Roundup: Historians' Take

Sean Wilentz: Live by the Movement, Die by the Movement

[Sean Wilentz is a history professor at Princeton University whose books include The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln and The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008.] More than candidates are defeated in elections. So are ideas. The Democrats’ heavy losses in the midterm elections may now force a reassessment and overhaul of the Barack Obama political experiment. Whether the president has the dexterity and fortitude to navigate through the harsher Washington political

Barbara Leaming: Churchill's Lesson for Obama

[Barbara Leaming is the author of two New York Times bestselling biographies and three New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Her most recent book, a biography of John F. Kennedy, focused on the influence of British history and culture on the 35th president.]By this time, everyone knows that in the moment of victory, President Obama returned the bust of Churchill. Whatever the gesture actually meant, many people took it to mean that unlike President Kennedy who had been studying

Christine Stansell: What Happened with Women?

[Christine Stansell is a historian at the University of Chicago and author of The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present, published by Random House.] WHAT HAPPENED with women? One leading indicator, the number of women in Congress, isn’t bad—there was only slight change downward—but that’s only when you stick to the old assumption that more women in Congress means more Democrats. Where there was turnover, it mostly went with the Republicans. Still, the right-wing female bloggers are

Julian E. Zelizer: Perception Politics

[Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of Jimmy Carter by Times Books, Arsenal of Democracy by Basic Books, and editor of a book assessing former President George W. Bush’s administration by Princeton University Press.] WHEN JOE Wurzelbacher, a.k.a “Joe the Plumber,” confronted Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign and criticized his tax plan, conservative pundits immediately used the encounter to raise questions abo

David Greenberg: What Went Wrong?

[David Greenberg is a historian at Rutgers University and contributor to Dissent, Slate, the New Republic, and other publications. In 2010-11 he is a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.] IF THE way to fight bad speech is with more speech, is the way to fight bad punditry with more punditry? Let me try. The Democrats’ drubbing on Tuesday has yielded the usual analyses, most of them, to paraphrase Mencken, simple, neat, and wrong: from the right comes the sneer tha

Tony Judt: My Endless New York

[Tony Judt, who died in August, was the director of the Remarque Institute at New York University. He is the author of the forthcoming collection, “The Memory Chalet,” from which this essay is adapted.] I CAME to New York University in 1987 on a whim. The Thatcherite assault on British higher education was just beginning and even in Oxford the prospects were grim. N.Y.U. appealed to me: by no means a recent foundation — it was established in 1831 — it is nevertheless the junior of N

Bruce Ackerman: The dangers of an imperial presidency

[Bruce Ackerman is a professor of law and political science at Yale and the author, most recently, of "The Decline and Fall of the American Republic."] It's easy to suppose that the Republican wave will put President Obama on the defensive. But that would be a mistake. House Republicans may repeat then-Speaker Newt Gingrich's blunder and shut down the government, but their other weapons are distinctly small-bore. The new congressional committee chairmen will predictably la

Rick Perlstein: How Obama Enables Rush

[Rick Perlstein is the author, most recently, of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and The Fracturing of America.] We live in a mendocracy. As in: rule by liars. Political scientists are going crazy crunching the numbers to uncover the skeleton key to understanding the Republican victory last Tuesday. But the only number that matters is the one demonstrating that by a two-to-one margin likely voters thought their taxes had gone up, when, for a

Allan Lichtman: The Joyless Election

[Allan Lichtman is a professor of history at American University and a national political analyst.] ...[N]ever before in the history of the United States has such a sweeping victory by one political party elicited so little joy and such minimal expectations. The American voters rejected the leadership of the Democratic Party that controlled the presidency and both Houses of Congress.... Above all, this year voters repudiated the government of the United States. This is

Gary Leupp: The Yemeni Toner Cartridge Bomb Story

[Gary Leupp is a Professor of History, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion at Tufts University, and author of numerous works on Japanese history.] Jeff Huber on Antiwar.com wrote Monday about the Yemeni toner cartridge bomb story: “…if there’s a single substantiated syllable in that entire narrative, I have yet to encounter it in the New York Times. In a series of articles from 29, 30, and 31 October, our newspaper of tarnished record created enough cognitive dissonance t

Harold James: Austerity Politics, Then and Now

[Harold James is Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University and Marie Curie Professor of History at the European University Institute, Florence. His most recent book is The Creation and Destruction of Value: The Globalisation Cycle.] Other countries, such as Greece, needed to have a full-blown crisis in order to prompt such adjustment measures, whereas Britain was acting prudently and preemptively. If Britain, with a relatively low share of public debt to

Daniel K. Williams: A Victory for the Christian Right

[Daniel K. Williams is an assistant professor of history at the University of West Georgia and the author of “God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right” (Oxford University Press, 2010).] Immediately after the 2010 midterm elections, the National Right to Life Committee declared the results a victory for the pro-life cause, claiming that 65 seats in Congress had switched from pro-choice to pro-life. The Family Research Council likewise declared that voters had soundly reject

Mark LeVine: No More Rage Against the Machine

[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).] Dishearteningly unsurprising. This somewhat awkward phrase is, to my mind, the best description o

David M. Kennedy: Throwing the Bums Out for 140 Years

[David M. Kennedy teaches history and is co-director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford.] SO we have had three “wave” elections in a row: control of both chambers of Congress changed hands in 2006, as did the presidency in 2008, and the House flipped back to Republican domination last week. All this apparently incoherent back-and-forth has left the political class reeling and set the commentariat aflutter. Explanations for our current political vo

Andrew Roberts: Entente Suicidal

[Mr. Roberts is a historian and the author, most recently, of "The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War" (Allen Lane, 2009).] Great Britain desperately needed to sign a 50-year defense pact with a close ally to protect her dwindling military resources and retain the power to project force in the world. A comprehensive deal with a key, trustworthy partner involving nuclear intelligence, aircraft carriers, joint expeditionary forces, satellite communications,

William J. Astore: Our Imperial Vote

[Professor Astore writes regularly for TomDispatch.com and can be reached at wjastore@gmail.com.] Yesterday, we went to the polls and cast our votes. The act of voting reassures us that we still live in a democracy. This is true in name only. For we are not a democracy; not even a republic. We are an empire. The imperial reality is there to see. Bloated government bureaucracies. A "defense" establishment that continues

William J. Astore: The New American Isolationism

[William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), is a TomDispatch regular. His books and articles focus mainly on the military, technology, and society]A new isolationism is metastasizing in the American body politic.  At its heart lies not an urge to avoid war, but an urge to avoid contemplating the costs and realities of war.  It sees war as having analgesic qualities -- as lessening a collective feeling of impotence, a collective sense of fear and terror. 

Ruth Rosen: What Obama Can Learn from the Social Movements That Changed the World

[Ruth Rosen, a former columnist at the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle, is a Professor Emerita of History, currently teaching at U.C Berkeley. Her most recent book is "The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America" (Penguin 2007)] In the wake of the election, progressive movements and their members are debating what went wrong. Some say the media amplified the bizarre statements of the Tea Party. Still others argue that Obama didn’t of

Robert Dallek: The Long View of the Tea Party

[Robert Dallek is the author of“Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power” and “An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963.” His new book is “The Lost Peace: Leadership in a Time of Horror and Hope, 1945-1953.”] Regardless of how many seats change hands in the election, one result is already clear: The tea party movement will, for the immediate future, influence the direction of the Republican Party. This is not to suggest that the tea party is likely to become the par

Stephen Mihm and Jeffrey Wasserstrom: How Today's China Resembles 19th Century America

[American historians Mihm and Wasserstrom are the authors, respectively, of A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States and China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know.] Is China making an unprecedented leap to the top of the global economic hierarchy? Yes, Martin Jacques asserts confidently in his buzz-generating When China Rules the World. He sees the country, which recently passed Japan to become the world's No. 2 economy, risi