Roundup: Historians' Take

Steve Hochstadt: The End of Encyclopedias?

[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.] The radical 18th-century thinkers who proposed democracy instead of aristocracy, legislatures instead of kings, and freedom instead of tyranny, also made a revolutionary proposal about knowledge. They imagined an encyclopedia that would make all significant knowledge available to ever

Andrew J. Bacevich: Civilian Control? Surely, You Jest

[Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of international relations at Boston University and author of Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War.] ...In Washington, only one decision is considered really final—and that’s the one that goes your way. Senior military officers understand these rules and play by them. When the president or secretary of defense acts in ways not to their liking—killing some sought-after weapons program, for example—they treat that decision as subject to

Daniel Branch: Kenya’s Referendum: “In the Name of God, No!”

[Daniel Branch is an assistant professor in history at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge/New York: 2009). He is currently writing a political history of Kenya since independence.] Many Kenyans as well as foreign observers have welcomed the result of Kenya’s constitutional referendum on 4 August 2010, which gave overwhelming approval to the document.

Yascha Mounk: Europe's Disoriented Right

[Yascha Mounk is editor of The Utopian and a PhD Candidate at Harvard University, with research interests in political theory, European politics, and intellectual history.] AT NO time since the Second World War has Europe been so firmly in the grip of right-wing leaders. From old hands like Angela Merkel in Germany, Nicolas Sarkozy in France, and Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, to the recently elected David Cameron in the UK, the center Right now governs the biggest European countries.

Walter Russell Mead: Pakistan's Failed National Strategy

[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 unremitting spate of bad news from Pakistan continues; rains are still drenching the highlands and the devastation continues to spread down the river valleys. This year’s harvest has been ruined; increasingly, it seems unlikely that farmers will be able to plan

Arthur Herman: The Re-Hollowing of the Military

[Arthur Herman is the author, most recently, of Gandhi and Churchill. His recent articles for COMMENTARY include "The 35-Year War on the CIA" (December 2009) and "The Gitmo Myth and the Torture Canard" (June 2009).] On May 3, 2010, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates delivered a speech at the Navy League in Washington to an audience of veterans, retired and current defense-industry executives, and supporters of the tradition of American naval power. Gates gave it t

Maura Elizabeth Cunningham and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom: China Discovers World Expo is No Olympics

[Maura Elizabeth Cunningham is the editor of the “China Beat” and a past contributor to publications such as Forbes.com; Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, currently in Shanghai, is the author, most recently, of “China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know,” just published by Oxford University Press. Both authors are both based in the History Department of the University of California, Irvine.] SHANGHAI: From gigantic video displays on Shanghai skyscrapers to electronic monitors ins

Chalmers Johnson: Lowering the Flag on the American Century

[Chalmers Johnson is the author of Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2006), among other works.  His newest book, Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope (Metropolitan Books), has just been published.]In 1962, the historian Barbara Tuchman published a book about the start of World War I and called it The Guns of Au

William Astore: A "No Fault" Divorce from the Costs of Our Wars

[Professor Astore currently teaches History at the Pennsylvania College of Technology in Williamsport, PA. He writes regularly for TomDispatch.com and can be reached at wjastore@gmail.com.] Lately I've been thinking about my visits to the battlefields of Antietam and Gettysburg. Antietam was the single bloodiest day of the Civil War; Gettysburg, fought over three days in early July 1863, left behind even more blood-soaked hills and fields. Yet you'd hardly know it today. Both the

Ilyon Woo: Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

[Ilyon Woo is author of "The Great Divorce."] Unhappy couples in New York have long gone to extremes to throw off the shackles of matrimony—in the worst cases, framing their spouses, producing graphic testimony about affairs, or even confessing to crimes they did not commit. All this will fade into the past if, as expected, Gov. David Paterson signs a bill making New York the last state in the country to adopt unilateral no-fault divorce. Their counterparts in

Daniel K. Gardner: China's Fight Against Disposable Chopsticks

[Daniel K. Gardner is a professor of history and the director of the program in East Asian studies at Smith College.] China's Ministry of Commerce, together with five other ministries, issued this warning in June: "Companies making disposable chopsticks will face local government restrictions aimed at decreasing the use of the throwaway utensil.... Production, circulation and recycling of disposable chopsticks should be more strictly supervised."... ...[S]tart

Tom Engelhardt: What If Washington...?

[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 other day I visited a website I check regularly for all things military, Noah Shachtman’s Danger Room blog at Wired magazine.  One of its correspondents, Spencer Ackerman, was just then at Ba

Juan Cole: An Israeli Attack on Iran Would Reduce Barack Obama to a One-Term President

[Juan Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History and the Middle East scholar at the University of Michigan. He has written extensively on the Middle East and the West-Islam relations.] What should a poor warmongering Neoconservative do? This political grouping includes WASPS such as former CIA director James Woolsey and former UN ambassor John Bolton, but at its core is politically active and extremely wealthy Jewish former Democrats who broke with their party in th

Claire Potter: I Will Go Voluntarily at 67

[Claire Potter is a professor of history and American studies at Wesleyan University, and blogs at Tenured Radical.] You heard it here first: I will retire as a tenured professor no later than the spring of 2025. I will be 67. Under federal law, my university cannot require retirement at any age, whether I am vigorous and productive, or a colleague with deteriorating skills and energy. Because of this, we need to imagine voluntary retirement as a foundation for the 21st

Victor Davis Hanson: Obama the Yuppie

[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.] ...Yuppism, remember, is not definable entirely by income or class. Rather, it is a late-twentieth-century cultural phenomenon of self-absorbed young professionals, earning good pay, enjoying the cultural attractions of sophisticated urban l

Thomas J. Sugrue: School Daze

[Thomas J. Sugrue is David Boies Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.] It's been more than a half-century since the Supreme Court issued its landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. "Separate educational facilities," the court ruled, "are inherently unequal." But for all of our celebration of a "post-racial" America, separate and unequal education is still the norm--and by all measures it's getting worse. In his 20

Julian E. Zelizer: Time to Give Political Analysis a Rest

[Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of "Arsenal of Democracy" and a book on former President Jimmy Carter, and is editor of a book assessing former President George W. Bush's administration to be published this fall by Princeton University Press.] After last week's primaries, the national media tried yet again to figure out what the results mean for the national political landscape. Writing for Politico,

Simon Schama: Obama's brave remarks reveal a true patriot

[The writer is an FT contributing editor. His latest book is ‘Scribble Scribble Scribble: writings on ice cream, Obama, Churchill and my mother’.] Has Barack Obama just committed political suicide? By appearing to endorse the building of a mosque and Islamic cultural centre at the threshold of Ground Zero, has he set himself at odds with the majority of Americans who regard the idea as a desecration of “hallowed ground”? Beleaguered Democrats fighting a rearguard actio

Hannah Gurman: The Iraq Withdrawal: An Orwellian Success

[Hannah Gurman is an assistant professor at NYU's Gallatin School. She is currently working on a book about the history of counterinsurgency in American foreign policy.] As the Second World War drew to a close, George Orwell looked back on the various prognoses of war and peace that had emerged in recent years. "All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way," he observed. "People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wi

Peter Dreier and Donald Cohen: Ignore the Fear-Mongering on Social Security

[Peter Dreier teaches politics and chairs the Urban & Environmental Policy program at Occidental College. Donald Cohen is the co-founder and president of the Center on Policy Initiatives, a San Diego-based think tank.] Alf Landon, the Kansas governor running as the Republican Party's 1936 presidential candidate, called it a "fraud on the working man." Silas Strawn, a former president of both the American Bar Assn. and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said it was part of P