Roundup: Historians' Take

Martin Kramer: Start with Two Palestinians

[Martin Kramer is the president-designate of Shalem College in Jerusalem (in formation) and the Wexler-Fromer Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.] In an interview in February 2003, Edward Said said this:An outrageous Israeli, Martin Kramer, uses his Web site to attack everybody who says anything he doesn’t like. For exam

Daniel Pipes: Israel and Congressional Democrats

[Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.]How should American voters concerned with Israel's welfare and security vote in the U.S. Congressional elections on Nov. 2?This much is clear after almost two years of Democratic control over the executive and legislative branches of government: Democrats consistently support Israel and its government far less than do Republicans. Leaving B

Thaddeus Russell: Why I Got Fired From Teaching American History

[Thaddeus Russell teaches history and cultural studies at Occidental College and has taught at Columbia University, Barnard College, Eugene Lang College, and the New School for Social Research.] Five years ago, I had every reason to believe that my job as a history professor at Barnard College was secure. I had been teaching there for four years, I had published my dissertation with a major publisher, and because I had tripled the sizes of the introductory U.S. history course and th

Steve Hochstadt: Free Speech about Saggy Pants

[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’s what I think of saggy pants: They look like hell.... Some outraged Americans want to ban saggy pants in public. If a community can fine homeowners for not keeping their houses painted properly, then why can’t it make people keep their pants up? The power to legisla

Ron Radosh: Glenn Beck’s TV Documentary on 20th Century Totalitarianism

[Ronald Radosh is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at The Hudson Institute, and a Prof. Emeritus of History at the City University of New York. He is the author or co-author of 14 books, including Red Star Over Hollywood:The Film Colony’s Long Romance with the Left (2006).]Last Friday, along with millions of others, I watched Glenn Beck’s first TV documentary, “The Revolutionary Holocaust: Live Free or Die,” his attempt, as he puts it on his website, “to examine the roots of socialism and co

Ron Radosh: The Flotilla Crisis and Israel’s Would-Be Friends

[Ron Radosh is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at The Hudson Institute, and a Prof. Emeritus of History at the City University of New York's Queensborough Community College] The truth about Israel and the terrorist flotilla is now apparent for anyone who wants to see. The problem, however, is the one various people, like Max Boot, have alluded to. Israel, by the way it dealt with the problem, handed Hamas and its opponents a major propaganda victory. Daniel Pipes makes much the same poin

Ron Radosh: A Sad Attempt to Build a New Left-Right Alliance

[Ronald Radosh is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at The Hudson Institute, and a Prof. Emeritus of History at the City University of New York.] ...Now, as the Obama administration and the President himself goes around the world apologizing for America’s past evils, the adherents of a Left-Right alliance have sensed that perhaps the moment is propitious for yet one more try at creating what they see as a new and effective movement, that will help push the President further towards adoption

Ron Radosh: A Poor Historian Tries to Make a Case for the U.S. Breaking with Israel: Where He Goes Wrong

[Ronald Radosh is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at The Hudson Institute, and a Prof. Emeritus of History at the City University of New York's Queensborough Community College.Writing today at The Daily Beast, historian Thaddeus Russell tries to make the case for the United States breaking its special relationship with Israel

Ron Radosh: Oliver Stone Reaches a New Low: Anti-Semitism

[Ronald Radosh is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at The Hudson Institute, and a Prof. Emeritus of History at the City University of New York's Queensborough Community College.] Oliver Stone is at it again. I previously wrote about him months ago. Stone, now in London to do publicity for his agitprop film on Hugo Chavez, took the opp

Ron Radosh: The Dangers of Politicized Conservative History

[Ronald Radosh is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at The Hudson Institute, and a Prof. Emeritus of History at the City University of New York's Queensborough Community College. He is a Presidential appointment to the Public Information Declassification Board, for a term extending from 2007 to 2010. He is the author or co-author of 14 books, including The Rosenberg File (1983 and 1997) and Commies: A Journey through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left (2001).]Having spent a good

Jim Sleeper: Yale’s Real Social Network

[Jim Sleeper is a lecturer in political science at Yale.] At the turn of the 18th century, Yale was founded to stop a Harvard-based “social network” from diverting its holy Puritan mission toward one emphasizing worldly “works” and wealth in a society connected, but flattened, by commerce. The world isn’t flat, Yale’s founders insisted. It has abysses, and students need a faith that can plumb them: one that can defy worldly power in the name of a Higher one. Harvard wa

Tom Engelhardt: A World Made by War

[Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com.  His latest book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books), has recently been published. You can catch him discussing war American-style

Gary Leupp: The Evil of Madeleine Albright

[Gary Leupp is a Professor of History, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion at Tufts University, and author of numerous works on Japanese history.] Madeleine Albright is infamous for her reply to the question posed by 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl about the sanctions against Iraq in May 1996. “We have heard that a half million children have died,” stated Stahl. “I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”

Sam Hitchmough: The Rise of the Tea Party: Competing Americas

[Dr. Sam Hitchmough teaches in the Department of History and American Studies at Canterbury Christ Church University in the United Kingdom.] The recent victories for the Tea Party brigade have brought an enduring and fascinating ideological battle in America back into focus. Ever since the web of American ideas of freedom was spun - the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Mayflower Compact and the concept of the American Dream i

Julian E. Zelizer: Obama Dropped Ball on Campaign Reform

[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 recently blasted the influx of money from undisclosed donors flowing into the midterm campaigns. He repeated a claim, which major media outlets have not been able to substantiate, that foreign funds may hav

Russell J. Rickford: Are We Commodities?

[Russell J. Rickford is an assistant professor of history at Dartmouth College.] When critics decry the "corporatization" of the university, they are referring to a number of trends that have transformed the character of higher education in recent years. Outsourcing a variety of nonacademic jobs that were once performed by university employees to large, external companies; forging entangling relationships with the corporate world; encouraging the growing presence of corpor

Charles Dorn: Disappointed Obama Isn't FDR?

[Charles Dorn is an educational historian at Bowdoin College and is the author of "American Education, Democracy, and the Second World War."] My brother recently e-mailed me to express his disappointment with President Obama, whom he and 67 million other hopeful Americans voted for in 2008. Two years later, he isn't the only one disillusioned. "I thought we were getting FDR," he wrote. "We did," I responded. "Just not the one we thought we were get

Julie Greene: Corn and Country: Nebraska, Mexico, and the Global Economy

[Julie Greene is in the history department of the University of Maryland.] On June 21, residents of Fremont, a small meatpacking town just outside Omaha, Nebraska, voted by 57 percent to deny work and shelter to undocumented immigrants. Why Fremont, Nebraska, and why now? Some observers, not knowing the Fremont measure was cooked up by the same coalition that passed Arizona’s law—Kansas City lawyer Kris Kobach, for example, was involved in both measures—are calling it a homegrown, h

Nigel Hamilton: Apocalypse in Print

[Nigel Hamilton is President of Biographers International Organization (BIO), and a senior fellow in the McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies, UMass Boston. His Biography: A Brief History, and How To Do Biography: A Primer, appeared in 2007 and 2008 (Harvard University Press). His latest biography is American Caesars: Lives of the Presidents, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush (Yale 2010).] Gutenberg started this craze for ink-and-print. Before then, we h

Stanley Kutler: The Bipartisan Politics of Fear

[Stanley Kutler is the author of “The Wars of Watergate”] Mercifully, the midterm election cycle is nearing its end. Both parties, we learn, are planning their “postmortem assessments.” The Daily Beast’s recent headline is a sign of the times: “Why Obama Can’t Lose in 2012.” Plan ahead.... In the 1934 midterm elections, two years after the launching of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, the president and Democrats vigorously defended their programs. No, they had not solv