Roundup: Historians' Take

Victor Davis Hanson: WikiLeaks’ Selective Morality

[NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the editor of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome, and the author of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.] There has never been anything quite like WikiLeaks in American military history. We are engaged in a great experiment to see whether the U.S. military can still persist in a conflict when it knows that any and all of its private communicati

Tom Engelhardt: Placing Your Global Bets

[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).]You can’t turn on the TV news or pick up a paper these days without stumbling across the latest political poll and the pros explaining how to parse it, or some set of commentators, pundits, and reporters placing their bets on the midterm elections.  The media, of course, loves a politi

David Greenberg: Hating Woodrow Wilson

[David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers and author of three books of political history, has written the "History Lesson" column since 1998. He is a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars for 2010-11.] Of all the eccentricities of today's resurgent right, one of the strangest has to be the virulent, obsessive hatred of Woodrow Wilson. For a long time, conservatives have talked about turning back the clock to a period bef

Stanley Kutler: Tea Party Robber Barons

[Stanley Kutler is the author of “The Wars of Watergate” and other writings.] We are witnessing, we are told, a groundswell of anger from a spontaneous, grass-roots movement against the president, Congress, Democrats, socialists (are commies extinct?), the debt, higher taxes, the “takeover” of the health system, and on and on. But the tea party appears to be as bothered by the policies of Franklin Roosevelt as those of Barack Obama. Disenchantment on the left, meanwhile

Terry Smith: Why We Have, and Should Keep, the 17th Amendment

[Terry Smith, who has been published extensively on the history of the 17th Amendment, is a distinguished research professor at the DePaul University College of Law.] The emergence of the so-called tea party as a political force in American politics has shed light on some of the paradigm-shifting ideas of the political right. One proposal heavily touted by some tea partyers but receiving far less media coverage than others is the repeal of the 17th Amendment, which The Times wrote a

Corey Robin: Why Conservatives Love War

[Corey Robin is an associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York's Graduate Center. A collection of his essays on conservatism will be published by Oxford University Press next year.] This year is the 60th anniversary of the publication of The Authoritarian Personality. Once this was the most famous of Theodor Adorno's works. Today it's largely forgotten. With one exception: its indelible portrait of the "pseudo-conservative.&q

Andrew J. Bacevich: Can Wikileaks Actually Make Americans Care About Iraq Again?

[Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His new book is Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War.] “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish

Max Hastings: British military thinking must get cleverer

[Max Hastings is a British military historian and FT contributing editor.] Some of us have long warned that the Royal Navy was setting a course towards self-immolation by insisting upon purchasing two giant aircraft carriers. So it now appears. Following last week’s defence and security review, announcing 8 per cent cuts in the defence budget, the government said the armed forces would “remain fully capable of making their contribution towards global security”. But what can that con

Richard S. Fogarty: Save SUNY, For All Our Sake

[Richard S. Fogarty holds a B.A. from SUNY Geneseo and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is an associate professor of history at UAlbany.] A few years ago, at a Virginia college at which I then taught, a colleague asked a student from New York, "Why, if you could have attended college in the finest state system of higher education in the country, did you come all the way to Virginia for your degree?" The student had his reasons, and my colleague

Mark Lilla: Tea Party à la française

[Mark Lilla is a historian of ideas at Columbia University.] It’s strike season in France.... The strikes are largely empty rituals now—even if, as we’ve seen in recent days, they can descend into criminal street violence. The days when a small confrontation at the factories of Billancourt could bring out workers everywhere and paralyze the country are long over. The last time a national strike had a major effect was in 1995, when unions managed to block an earlier pens

Alastair Reid: Let the Trade Unions into the Big Society

[Alastair Reid is a fellow of Girton College, Cambridge and editor of "History and Policy" (historyandpolicy.org). His latest book is "The Tide of Democracy: Shipyard Workers and Social Relations in Britain, 1870-1950" (Manchester University Press).] The Con-Lib coalition's ambition for a "big society" based on a reduction of central "big government" and support instead for local "people power" includes community organisers, social v

Victor Davis Hanson: Three Wars, Little News

[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.] It is a busy time in America. The Major League Baseball playoffs are competing with the upcoming midterm elections for the public’s attention. The rescue of courageous miners in Chile has for a time overshadowed even the latest psychodramas of Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton. There

Julian E. Zelizer: Other Midterm Defeats for Democrats

[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.] President Obama has warned Democratic voters not to be apathetic. “If the other side does win,” he told an audience in Wisconsin on Sept. 28, “they will spend the next two years fighting for the very same policies that led to

Timothy Garton Ash: In Its Rows About Islam, the U.S. Must Avoid Catching a European Disease

[Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist.] Last Friday, in New York, I discovered a strip club near the site of the planned Islamic centre, described by its opponents as "the mosque at Ground Zero". As pole dancers gyrated with all the sizzling eroticism of a weary Wal-Mart checkout assistant at the end of a long shift, I asked the burly front-of-house man – Scott, from Brooklyn – whether they had faced any protests about this profanation

Beverly Gage: Under God ... or Not

[Beverly Gage, a history professor at Yale, is writing a biography of J. Edgar Hoover.] Today’s conservatives often describe themselves as strict constructionists, seeking the “original meaning” of the nation’s founding texts. In the case of the Pledge of Allegiance, a much ­fetishized if not legally binding document, this approach is unlikely to yield the desired political result. As Jeffrey Owen Jones and Peter Meyer note, the original author of the pledge was a former Christian S

Max Boot: Britain Bows Out of the Security Game

[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.] Britain emerged as a world power in the years after its defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. By 1815, following the defeat of Napoleon, it had become the most powerful nation in the world. Then came World War I and World War II—both conflicts for which Britain was not well-prepared. It's been downhill ever

Marc Stein: Gay Rights and the Supreme Court: The Early Years

[Marc Stein’s latest book, Sexual Injustice: Supreme Court Decisions from Griswold to Roe, has just been published by the University of North Carolina Press. The author is an associate professor of history, women’s studies, and sexuality studies at York University in Toronto.] As the new U.S. Supreme Court term begins and as the California same-sex marriage case continues to make its way through the courts, it’s a good moment to consider the early years of the gay and lesbian moveme

Sean Foley: Turkey and the Gulf States in The Twenty-First Century

[Sean Foley is an Assistant Professor of History at Middle Tennessee State University and will be a Fulbright research scholar in Malaysia from September 2010 until July 2011. He specializes in the Middle East and religious and political trends in the broader Islamic world.] In October 1927 Turkish President Mustafa Kemal Ataturk delivered a historic speech in which he explained why Turks had to abandon the Ottoman Empire and embrace his new state. Ataturk pointed out the high cost

Diane Ravitch: The Myth of Charter Schools

[Diane Ravitch is Research Professor of Education at New York University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Her most recent book is The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. (November 2010)]Ordinarily, documentaries about education attract little attention, and seldom, if ever, reach neighborhood movie theaters. Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting for “Superman” is different. It arrived in lat

Robert Darnton: Can We Create a National Digital Library?

[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)] The purpose of this meeting is to discuss a question of vital importance to the cultural life of our country: Can we create a National Digital Library? That is, a comprehensive library of digitized books that will be easi