Roundup: Historians' Take

Edward Tenner: The Myth of Anti-Intellectualism

[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.] Was Elena Kagan's tactful performance in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings proof of American anti-intellectualism, as Judith Warner has argued in the New York Times Magazine? I find it hard to believe Ms. Kagan really needed all that coaching. Had she raised so much money for Harvard Law School by talking down to prospective

Julian E. Zelizer: Sarah Palin Likes Government Too

[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.] During a speech at an event called "Freedom Fest," former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin warned Tea Party activists that while go

Sean Wilentz and Julian E. Zelizer: Teaching 'W' as History

[Sean Wilentz is a professor of history at Princeton University and author of The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008 (Harper, 2008) and Bob Dylan in America, to be published by Doubleday in September. Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs and author of Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security—From World War II to the War on Terrorism (Basic Books, 2010) and editor of The Presidency of George W. Bush: A First Historical Assessment, to be released by Prince

Elaine Tyler May: Anger and Security

[Elaine Tyler May is a professor of American studies and history at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Her most recent book is America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation (Basic Books). This essay is based on her 2010 presidential address to the Organization of American Historians. The full text will appear in The Journal of American History in March 2011.] The first decade of the 21st century was marked by the events of September 11, 2001, and the milita

Amity Shlaes: Obama Threatens to Follow in FDR's Economic Missteps

[Amity Shlaes is a senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression."] With unemployment high and the Dow Jones industrial average bumping about, the big debate this summer is how to prevent a double-dip recession resembling that of the late 1930s. Some say Washington should spend more, arguing that government austerity triggered the collapse in 1937 that erased previous gains. Oth

Jonathan Zimmerman: Where's the Outrage About Lebron James's Salary?

[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.”] In 1930, when the baseball star Babe Ruth earned the then-unheard-of sum of $80,000, a reporter asked him why he should make more than the president of the United States, Herbert Hoover. “Why not?” Ruth famously replied. “I had a better year than he did.”... Hoover earned $75,000 in

Harold James: Central Banking Deflowered

[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.] After the European Central Bank announced on May 9 that it would buy the government bonds of Mediterranean countries experiencing severe fiscal strains, critics complained that the Bank had "lost its virginity."

Juan Cole: A Colossus Has Departed

[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 death of Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Husain Fadlallah at 75 marks the passing of a cleric revered by many Shia Muslims and by many Lebanese and Iraqis. His life exemplified the awakening and increasing global influence of Shia Islam. Although Fadlallah became less radical with time,

William J. Astore: Hope and Change Fade, but War Endures

[William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and TomDispatch regular. He has taught at the Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School and currently teaches History at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. He may be reached at wjastore@gmail.com.]If one quality characterizes our wars today, it’s their endurance.  They never seem to end.  Though war itself may not be an American inevitability, these days many factors combine to make

Victor Davis Hanson: American Decline Is a State of Mind

[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] We are hearing all sorts of reasons why the United States is doomed to decline. After all, America is piling up deficits at a record rate of about $1.5 trillion a year while other countries are slashing their spending. The national debt cascades over $13 trillion and is on track to

Stephanie Cronin: Afghanistan's Armies, Past and Present

[Stephanie Cronin is Departmental Lecturer in the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford. She is currently working on a comparative study of military-led modernisation entitled Armies, Tribes and States in the Middle East. stephanie.cronin@orinst.ox.ac.uk]Since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and the overthrow of the Taliban, the United States and its NATO partners have become drawn in to the project of rebuildi

Ian Milligan: Contextualizing G20 Policing in Toronto

[Ian Milligan is an editor at ActiveHistory.ca and a third-year PhD student in Canadian history at York University. For his dissertation, he is studying the relationship between the New Left, Youth, and Labour in the 1960s and early 1970s. Ian is also a Book Review Editor with Left History, a peer-reviewed academic journal published out of the history department at York University.] As Sean Kheraj noted last week, many commentators seemed sur

Christine McLaughlin: The Moral Economy of the 2010 Toronto G20 Crowd?

[Christine McLaughlin is an editor at ActiveHistory.ca. She is in her third year of the PhD program in history at York University. She is interested in the contested meanings and experiences of community, family and work. Her dissertation explores these themes as they played out in twentieth-century Oshawa, Ontario. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, a group of historians sought to rescue terms like “crowd,” “mob” and “riot” from the “condescension of posterity,” illustrating that cr

Andrew J. Bacevich: Obama the Non-Believer

[Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. He is the author of Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (2010), The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (2008), and The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (2005), among other books.] ...Bush’s Freedom Agenda ended in abject failure—no liberalizing tide has swept the Islamic world. The promised Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and the evi

Daniel Pipes: On NASA's Strange Priorities

[[Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.]Barack Obama's grand speeches in Istanbul and Cairo as well as his repeated insistence on"respect" made Americans very aware that he hopes to win Muslim favor. But we did not know how de

Jayne Merkel: When Less Was More

[Jayne Merkel is an architectural historian and critic. She is the author, most recently, of “Eero Saarinen.” She is a contributing editor of Architectural Design/AD magazine and Architectural Record.] We tend to think of the decades immediately following World War II as a time of exuberance and growth, with soldiers returning home by the millions, going off to college on the G.I. Bill and lining up at the marriage bureaus. But when it came to their houses, it was a tim

Daniel Pipes: Trust the Palestinian Authority?

[Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.]Under Yasir Arafat, the Palestine Liberation Organization notoriously said one thing to Arab/Muslim audiences and the opposite to Israeli/Western ones, speaking venomously to the former and in dulcet tones to the latter. What about Arafat's mild-mannered successor, Mahmoud Abbas? Did he

Thaddeus Russell: Does Israel Make Us Safer?

[Thaddeus Russell is the author of the forthcoming A Renegade History of the United States (Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 2010). He teaches history and cultural studies at Occidental College and has taught at Columbia University, Barnard College, Eugene Lang College, and the New School for Social Research.] When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits the White House Tuesday, President Obama will have the chance to be the first American president since the founding of Is

Victor Davis Hanson: Afghanistan Agonistes

[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.] The growing consensus is that the United States and its NATO allies cannot prevail in their aim of creating a stable constitutional government in Afghanistan, free of radical Taliban insurrectionists who will facilitate terrorism beyond their borders and seek to reinstitute their medieval theo

Ussama Makdisi: Understanding Past Could Help Restore U.S.-Arab Ties

[Makdisi is a professor of history at Rice University. He is the author of "Faith Misplaced: The Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations, 1820-2001."] A year after Barak Obama's Cairo speech, the dialogue between the Arab world and America is nowhere to be seen or heard. As the bloody events of last month have demonstrated, the Arab-Israeli conflict constantly upstages and undermines even the best-intentioned American diplomacy in the Arab world. The quagmires in Afghanistan