professor of political science at Villanova University. She is the author of Jockeying for the American Presidency: The Political Opportunism of Aspirants.] Members of the Tea Party movement, according to liberal pundits are angry right-wing extremists. The progressive news website Alternet describes the movement as being “built on fear, violence, and race resentment.” New York Times columnist Frank Rich views the Tea Party as an invention of ultra-c

Timothy Snyder: No, Obama Is Not a 'Hitler' or a 'Stalin'

[Timothy Snyder is Professor of History at Yale University. His most recent book is Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.] For an American historian who researches totalitarianism and genocide, nothing is more disheartening than facile comparisons sometimes heard between Western leaders and Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin. When we are so wrong about history, we do a great injustice to ourselves. The Stalin comparison rests on a basic misunderstanding of the histor

Timothy Garton Ash: Step Up, India

[Timothy Garton Ash, a contributing editor to Opinion, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor of European studies at Oxford University.] If we want to help pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and the cause of freedom in Myanmar (also known as Burma), we must hope that India rediscovers the spirit of its better self. The world's largest democracy needs urgently to review its approach to one of the world's worst tyrannies, which squats like a toad on its very doo

Conrad Black: Is Barack Obama the next James Buchanan?

[Conrad Black is a writer and former newspaper publisher whose most recent book is Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full (PublicAffairs, 2007). He is publisher emeritus of The National Interest.] President Obama, who entered office on a wave of greater hope and optimism than any president since John F. Kennedy, is now generally seen as perhaps the most ineffectual president since James Buchanan. He has offered no economic prospect except a decade of trillion-dollar annual deficits and mo

Victor Davis Hanson: The George W. Bush Fixation

[Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.] Barack Obama remains fixated on George W. Bush. For nearly two years, President Obama and his team have prefaced their explanations for the tough economy, the tough finances, and the tough situation abroad with a “Bush did it” chorus. Apparently, they believed that most of our problems, here a

Joseph A. Palermo: D-Day in the Class War

[Joseph A. Palermo is Associate Professor of American History at California State University, Sacramento.]After a decade of stagnant or declining real wages,"bipartisan" schemes are proliferating to shift the burden of Washington policymakers' own catastrophic mismanagement of the nation's fiscal policies right onto the shoulders of working people. The press commentary has been abysmal. All"serious" thinkers out there on television or in print are in full agreement that"entitlemen

Lawrence Davidson: Palestine and the Fate of the UN

[Lawrence Davidson is Professor of History at West Chester University, West Chester, Pa and author most recently of Foreign Policy, Inc.: Privatizing America’s National Interest (2009).] The United Nations celebrated its 65th birthday (1945 to 2010) on 24 October 2010. At 65 the world body has lasted 27 years longer than its predecessor, the League of Nations (1919 to 1946). Will the UN go another 65 years? To help answer that question a quick look at what did in the League of Natio

Walter Russell Mead: Obama’s Dark Night of the Soul

[Walter Russell Mead is Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. He blogs at The-American-Interest.com.] Life keeps getting worse for President Obama. It is not just that the conservative press, which never liked him, has a new note of confidence and even joy as it pursues a quarry whose blood reporters think they can smell. It is not just that he lost control of Con

Mark LeVine: Nowhere Left to Run

[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. He has authored several books including Overthrowing Geography: Jaffa, Tel Aviv and the Struggle for Palestine (University of California Press, 2005) and An Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books, 2009).] It has been a strange political season. It began sitting in Istanbul with Swedish friends, digesting the news

Steve Hochstadt: Who is the Spendthrift?

[Steve Hochstadt of Jacksonville is a professor of history at Illinois College. His column appears every Tuesday in the Journal-Courier and is available and on his blog at stevehochstadt.blogspot.com.] Here is our national debt: $13,000,000,000,000. That’s way too many zeros for us to really understand such a number’s significance. It doesn’t help to write $13 trillion, either, because we are just getting comfortable with the concept of a billion. I still find it hard t