Roundup: Historians' Take

Timothy Garton Ash: Britain Has Spent 50 Years Hunting in Vain for Its Role

[Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist.] Foxhunting may have been curbed, but some Brits are back at another of their traditional pastimes: role-hunting. It's nearly 50 years since the American secretary of state Dean Acheson whipped up a storm by saying that Britain had lost an empire but not yet found a role. Role-hunting has been a British sport ever since. Tally-ho! goes up the cry, every time we have a new government, and off they gallop, le

David Greenberg: Too Big To Fail, the 1912 Version

[David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers and author of three books of political history, has written the "History Lesson" column since 1998.] In the historic election of 1912, a sitting president faced a former president and a future president. William Howard Taft, the conservative Republican incumbent, enjoyed support from banking and business, which mostly opposed any new federal powers and agencies that might restrict their freedom. The form

Victor Davis Hanson: Holder’s Hypocrisy

[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.] Attorney General Eric Holder has developed a bad habit of accusing others of acting in bad faith while doing so himself. Take the issue of Guantanamo Bay. In Aspen, Colo., last week, Holder accused Congress of playing politics by preventing President Obama from closing the Guantan

Jesse Lemisch: Mean Bastards as Culture Heroes

[Jesse Lemisch is a Professor Emeritus of History at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York.] All day long, and on into a second day, here in New York, the media have been full of George Steinbrenner. He’s always been a Mean Bastard -- even in the Seinfeld version -- and that’s how he is memorialized: a Mean Bastard and a Winner. Sometimes he’s represented as a Mean-Bastard-with-a Heart-of-Gold-who-Gave-Money-to-Good-Causes. It would se

John M. Barry: How Prepared Are We for the Next Great Flu Breakout?

[John M. Barry, Distinguished Scholar at the Tulane/Xavier Center for Bioenvironmental Research, is the author ofThe Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History (Viking, 2004). This study of the 1918 pandemic was named by the National Academies of Science the year's outstanding book on science or medicine. He has advised both the Bush and Obama administrations on influenz

Daniel Martin Varisco: Worth a Response: Why Yemen is Not Afghanistan

[Daniel Martin Varisco is Professor of Anthropology at Hofstra University.]Yemen hardly ever makes the news unless a journalist wants to rail against the green-dribbling khat habit of grown men who wear skirts or trump with the terrorism card. In the Sunday Magazine of The New York Times, Robert F. Worth asks the provocative question: “Is Yemen the Next Afghanis

William Astore: George Steinbrenner and the Relentless Pursuit of Victory

[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.]As a lifelong Red Sox fan, my perspective on George Steinbrenner is slanted. To me, he was the leader of the "evil empire," the annoying, meddlesome, yet admittedly successful owner of the hated New York Yankees. And that was what rankled Red Sox fans: Steinbrenner bought the Yankees in

Juan Cole: Global Warming and al-Qaeda in the Greater Indian Ocean

[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.] ...The general bad news is that a University of Alabama team of scientists has concluded that the first half of 2010 has been the hottest first five months of a year on record. The specific bad news is that a team of climate scientists at the University of Colorado has di

Vivien Green Fryd: Lifting the Veil of Race at the U.S. Capitol

[Vivien Green Fryd, Professor and Chair in the Department of History of Art at Vanderbilt University, is the author of Art and Empire: The Politics of Ethnicity in the U.S. Capitol, 1815-1860 (1992, 2000) and Art and the Crisis of Marriage: Georgia O'Keeffe and Edward Hopper (2002). She is currently completing a book manuscript, Reenacting and Performing Sexual Trauma in Second-Wave Feminist American Art.] During Barack Obama's swearing-in ceremony as the 44th president of the Unite

Joseph J. Ellis: On Constitutional Compromise

[Joseph J. Ellis, winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in History for Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (Knopf 2000), is the Ford Foundation Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College.] In September 1789, at the end of the Constitutional Convention, James Madison wrote in dismay to his old friend Thomas Jefferson, who was an ocean away in Paris. “I hazard an opinion,” he lamented, “that the plan should it be adopted will neither effectively answer the national object n

Sean Wilentz: Why I’m Actually Going to Miss that Meddlesome Pain in the Ass George Steinbrenner

[Sean Wilentz is the author of Bob Dylan in America, which Doubleday will publish in September.] Writing back and forth with a fellow Yankee fan just after the news broke about George Steinbrenner’s death, I was surprised how touched we were. Like Yankee fans generally, we had lambasted Steinbrenner for decades. He was a meddlesome pain in the ass. He brought an obsessively willful football coach’s mentality to a subtle sport played over a very long season. And his strange emotional

Dermot Quinn: Wards of the State

[Dermot Quinn is professor of History at Seton Hall University and formerly a fellow of the James Madison Program at Princeton University.] ...Written in 1912 by Hilaire Belloc, an Anglo-Frenchman whose true home was the Middle Ages, The Servile State is an unlikely vade mecum for 21st-century Washington. Yet men with French names have a way of understanding the inner life of this country. The Servile State is not quite Democracy in America—for one thing, it is less than 200 pages l

Stanley Kutler: It’s Obama’s Empire Now

[Stanley Kutler is the editor of The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War (Scribner's, 1995) and the The Wars of Watergate (Alfred A. Knopf). He is the E. Gordon Fox Emeritus Professor of American Institutions at the University of Wisconsin, and also professor of law.] The American Empire is alive and well—and as expansive as ever. We have established more than 700 military bases across the world, largely encircling the peripheries of Russia and China, which are now central to the Iraq a

David Kaiser: Foreign Policy Traditions

[David Kaiser is a historian of international and domestic politics. He is the author of The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F Kennedy (2008).]Yesterday's New York Times included a very interesting article about the forthcoming publication of Mark Twain's autobiography, which heretofore has been available only in very edited editions. Twain himself ordered t

Daniel Pipes: Farrakhan Demands Reparations from Jews

[Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.]Louis Farrakhan recently sent a three-page letter along with two books to the heads of sixteen Jewish organizations.Dated June 24, 2010, the letter is resplendent with a crescent-and-moon flag and Farrakhan's impressive-sounding title ("National Representative o

Martha Nussbaum: Veiled Threats?

[Martha Nussbaum teaches law, philosophy, and divinity at The University of Chicago. She is the author of several books, including “Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality” (2008) and “Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities” (2010).] In Spain earlier this month, the Catalonian assembly narrowly rejected a proposed ban on the Muslim burqa in all public places — reversing a vote the week before in the country’s upper house of parliame

John Steele Gordon: A Short History of the Recess Appointment

[John Steele Gordon writes on business and economic history, as well as for COMMENTARY's blog.] President Obama's recess appointment of Dr. Donald Berwick to be head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services escalates the abuse of the recess appointment power one step further. The Constitution gives to the president the power to nominate and, "by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate," to appoint high government officials, such as ambassadors

Walter Russell Mead: The Big Green Lie Exposed

[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 Big Green Lie is falling apart. And it’s not about Climategate and Glaciergate. It’s not about the science. It’s not even about public confidence in the integrity of the green movement — although this confidence is unlikely to regain the levels of 2009. Hum

Mackubin Thomas Owens: General Mattis Moves to CENTCOM

[Mackubin Thomas Owens is a professor at the Naval War College and editor of Orbis, the journal of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is a Marine-infantry veteran of the Vietnam War.] The president has nominated Marine Gen. James Mattis to be the next commander of U.S. Central Command, replacing Gen. David Petraeus, who has assumed command of the effort in Afghanistan. This is a welcome move. There is now a remarkable military tandem in place in the Greater Middle East, one t

Tom Engelhardt: Why Are We in Afghanistan?

[Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond.  His latest book,