Roundup: Historians' Take

Juan Cole: Israel Declares for Ethnic Nationalism

[Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History and the director of the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Michigan.] The Israeli cabinet has approved a measure that would require persons applying for Israeli citizenship to affirm the “Jewish and democratic” character of Israel. The new oath would at the moment affect relatively

Sharon Davies: When America Feared and Reviled Catholics

[Sharon Davies is a professor at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law and the author of "Rising Road: A True Tale of Love, Race and Religion in America."] The mind-set is all too familiar: A radical religious group, lurking inside the country, owing loyalty to a foreign power, threatens America. No one denies that its members have a right to worship as they please, but good Americans, patriots, feel compelled to call for curbs against the menace they present. Be

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom: Liu Xiaobo: His Writings, His Life, His Win

[Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, the Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies, and the author, most recently, of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (published in April by Oxford University Press). For photos from the World's Fair, see the original article at The China Beat.] I’ve never met Liu Xiaobo. I only know him through his powerful writings—and through watching compelling interviews with him, most nota

Timothy Snyder: Why Laptops in Class are Distracting America's Future Workforce

[Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University. His book “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin” out this month.] As these first few weeks of the college semester begin, professors look out expectantly into grand lecture halls, where they see, rather than faces of students, the backs of open laptops. The students, for their part, are looking intently at the laptop screens. What are they doing as they stare forward with such apparent focus? I teach

Edward Tenner: Glenn Beck, Woodrow Wilson, and Liberalism

[Edward Tenner is a historian of technology and culture. He was a founding advisor of Smithsonian's Lemelson Center and holds a Ph.D in European history.] The Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank is bemused by Glenn Beck's fixation on the abiding evil influence of Woodrow Wilson, which he links to Beck's defiance of the convention against comparing political opponents to Nazis. (I suspect that if the taboo has eroded for Beck and others it's because it's hard to call people commun

Joseph A. Palermo: Why Liberals Don't Stand a Chance in the Corporate Media

[Joseph A. Palermo is Associate Professor of American History at California State University, Sacramento.]Last March, when President Obama announced he was fast-tracking a bunch of deepwater oil leases, mainstream media commentators told us what a politically sophisticated move it was. He was showing the" courage" to defy his base among the anti-drilling crowd and when those dolphin-huggers screamed foul, he stood his ground. A few weeks later, when the Deepwater Horizon/Macondo oi

Victor Davis Hanson: The Coming GOP Gift to the President

[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.] After 2010, will he be Carter or Clinton? That's the ongoing parlor game now played among pundits over how President Obama will react to the Democrats' probable shellacking in midterm elections next month. Jimmy Carter stuck to his liberal age

Andrew J. Bacevich: The Long War: Year Ten

[Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His bestselling new book is Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War.] In January 1863, President Abraham Lincoln’s charge to a newly-appointed commanding general was simplicity itself: “give us victories.” President Barack Obama’s tacit charge to his generals amounts to this: give us conditions permitting a dignified withdrawal. A pithy quote in Bob Woodward’s new book capt

Daniel Pipes: Dueling Fatwas

[Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.] Reciprocal death sentences raging between Yemen and the United States offer a glimpse of warfare in the internet age. The topic opens with South Park, an iconoclastic adult cartoon program on Comedy Central, which in April mocked the prohibition on depicting the Islamic prophet Muhammad. An obscure website, RevolutionMuslim.com (whos

Jonathan Zimmerman: Homophobia Hurts Straight Men, Too

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of “Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory.”] In the 1986 movie Stand By Me, an adult protagonist – played by Richard Dreyfuss – looks back wistfully on the friendships he formed in his youth. “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve,” he muses. “Does anyone?” For most American men, the sad answer is “no.” In surveys, men repo

Walter Russell Mead: Castrodaemmerung ... The Twilight of the Bros

[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.] As an old Cuba hand, I have no desire to defend the island’s communist government or make excuses for its dismal failures in the area of human rights and economic development, but with the news that Cuba is considering the release of yet another tranche of political

Walter Russell Mead: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: The Electric Car Industry Isn’t Going to Save Us

[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.] We all have our off days; Tom Friedman (a man I admire) had one last Sunday in a New York Times column calling for higher gas taxes and a crash program to build electric cars. As usual, he’s worried about the right things and is even ahead of the curve. The piece

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom: California Dreamin’ at China’s World’s Fair

[Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, the Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies, and the author, most recently, of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (published in April by Oxford University Press). For photos from the World's Fair, see the original article at The China Beat.] Shanghai can be a surreal place to visit in ordinary times. This is due to the juxtap

Victor Davis Hanson: The Gift of Obama’s Foreign Policy

[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.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.] The Obama reset foreign polic

Paul Kengor: Obama’s Communist Mentor

[Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College. His books include The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism and the newly released Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century.] When you write a book, particularly one that requires several years of research, you tend to encounter a bunch of unexpected information. Sometimes you find things that, if reported, will undoubtedly prompt partisans to demand you explain you

Benny Morris: The Settling Freeze

[Benny Morris is a professor of history in the Middle East Studies Department of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.] Settlement of the land was at the heart of the Zionist enterprise from its start in the 1880s. New settlements enabled the "New Jew" to reforge a bond with the ancestral soil and to mark out the territory of the Jewish state-to-be. The settlement clusters more or less defined the contours of the Jewish state that emerged in 1948. Then came the

Jack Carlson: Obama as Roman Emperor

[Jack Carlson is an archaeologist and Allbritton Scholar at Brasenose College, Oxford. A version of this essay first appeared in “American Thinker.”] Two years ago, Democrats were clamoring to ride in on Barack Obama’s coat tails. Proximity to the Obama persona was a prized political asset. Today, amid dim presidential polling numbers, anxious Democrats are keeping their distance. Some, like Rep. Chet Edwards of Texas, have even used campaign ads to tout their defiance

Fouad Ajami: Pax Americana and the New Iraq

[Mr. Ajami is a professor at The Johns Hopkins School of Advance International Studies and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.] The chronicles now assign Iraq a distinction all its own. It holds the world record for the longest period of time spent without a government in the aftermath of a contested election. Seven months on, the Baghdad political bazaar is still open. (Consolation to the Iraqis: Holland had held the distinction of longest without a government.)

Victor Davis Hanson: Americans Still Cling to Ignorance

[Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services.] The bookish, twice-unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson once sighed that if most thinking people supported him, it still wouldn't be enough in America because

Tony Platt: The Dirty History of the Nuremberg Laws

[Tony Platt is the author, with co-researcher Cecilia O’Leary, of “Bloodlines: Recovering Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws, From Patton’s Trophy to Public Memorial. He blogs on history and memory at GoodToGo.typepad.com. He is professor emeritus at CSU - Sacramento.] Historical anniversaries are typically an occasion for remembrance, but the content of what and why we remember is always changing—and sometimes a matter of argument. Take,