Roundup: Historians' Take

Dovid Katz: The Crime of Surviving

[Dovid Katz is the research director of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute and a cofounder of the Litvak Studies Institute. He is the author of Lithuanian Jewish Culture and the website HolocaustInTheBaltics.com.] Rachel Margolis may be the most tragic Holocaust survivor on the planet. She has stiff competition, to be sure, but Margolis’s recent experiences are almost too surreal and painful to be believed. After the war—during which her parents and brother were murdered—Mar

Gordon S. Wood: Our Founders Were Not Political Amateurs

[Gordon S. Wood, a professor emeritus of history at Brown, is the author, most recently, of “Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815.”] The American public is not pleased with Congress — one recent poll shows that less than a third of all voters are eager to support their representative in November. “I am not really happy right now with anybody,” a woman from Decatur, Ill., recently told a Washington Post reporter. As she considered the prospect of a government

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Shanghai Illuminations: 1890-2010

[Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, is the author of “China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know.”]As I’ve noted in previous blog posts, I’ve been spending a lot of time lately giving talks about my new book, China in the 21st C

Daniel Martin Varisco: On Colonels, Pantyhose and Honor Killings

[Daniel Martin Varisco is Chair, Anthropology Department at Hofstra University.]At the start of one of my all-time favorite movies, The Ruling Class, actor Harry Andrews as the 13th earl of Gurney returns to his well-groomed estate to relax after a long day of waxing conservative in the House of Lords. While this film should be required viewing for the current British parliamentary campaign, my interest is in the way this

Jon Lawrence: When the Wheels Came Off Brown's Campaign Bus

[Jon Lawrence is author of Electing Our Masters (OUP, 2009).] Surveying the wreckage of Gordon Brown's political fightback on the streets of Rochdale, some commentators are claiming that it's all happened before. They're wrong; even taking a very long-term perspective, no senior politician has gaffed quite so damagingly while on the stump as the Prime Minister did yesterday. It is true that, ever since microphones were invented they have helped politicians put their fee

Elwood Watson: Ugly Resistance Against the President Continues

[Dr. Elwood Watson is a full professor of history and African-American studies at East Tennessee State University.]Read the following examples:On April 15 (income tax day), more than 10,000 members of the recently formed tea party group converged on the nation’s capital to voice their resentment and erratic anger at government and at President Obama in particular.Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell initially announced that the state had proclaimed April as co

Stanley Crouch: Gates' Cold Shower on the Reparations Debate

[Stanley Crouch is an essayist and columnist based in New York. He has been awarded a MacArthur, a Fletcher, and was recently inducted into the Academy of Arts and Sciences. The first volume of his Charlie Parker biography will appear within a year.] In the world of slang, smack means either heroin or dung. The academy has been overrun by intellectual smack dealers for a good while, but the biggest bust of the game has just taken place. With intellectual honesty as his

Henry Louis Gates Jr.: Ending the Slavery Blame-Game

[Henry Louis Gates Jr., a professor at Harvard, is the author of the forthcoming “Faces of America” and “Tradition and the Black Atlantic.”] ...While we are all familiar with the role played by the United States and the European colonial powers like Britain, France, Holland, Portugal and Spain, there is very little discussion of the role Africans themselves played. And that role, it turns out, was a considerable one, especially for the slave-trading kingdoms of western and central A

Walter Russell Mead: Europe in Crisis

[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 latest sickening bout of stock market turbulence underlines the point I made on this blog last December; the next stage of the global economic crisis is centered in Greece. That’s an unpleasant reality for our European friends who have spent much of

Victor Davis Hanson: Obama's Nuclear Naivety

[NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the editor of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome, and the author of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.] The Obama administration has celebrated its recent efforts to sign a nuclear-weapons accord with Russia and the hosting of a nuclear non-proliferation summit in Washington — all silhouetted against grandiose promises to seek the end of all n

Gil Troy: Obama the President is Not Alexander the Great

[The writer is professor of History at McGill University and a Shalom Hartman Institute Research Fellow. He is the author of Why I Am A Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today and Leading from the Center: Why Moderates Make the Best Presidents.] I understand Barack Obama’s impatience with Israel. I see his logic whereby if only Israel would freeze, concede and withdraw, the conflict would end. I can imagine the appeal, for the first African-American US president

Harold James: Another Failed British Experiment

[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.] British politics has always been something of an experimental laboratory for the industrialized world. In the 1970s, Britain was where the preeminent postwar model of how to manage the economy collapsed. That model had been

Jim Downs: Historical Context Can Help Us Better Understand Debate Over New Health Care Legislation

[Jim Downs is author of the forthcoming book, "Sick from Freedom: The Unexpected Consequences of the American Civil War." He is an assistant professor of history at Connecticut College.] Once upon a time, the United States had a full-fledged national health care system. The federal government employed 120 doctors, constructed 40 hospitals, provided medical care to over 500,000 people, and even created special facilities for orphans and the elderly. That health care

Victor Davis Hanson: What's Happening with Israel?

[Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services.] Current American relations with our once-staunch ally Israel are at their lowest ebb in the last 50 years. The Obama administration seems as angry at the building of Jewish

Jill Lepore: Who Owns the American Revolution?

[Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University where she is also chair of the History and Literature Program. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale in 1995.] ...Beginning even before it was over, the American Revolution has been put to wildly varying political ends. Federalists claimed its legacy; so did anti-Federalists. Jacksonian Democrats said they were the true sons of the Revolution. No, Whigs said, we are. The Union cl

Daniel Pipes: In Europe, Remorse Has Turned to Masochism

[Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. This piece was crossposted at the National Review Online.]"Nothing is more Western than hatred of the West." So writes the French novelist and essayist Pascal Bruckner in his book La tyrannie de la pénitence (2006), capably translated into

Joshua Brown: Arizona Shreds the Constitution

  Joshua Brown is executive director of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning and professor of history at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

Tom Engelhardt: Why We Won’t Leave Afghanistan or Iraq

[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

Andreas Umland: Is Europe Losing Ukraine?

[Andreas Umland has been published in The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Prospect Magazine, the Moscow Times, and elsewhere. He is general editor of the book series “Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society” (www.ibidem-verlag.de/spps.html).] Largely unnoticed in the West, Ukraine’s new President, Viktor Yanukovych, has brought to power an illegitimate government, in March 2010. Though being installed via a seemingly

Robert Zaller: If This is Capitalism, Bring on Socialism

[Robert Zaller is a professor of history at Drexel University. He can be reached at op-ed@thetriangle.org.] Wall Street died in 2008. Every major bank and investment house on the Street was, as they say of unlucky homeowners, underwater. Their putative assets were exceeded by their debts and collateral obligations; and since they were all entangled like snakes, none could extricate itself from the common fate. The system went into cardiac arr