Roundup: Historians' Take

Timothy Garton Ash: Europe is Sleepwalking to Decline -- We Need a Churchill to Wake It Up

[Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist.] Can anyone save me from Europessimism? I feel more depressed about the state of the European project than I have for decades. The eurozone is in mortal danger. European foreign policy is advancing at the pace of a drunken snail. Power shifts to Asia. The historical motors of European integration are either lost or spluttering. European leaders rearrange the deckchairs on the Titanic while lecturing the res

Daniel Martin Varisco: Facebook vs. the Holy Book

[Daniel Martin Varisco is Professor of Anthropology at Hofstra University.] The news out of Pakistan teeters between bad and worse. First, there are the drones targeting Taliban leaders and often taking out civilians as long-range missile attacks tend to do. Then there is the lingering concern about the government’s stability, especially given the fact that Pakistan has nuclear weapons. Throw

Jim Sleeper: Peter Beinart Unbound?

[Jim Sleeper is a lecturer in political science at Yale University.] Anyone who actually writes anything about Israel that perfect strangers are likely to read had better believe he's got the wisdom, pointillist clarity and courage to unmask others' astigmatism, myopia and bad faith. Too often, though, the would-be Truth-teller, no matter where he stands on a political or religious spectrum, is less wise about Israel than he is driven by swift, dark currents in history and in himsel

Victor Davis Hanson: The Technocrats’ New Clothes

[NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and editor, most recently, of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome.] In the last year, many of the dreams of an emerging international elite have imploded — and this, in a new century that was to usher in a regime of global liberal ecumenism. The lies and academic fraud of Climategate reminded us that it is almost impossible

Walter Russell Mead: The End of Trilateralism

[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.] Geopoliticians like GUTs–Grand Unified Theories–that reduce the complexity of world events to a simple underlying concept. For the last ten years the world’s favorite GUT has been “the decline of America.” For the ten years before that it was “America’s unilateral

Ann Gordon and Lynn Sherr: Sarah Palin is No Susan B. Anthony

[Ann Gordon, Research Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University, edited the 5-volume Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Lynn Sherr, award-winning broadcaster and former ABC News correspondent, wrote "Failure is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony in Her Own Words" and is writing a play about Anthony.] Last week in Washington, Sarah Palin addressed the Susan B. Anthony List - the political action committee that calls itself the

Jon Wiener: Arizona Ethnic Studies Ban Defended by Fox News

[Jon Wiener teaches US history at UC Irvine. His most recent book is Historians in Trouble.] It was a dirty job, but somebody had to do it: defend the new Arizona law that bans ethnic studies in public schools. Fox News anchor Greta van Susteren took on the task, with predictable results.... What exactly is wrong with Arizona schools offering Chicano Studies classes? Van Susteren asked Tom Horne, Arizona superintendent of public instruction, who sponsored the bill an

Bethany Moreton: To Serve God and Walmart [Video, 7 minutes 57 seconds]

Bethany Moreton, author of To Serve God and Walmart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise on how Walmart has effectively married capitalism and Christianity.

Charles Postel: The Tea Party and the Dark Side of Conservatism

[Charles Postel, an assistant professor of history at San Francisco State University, won the Bancroft Prize in American history for his book “The Populist Vision.”] Tea partiers proudly proclaim themselves conservatives. And rightly so. Tea party protesters repeat the conservative catchwords of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, who built their careers fighting the “creeping socialism” of civil rights legislation, Social Security and Medicare. Tea partier

Tom Engelhardt: Obama’s Flailing Wars -- A Study in BP-Style “Pragmatism”

[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, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing

Gil Troy: A Careerist Conundrum of Supreme Proportions

[Gil Troy is a professor of history at McGill University and a visiting scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington.] For New Yorkers born in the 1960s, U.S. President Barack Obama’s nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court triggered the frissons of pride and envy many of us feel when someone our age and from our humble background makes it. But Ms. Kagan’s careerist conundrum is particularly fascinating. Did this woman with the perfect Princeton-Oxford-H

Julian Zelizer: Senate Should Accept Kagan's '95 'Challenge'

[Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. His new book is "Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security: From World War II to the War on Terrorism," published by Basic Books. Zelizer writes widely about current events.] In 1995, Elena Kagan published a lengthy book review in the University of Chicago Law Review, titled "Confirmation Messes, Old and New," in which she was critical of

Daniel Okrent: An Illegal Substance Sold Legally

[Daniel Okrent is the author of "Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition," just published by Scribner.] "He owned some drugstores, a lot of drugstores," Daisy Buchanan said. "He built them up himself." To Daisy, this was a perfectly reasonable explanation of the wealth of her new neighbor, Jay Gatsby. To her husband, more knowing about the world beyond the boundaries of East Egg, it was evidence that Gatsby had made his money as a bootlegger.

Victor Davis Hanson: The Other European Volcano

[Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and editor, most recently, of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome.]Five years ago, the European Union’s account of itself resonated with end-of history triumphalism. In organic fashion, democratic socialism would spread eastward and southward, recivilizing the old Warsaw Pact and the Balkans through cradle-to-grave entitlements, state unionism, radica

Jonathan Zimmerman: Putting the Accent on Bigotry

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University.] In the 1930s, Bel Kaufman applied to teach in the New York City public schools. She took a written examination and then an oral one, which required her to recite a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay. A few days later, Kaufman received a curt letter in the mail: “Failed for poor background in English.” In short, she had the wrong accent. Emigrating from Russia at the age of 12, Kaufman graduated magn

Juan Cole: The New Realities of the U.S. Sphere of Influence

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] Iraq is in the US sphere of influence now, as the Philippines are, but in neither case does this modern form of great power politics require a big military presence. The Neocons’ dream of a division (25,000 – 30,000) US troops permanently in Iraq has been defeated by the Mahdi Army, the Baathists, and Su

Greg Grandin: Glenn Beck, America’s Historian Laureate

[Greg Grandin is a professor of history at New York University.  His most recent book, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City, just published in paperback, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was picked by the New York Times, the New Yorker, and NPR for their “best of&rdquo

Joel Beinin: Egyptian Workers Demand a Living Wage

[Joel Beinin is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History at Stanford University. He is the principle author of The Struggle for Worker Rights in Egypt (Washington, DC: Solidarity Center, 2010).] On May 11 the Egyptian government extended the State of Emergency, which has been in effect continuously since 1981, for an additional two years. The Emergency Law gives the regime broad powers which it has used to try to suppress dissent of all so

Victor Davis Hanson: Profiling, Diversity, and Arizona’s New Law

[Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and editor, most recently, of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome.] Profiling is considered among the worst of American sins. Not long ago, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested by the Cambridge, Mass., police for trying to enter his own locked home after misplacing his key. Almost immediately, President Obama rushed to condemn

Ruth Harris: How the Dreyfus Affair Explains Sarkozy's Burqa Ban

[Ruth Harris is a fellow of New College, Oxford, and author of Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion and the Scandal of the Century.] ...Indeed, the debate [over banning the burqa] has a long history in France and is not merely a product of the right, though Sarkozy's opponents denounce it as a nakedly political attempt to attract anti-immigrant support. A powerful, and sometimes irrational, fear of religious influence -- once Catholic, now Muslim -- has long been a part of French society, th