Roundup: Historians' Take

Robert S. McElvaine: Could TV's "Mad Men" Heal America's Culture Wars?

[Robert S. McElvaine, a professor of history at Millsaps College, is completing a book manuscript on “The Young Sixties.” His most recent book is a new edition of "The Great Depression."] The extraordinary popularity of the television series "Mad Men," which recently won its third consecutive Emmy for Best Drama, suggests an interesting and important shift in Americans’ attitudes toward our culture and history. That shift may have profound, if so far subtle, poli

Daniel Martin Varisco: The Empire’s New Clothes

[Daniel Martin Varisco is professor of anthropology at Hofstra University.] In biblical times when an individual mourned, it involved tearing up everyday clothes and putting on coarse sackcloth and ashes. This is what the patriarch Jacob did when told his young son Joseph had been killed. When Job lost his family he sat on a dung pile. Both acts were motivated by humility rather than thoughts of revenge. As fitting as Job’s location might be for some of the memorial scenes

Walter Russell Mead: 9/11, Islam and War

[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.] Nine years ago this morning I came up from the subway stop at 68th Street and Lexington Avenue to hear from the breakfast cart vendor that a plane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers in lower Manhattan. It didn’t seem that important; I pictured a

Shaun Jacob Halper: Why Iran Hawks are Obsessed with Hitler

[Shaun Jacob Halper is currently a PhD student of History at the University of California at Berkeley where he studies modern European History with a focus on subaltern histories including Jewish and gay history. Shaun graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia in '05 where he studied Art History and American and European History.]Any professional historian worth his academic chair knows that no two historical periods are ever truly the same. No matter how widely the cliché is used, hist

Victor Davis Hanson: October Surprises

[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.] In less than 60 days, the Democrats will probably suffer historic losses in both the House and the Senate. The eleventh-hour campaigning of the now-unpopular Barack Obama on behalf of endangered congressional candidates will not change much.

Juan Cole: The Great Pakistani Deluge Never Happened, If You Watch TV News

[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 Great Deluge in Pakistan passed almost unnoticed in the United States despite President Obama’s repeated assertions that the country is central to American security.  Now, with new evacuations and flooding afflicting Sindh Province and the long-term crisis only beginning in Pakistan, it has washed almost completely off American televi

Gary Leupp: Playing with Fire

[Gary Leupp is a Professor of History, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion at Tufts University, and author of numerous works on Japanese history. He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu.] Christians have a long tradition of book burning, dating back to the first decades of what some call the “Jesus movement.” The Book of Acts in the New Testament records how Christian believers in Ephesus collected books with offensive

Mark A. LeVine: ...Meanwhile, Over in Ghana

[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. His most recent books are Heavy Metal Islam (Random House) and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books).] It was fascinating to watch Mubarak, Abdullah, Netanyahu, and Abbas-a rogue's gallery of oppressors and human rights violators if there ever was one-talk seriously about peace and protecting human and civil rig

David Bercuson: The Road to U.S. Economic Recovery?

[David Bercuson is a professor of history at the University of Calgary.] When it comes to American politics, Canadians are heavily Democratic. But Canadians might want to pause before hoping for a Democratic victory in November’s congressional elections. Canada is economically dependent on the United States and although Canada has fared much better than the U.S. in the Great Recession, Canada too is stuck in the economic doldrums and will remain so as long

Zaheer Ali: Islamophobia Did Not Start at Ground Zero

[Zaheer Ali is a doctoral student in history at Columbia University, where he is focusing his research on 20th-century African-American history and religion. His dissertation is on the history of the Nation of Islam in Harlem, N.Y., during the time of Malcolm X's ministry. You can follow him on Twitter.] While most examinations of Islamophobia suggest that it is only the most recent expression of American nativism -- made manifest after the 9/11 terror attacks -- the history of usin

Daniel Martin Varisco: Burning Books, Burning Bodies, Burning Bridges

[Daniel Martin Varisco is Professor of Anthropology at Hofstra University.]“Burn, baby, burn.” One might expect these words to come from a comedian as much as an arsonist. If you put the name “Terry Jones” into Google you will find a comedian. That is Terence Graham Parry Jones of Monty Python fame. These days there is another Terry Jones, a “Rev.ed” up one to boot. Rev. Terry Jones is the previously and foreseeably future little-known p

Victor Davis Hanson: Our Waning Obama Worship

[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.] In just 20 months, President Obama’s polls have crashed. From near 70 percent approval, they have fallen to well below 50 percent. Over 70 percent of the public disapproves of the Democratically controlled Congress. Hundreds of thousands of

Conor Williams: Defending Progressivism

[Conor Williams is a PhD Candidate in the Georgetown University Department of Government. He is currently working on his dissertation on John Dewey, Michael Oakeshott, and modern non-foundationalist politics. Williams co-authored “The Progressive Intellectual Tradition” with John Halpin at the Center for American Progress. Before coming to Washington, he attended Bowdoin College and served as a Teach For America corps member in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.] Less than two years after the

Daniel L. Breen: Revisiting a Political Firestorm

[Daniel L. Breen, an assistant professor of history at Newbury College, is writing a book about the Selfridge case.] WHEN PRESIDENT Obama defended the right of Muslim-Americans to build a mosque near Ground Zero “in accordance with local laws,” he noted that in 1806, Thomas Jefferson had entertained the Tunisian ambassador at the White House. In fact, the Tunisian’s visit was rather more eventful than Obama let on. In the summer of that year, that same ambassador would, quite uninte

Peter A. Coclanis: In Manufacturing, We're Still Making It

[Peter A. Coclanis is Albert R. Newsome distinguished professor of history and director of the Global research Institute at UNC-Chapel Hill.] Even in our rancorous political times, virtually every politician and pundit in America would agree on one thing: The U.S. economy is not doing well these days. To be sure, the prescriptions offered for our ailing economy vary wildly, but the chances for a successful therapeutic response would improve for all if would-be economic

Harold James: Recession Geopolitics

[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 Globalization Cycle.] The news that China has overtaken Japan as the world’s second largest economy did not come as a surprise. This is the major geo-political outcome of the Great Recession of the early twenty-first century – one that carries bot

Jonathan Biatch and Charles L. Cohen: Islam is Not the Enemy

[Biatch is a rabbi at Temple Beth El in Madison. Cohen is a professor of history and religious studies and director of the Lubar Institute for the Study of the Abrahamic Religions at UW-Madison.] This week we observe a unique confluence of days sacred to Jews, Muslims and all Americans. The convergence of the beginning of the Jewish New Year, the conclusion of the month of Ramadan fasts, and the ninth anniversary of the terror attacks of Sept. 11 compel us to reflect on

Julian E. Zelizer: How Much Do We Learn From the First Cut of History?

[Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of Jimmy Carter (Times Books) and Arsenal of Democracy (Basic Books) and the editor of The Presidency of George W. Bush (Princeton University Press).] Last year it seemed almost impossible to walk through an airport without noticing someone reading a copy of Game Change, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. The book captured the public's imagination through a vivid account of th

Ron Radosh: Misshaping Minds at Brooklyn College

Brooklyn College has assigned, as a book that all incoming transfer students must read, the extremely slanted work "How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America." A letter from the CUNY college's administration to faculty says the assignment is an "effort to provide a common experience for this population of students." Appalled that this is the "common experience" that administrators aim to foster, faculty members alerted The New Yo

Tom Engelhardt: Will Our Generals Ever Shut Up?

[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 just been published.]The fall issue of Foreign Policy magazine features Fred Kaplan’s “The Transformer,” an article-cum-interview with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.