Roundup: Historians' Take

Burt Folsom: The Tyranny of Good Intentions

[Burt Folsom teaches history at Hillsdale College.] As we look around us, we are awash in failed government programs. At the state level, California (and other states) are broke and desperate for cash. At the federal level, we see minimum wage laws stifling the hiring of young men and women; a social security system that is on the verge of paying out more than it takes in; and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac receiving $145 billion in tax dollars now, and more later. We got i

Ira Chernus: Why Are So Many Americans Scared of Undocumented Immigrants?

[Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Read more of his writing on Israel, Palestine, and American Jews on his blog: http://chernus.wordpress.com.] “The overwhelming majority of Americans think the country’s immigration policies need to be seriously overhauled.” And most Americans support Arizona’s stringent new immigration enforcement law, “even though they say it may lead to racial profili

Iain McLean: Tories Avoid Irish Entanglements

[Iain McLean is Professor of Politics, Nuffield College Oxford and a member of the History & Policy Network.] The Conservative Party, now in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, no longer needs to rely on the support of Ulster Unionists. This is just as well, because the history of entanglements between Irish and British parties suggests it would have been an unwise move, which the Conservatives narrowly avoided. In January, Conservative Northern Ireland spokesman

Peter Rachleff: Don’t Give Us Your Tired, Poor

[Peter Rachleff is a history professor at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN.] The “nativism” manifested in SB1070, Arizona’s new law ordering police to challenge residents for proof of citizenship or immigration papers, is nothing new. Such hostility to newcomers — displayed in rallies and demonstrations, expressed in politics and codified in laws — has been an all-too-frequent presence throughout U.S. history. As Americans prepare to debate not only the Arizona law (and it

Geraldo L. Cadava: Arizona Has a Long History of Demonizing Mexican Migrants

[A native of Tucson, Geraldo L. Cadava teaches Latino history at Northwestern University. Harvard University Press will publish his forthcoming book on the Arizona-Sonora border region since World War II. E-mail him at g-cadava@northwestern.edu] The inclination of Arizonans to target Mexicans as the cause of their political and financial problems has shaped the state's history for at least a century. In the middle of World War I, employer

Walter Russell Mead: The Middle East Peace Industry

[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.] George Mitchell (below) has arrived in Jerusalem and the ‘proximity talks’ have started, but it is not at all clear what will come of them. The Middle East peace process is the longest running piece of diplomatic theater on the world stage. Dating from

Stephen Fielding: The Last Time the Liberals Supported a Minority Government

[Steven Fielding is director of the Centre for British Politics and professor of Political History in the School of Politics and IR, University of Nottingham.] Amidst all the speculation regarding negotiations about the creation of a post-election arrangement between the Conservatives and LibDems I haven’t seen any reference to the last time the Liberals (as they were then) put in a minority government. Actually, they did this twice in the 1920s, first in 1923 and then

Charles L. Zelden: New Political Movements Seek a Hold on U.S. Politics

[Charles L. Zelden is a professor of history at Nova Southeastern University and editor of About Federal Government: An Encyclopedia of the Executive, Legislative and Judicial Branches.] Angry, resentful and scared. This seems to be the state of grassroots politics today. On the left and on the right, political talk among ordinary Americans has taken on an outraged and aggressive tone — showcasing emotion over reason, distrust over unity. People feel abandoned by their

Niall Ferguson: The Unappealing Choices After an Inconclusive British Election

[Niall Ferguson is the Laurence A. Tisch, professor of history at Harvard and a contributing editor of the FT.] It has been a generation since the British electorate delivered such an inconclusive result at a general election. Not since Edward Heath posed the question “Who Governs Britain?” in February 1974 – the answer, of course, was “Not you” – has one of the two major parties failed to secure a majority in the House of Commons. But this election result was only a s

Daniel Pipes: Accepting Israel as the Jewish State

[Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.]When a major Arab state would finally sign a peace treaty with Israel, it was long assumed, the Arab-Israeli conflict would end. The Egypt-Israel peace treaty of 1979, however, buried that expectation; it had the perverse effect of making other states and also the

Max Boot: Maliki's Actions, and Obama's Inaction, Threaten an Iraq Democracy

[Max Boot is a senior fellow in national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributing editor to Opinion.] Since the success of the 2007 surge in Iraq, violent attacks have fallen more than 90% and Iraqis have been making steady progress toward stability and democracy. That momentum is now threatened by the actions of Iraq's prime minister, Nouri Maliki, and by the inaction of the Obama administration. Maliki, whom I met a week ago as part of a

Jonathan Zimmerman: It's Time for Schools of Education to Embrace New Routes to Teacher Certification

[Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of history and education at New York University. He is the author of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory."] Let's suppose you have spent your career as a professor at an American education school, training future teachers. Then suppose that your state decided that teachers could get certified without attending an education school at all. That's called "alternative certification," and most

Victor Davis Hanson: Greek Tragedies

[Mr. Hanson, who lived in Greece for two years, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of the recently released "The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern," as well as "Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom."] Draping the Acropolis with a hammer-and-sickle banner might seem a stupid public relations stunt—especially as a bankrupt Greece seeks to reassure fore

Julian Zelizer: Gov. Daniels -- GOP's best hope for 2012?

[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.] Conservative pundits are in love with a candidate for 2012, and it is not Sarah Palin. If you ask many top Republicans their favorite pick for the presidential campaign, they

William Dalrymple: The Ghosts of Gandamak

[William Dalrymple, the author of the forthcoming “Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India,” is writing a book on the First Anglo-Afghan War.] THE name Gandamak means little in the West today. Yet this small Afghan village was once famous for the catastrophe that took place there during the First Anglo-Afghan War in January 1842, arguably the greatest humiliation ever suffered by a Western army in the East. The course of that distant Victorian war followed a

Jim Sleeper: The Value of a Liberal Education for Leaders

If the graying of Barack Obama as a herald of progressive change is getting you down, watch the new PBS documentary tonight at 8 pm about John Lindsay, New York City's heraldic young mayor and presidential hopeful during the tumultuous late 1960s and early 1970s. "Fun City Revisited: The Lindsay Years" was broadcast Thursday night on New York's PBS station, WNET-13, and it can be viewed in its entirety on the website. It will also air on WLIW, Channel 22, Long Island, on May 12.

Andrew Roberts: General Election 2010

[Andrew Roberts is a British journalist and historian.] This general election campaign was one of the most hard-fought in post-war history, even though its results seem eerily inconclusive. It was not just the Prime Minister who bit his nails as the four weeks progressed – so did the whole nation, as the Liberal Democrats seemed at one point to be genuinely breaking the mould of British politics, but then slipped back to lose seats overall. The way the electorate looked closely at L

Joseph J. Ellis: Immaculate Misconception and the Supreme Court

[Joseph J. Ellis, a professor of history at Mount Holyoke College, won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in history for his book "Founding Brothers" and the National Book Award for "American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson."] ...[T]he constitutional doctrine of original intent has always struck most historians of the founding era as rather bizarre. For they, more than most, know that the original framers of the Constitution harbored deep disagreements over the do

Michael Ruse: Three Loud Cheers for the European Community

[Michael Ruse directs the program in history and philosophy of science at Florida State University. His forthcoming book is Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science.] I first went to Spain in 1961. I was a member of the University of Bristol’s "Vagabonds' Club." Forming ourselves into groups of eight, we would cross the Channel and rent a VW van in Ostend in Belgium. Then we would drive ourselves all over the continent for a month, camping as

Ira Chernus: Blood or Treasure? Obama’s Crucial Choice in the Middle East

[Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Apocalypse Management: Eisenhower and the Discourse of National Insecurity. Read more of his writing on Israel, Palestine, and American Jews on his blog.] Writing about U.S. Middle East policy used to be a boring job. You’d start out with “The U.S. supports Israel’s stand on...” and then just fill in the details.  No longer. Many pundits claim to smell the winds of policy change bl