Roundup: Historians' Take

Stephen Morris: How America is Helping to Whitewash the Cambodian Genocide

[Stephen Morris is a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and author of Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia.] Yesterday, in Cambodia, a perpetrator of one of the twentieth century’s great crimes was sentenced. Kang Kek Lew, also known as Comrade Deuch, was the head of the infamous Tuol Sleng prison during the reign of the Khmer Rouge, and was at least partly responsible for the murder of more than 12,000 people. Now he will serve 19 years in jail.

Kathy Olmsted: "We Owe It to History to Publish It"

[Kathy Olmsted is a professor of history at UC Davis.] Daniel Schorr, who died yesterday, is being remembered for his remarkable, decades-long career as a print, radio, and television journalist. I’m familiar with one small slice of this story: I did an intensive study of his coverage of the intelligence beat for CBS News from 1974 to 1976 – coverage that ultimately cost him his job. I came away from my research and from my interview with Schorr profoundly impressed by his commitm

Andrew J. Bacevich: Leakistan: The New Insurgency

[Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. A graduate of the U. S. Military Academy, he received his Ph. D. in American diplomatic history from Princeton. He is the author of, most recently, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War.] Based on initial press reports, the leaking of “90,000 classified documents” related to the Afghanistan war doesn’t really tell us much that we don’t already know. Our Afghan partners are less

Tom Engelhardt: All the Strangeness of Our American World in One Article

[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. You can catch him discussing it on a TomCast video by

Julian Chambliss: Black Panther Brought to Life

[Julian Chambliss is an associate professor of history at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla.] The online premiere last month of a Black Panther animated series was an exciting event for diehard comic geeks. The Panther, the first black superhero from Marvel, inspired me as a young comic fan. Now, all grown up with academic credentials to justify my comic habit, I can see the good and the bad in the new "motion comic" (a 21st century way to say cartoon). Moving it off the

Fouad Ajami: The Cop on the Banks of the Nile

[Mr. Ajami is professor of Middle East Studies at The Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies and an adjunct senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.] He was there on the reviewing stand on Oct. 6, 1981, when the assassins struck down his flamboyant predecessor, Anwar Sadat. Few thought that Hosni Mubarak, an unassuming military officer, would survive the tumult of Egypt's politics. The country was on the boil, the assassins who took Sada

Jonathan Zimmerman: Linda McMahon and the Reality of Wrestling's Sex and Violence Fantasy

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at New York University. He is the author, most recently, of “Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory.”] How low can politics go? That’s what I’ve been wondering as I learn about Linda McMahon, the professional wrestling entrepreneur and likely Republican nominee for the US Senate from Connecticut. Together with her husband, Vince, she has developed World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) into a $1.2 bi

Niall Ferguson: Today's Latter-Day Keynesians Have Learnt Nothing

[The writer is an FT contributing editor. His new biography of Siegmund Warburg, High Financier, has just been published by Penguin.] To those of us who first encountered the dismal science of economics in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the current debate on fiscal policy in the western world has been – no other word will do – depressing. It was said of the Bourbons that they forgot nothing and learned nothing. The same could easily be said of some of today’s latter-da

Tom Engelhardt: Advice for General Petraeus on the Rules of Engagement: It’s Neither/Nor, Not Either/Or

[Tom Engelhardt, author of the recently-published The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books, July 2010) and editor of Tomdispatch.com, writes in a guest editorial for Informed Comment] Recently, we’ve been flooded with news stories and debate about the “rules of engagement” for U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Now-discredited war commander General Stanley McChrystal, we’ve been told, instituted fiercely restrictive rules of engagement to lessen the number o

Efraim Karsh: Who’s Against a Two-State Solution?

[Efraim Karsh, editor of the Middle East Quarterly and author most recently of Palestine Betrayed (Yale), is professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College, University of London.] "Two states, living side by side in peace and security." This, in the words of President Barack Obama, is the solution to the century-long conflict between Jews and Palestinian Arabs in the Middle East. Washington is fully and determinedly on board. So are the Europeans. The

Victor Davis Hanson: The New Racial Mess

[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.] Weren’t we supposed to enter a new age of tolerance with the election of Pres. Barack Obama? His half-black, half-white ancestry and broad support across racial lines suggested that at last Americans judged each other on the content of our characters — not the color of our skin or

William J. Astore: Why It’s Wrong to Equate Military Service with Heroism

[William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and TomDispatch regular, teaches History at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. He welcomes reader feedback at wjastore@gmail.com.] When I was a kid in the 1970s, I loved reading accounts of American heroism from World War II.  I remember being riveted by a book about the staunch Marine defenders of Wake Island and inspired by J

Julian Zelizer: Why Obama's Poll Numbers Have Sunk

[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 Carter to be published next fall by Times Books. He is also the editor of a new book about former President George W. Bush to be published next fall by Princeton University Press.] President Obama's supporters have been frustrated about the apparent paradox of this administration. With the recent passage of historic financial regulat

Eric Rauchway: David Brooks Doesn’t Understand Progressivism Very Well

[Eric Rauchway is a professor of history at UC Davis.]Today’s David Brooks column is terrible as history or political semantics, but it nearly makes a minimally sensible point. First the terrible part. When historians look back on this period, they will see it as another progressive era. It is not a liberal e

Tom Palaima: Capitalizing on Socialism's Bad Name

[Tom Palaima is a regular contributor to the Austin American-Statesman, The Texas Observer, and the Times Higher Education. Contact: tpalaima@mail.utexas.edu.] Among techniques to prevent informed discussions from taking place on critical issues that are facing our country is the timeworn strategy of demonizing the opposition through personal attacks or by linking them and their views to some notion, practice or philosophy that a good m

Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman: The Trouble with Chavismo

[Rabbi Abraham Cooper is associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, where Harold Brackman is a historian and consultant. For more information, see www.wiesenthal.com.] With Americans worried about unemployment, the deficit, immigration, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and more, it's not surprising that some are looking abroad for other approaches to governing. Even Venezuela's Hugo Chávez is being touted by some as having figured out a bette

Walter Russell Mead: Obama's Ideals Could Lead to 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] In spite of what some conspiracy-minded critics on the right think, mainstream journalists like Time’s Joe Klein do not often agree with Fidel Castro. That both Klein and Castro think the chances of war between the United States and Iran have increased recently is w

Daniel Martin Varisco: Born Free, Unless You are Female

[Daniel Martin Varisco is Professor of Anthropology at Hofstra University.]I opened my email this morning and back-to-back there was instant conflict: a posting about a new Indian Deobandfatwa ruling that veiled Muslim women should not ride bicycles and another about a female French lawyer who ripped the face cover

Joel Richard Paul: Which Tea Party?

[Joel Richard Paul is a professor at the University of California Hastings Law School and author of Unlikely Allies: How a Merchant, a Playwright, and a Spy Saved the American Revolution.] Tea Party activists, I owe you an apology. I used to think that the country was divided between blue states and the "irony-free zone." I realize now that the Tea Party is, in fact, a lot funnier than Democrats ever were. When the leadership of the Tea Party accused the NAACP

Kai Bird: Afghanistan: Vietnam Redux

[Kai Bird is author of “The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy & William Bundy, Brothers in Arms.” He and Martin J. Sherwin won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished biography for their book “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.”] The war in Afghanistan is nearly nine years old. Despite the Obama administration’s July 2011 target date for de-escalating, there seems no end in sight. It is already longer than the U.S. ground war in Vietnam