Roundup: Historians' Take

Bruce Levine: The Myth of the Black Confederates

[The writer is a professor of history and African American studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.] Next year, the country will begin observing the sesquicentennial of the bloodiest war in U.S. history -- the Civil War. But the question of how to remember that war sometimes seems as contentious as the war itself was. On Oct. 20, The Post reported that in Virginia, fourth-grade students received textbooks telling them that thousands of African Americans fought in C

Julian E. Zelizer: It's Tea Party vs. Bush and Obama

[Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of "Jimmy Carter" by Times Books and editor of a book assessing former President George W. Bush's administration by Princeton University Press.] Former President George W. Bush loomed large throughout the 2010 campaign even though he has been out of office for nearly two years. The upcoming publication of Bush's memoirs, "Decision Points," offers

Walter Russell Mead: America Spinning Its Wheels

[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.] The midterm elections find the two parties, and the United States, in an uncomfortable position. Even as it apparently moves toward a major victory, the Republican Party is divided between the Tea Party and the Establishment wings, and it is still haunted by the f

Markha Valenta: Why Geert Wilders is Not Liu Xiaobo

[Markha Valenta holds appointments in the departments of history at the University of Amsterdam and of culture studies at the University of Tilburg. Her current work concerns the politics of religious diversity in relation to global urbanism, multiculturalism and secular democracy. Her openDemocracy column is Inter Alia.] It is rather striking, at first sight, to note how much the Dutch politician Geert Wilders and the Chinese Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo have in common. Both threa

Jon Wiener: Why the Democrats Will Win in California

[Jon Wiener teaches US history at UC Irvine.] When the votes are counted on Tuesday night in California, Democrats will easily sweep the top contests. Senator Barbara Boxer is likely to defeat challenger Carly Fiorina, 51-46 percent (Nate Silver’s projection at 538.com), and last week’s California Field poll shows Democrat Jerry Brown ahead of Republican Meg Whitman in the gubernatorial race by ten points. Across the nation, the Republicans have a better-than-even chanc

Michael Kazin: Jon Stewart Isn't Enough

[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.] Demonstrators have been coming to Washington since Coxey’s Army trudged up the steps of the Capitol during the depression of the 1890s. So it was probably inevitable that the traditional repertoire of protest would, by now, have grown rather stale. These days, passionate orators, earnest singers, and fist-shaki

Mary L. Dudziak: An Age Without Surrender Ceremonies

[Mary L. Dudziak is the Judge Edward J. and Ruey L. Guirado Professor of Law, History and Political Science at the University of Southern California.]Here’s a snippet from the book I’m finishing up this fall.  This passage is about what I think of as President Obama’s “Mission Accomplished” moment, and it raises questions about how to think about the role of wartime in American history during a period when wars don’t seem to end. On August 18, 2010, the conflict in Iraq e

Max Boot: The Policies That Keep Us Safe

[Max Boot is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is writing a history of guerrilla warfare and terrorism.] The foiled package-bomb plot originating in Yemen is the latest sign of how determined Islamist extremists remain in trying to strike the United States. Just in the past year, we have seen the shooting at Fort Hood, which left 13 people dead; an attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner with explosives hi

Edmund Morris: The Tea Party Last Time

[Edmund Morris is the author of biographies of Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and Beethoven. This fall he will publish the third volume of his Roosevelt trilogy.] The past may be a foreign country, as L. P. Hartley famously observed, but at least one of its landscapes — the political scene on election eve, a century ago — looks familiar to this time traveler. Having ridden, in a sense, on the campaign train of Theodore Roosevelt, as the former president barnstormed

Stanley Kutler: The Company We Keep

[Stanley Kutler is the author of “The Wars of Watergate” and other writings.] President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, according to a New York Times report last week, admittedly accepts large cash payments from the Iranian government. The political and religious dynamics of the region are complex. Iran obviously has an interest in keeping the Taliban at a distance and at the same time countering Pakistan’s influence in the area. In this caldron of intrigue we have a huge American exp

Louis P. Masur: Take Heart, Barack: Honest Abe Had a Rough Midterm Too

[Louis P. Masur teaches American Studies at Trinity College (CT). He is the author of "The Civil War: A Concise History."] If you think President Obama has problems going into the midterm election, consider what Abraham Lincoln faced. In fall 1862, the nation was 18 months into Civil War. Eleven states had left the Union and four slave states still within -- Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri -- continued to cause Lincoln political problems. The elections were held

Paul Ocobock: Anticolonial Behavior

[Paul Ocobock has a PhD in history from Princeton University. He has worked in Kenya for several years and conducts research on anticolonial movements in Africa. Special thanks to Christine Stansell and Sebastian Karchar.] THE LEGACY of colonialism still casts a long shadow over the world. In the United States, the right-wing Tea Party takes its name from an anticolonial revolt against British taxation on a chilly December day in Boston in 1773. Beginning in 2001, American soldiers

Adrian R. Lewis: How Universities Can Help in Our Wars

[Adrian R. Lewis, a former Army enlisted soldier and officer, is a professor of history at the University of Kansas and director of its Office of Professional Military Graduate Education. He wrote this article in a guest post for Thomas Ricks's blog.] America's universities are being grossly under-utilized by the Armed Forces of the United States in the persistent irregular war we are currently fighting in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and other parts of the world. In

Victor Davis Hanson: American Groupspeak

[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.] Juan Williams was just fired from NPR. His sin? He confessed to occasional anxiety when people in Muslim garb board airplanes, and then went on to explain why stereotyping is wrong. The fate of Williams reminds us that Americans have developed two personas — one public and politi

Jim Sleeper: Washington Post Reverts to Truth-Dodging: 'Blame the Ivies!'

[Jim Sleeper is a lecturer in political science at Yale.]They're ba-a-ack! Now that America's wealth"is more concentrated in fewer hands than it's been in 80 years" and"the top one-tenth of one percent of Americans... earn as much as the bottom 120 million" (as Bob Reich put it here below) conservative opinionators are doing just what they did about it twenty years ago.They're giving Americans a"

Fouad Ajami: Karzai and the Scent of U.S. Irresolution

[Mr. Ajami is a professor at The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.] 'They do give us bags of money—yes, yes, it is done, we are grateful to the Iranians for this." This is the East, and baksheesh is the way of the world, Hamid Karzai brazenly let it be known this week. The big aid that maintains his regime, and keeps his country together, comes from the democracies. It is much cheap

Simon Schama: Time for the great orator to talk back

[Simon Schama is a British art historian and FT contributing editor.] History will be kinder to the first two years of Barack Obama’s administration than the electorate next Tuesday. (That’s because history mostly gets written by gutless liberals, you can hear conservatives snort.) But history loves lists and the record of the 44th president and the universally despised 111th Congress boasts an array of legislative accomplishments unrivalled since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society year

Jonathan Tremblay: Clinging to Historical Corpses

[Jonathan Tremblay is a historian and a Breaking News Editor for the History News Network] Prime minister of Israel from 2001 to 2006, Ariel Sharon suffered a stroke while in office and has since been in a vegetative state. The comatose Prime Minister remains a vivid character for the Middle East, having been the defence minister that orchestrated the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon that killed hundreds of Palestinian refugees. Furthermore, as Prime Minister, he initiated the build

Juan Cole: Could Wikileaks Leave Iraq Without a Government?

[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 wikileaks document dump from the Iraq War may well derail the formation of a government by implicating caretaker prime minister Nuri al-Maliki in running death

Julian E. Zelizer: Why Democrats are Hurting

[Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of "Jimmy Carter" by Times Books and editor of a book assessing former President George W. Bush's administration by Princeton University Press.] With the midterm elections just a week away, many Democrats are scratching their heads and wondering what went wrong. After Barack Obama's election in 2008, many in the party thought that they were on the cusp of