Roundup: Historians' Take

Richard Samuelson: Why China Views Google as a Tool of the U.S. Government

[Richard Samuelson is the 2009–2010 Garwood Visiting Fellow at Princeton University’s James Madison Program, and an Assistant Professor of History at California State University, San Bernardino.] The clash between China and Google is the first shot in what could be a long war. Why should this be the case when, as Fareed Zakaria notes, the U.S. and China “have powerful reasons to cooperate with one another”? Those reasons, however powerful, might not be enough. The troub

Teresa Iacobelli: What is the Use of Official Apologies to Historical Misdeeds?

[Teresa Iacobelli is a PhD student at the University of Western Ontario.] In March 2010 the Qikiqtani Truth Commission (QTC) will draw to a close with the release of a final report and recommendations for the future. While the QTC has been ongoing since 2007 most Canadians remain unaware of its existence, and of the historical and social issues that it addresses. The QTC was created with a mandate to research and report on the facts surrounding the alleged dog slaughters, relocati

Dominic Sandbrook: Argentina is living in a nationalist dreamland

[Dominic Sandbrook’s latest book, State of Emergency (Penguin), will be published later this year.] Loafing around Budapest last week during a welcome break from our miserable economic headlines, I found myself in the gift shop of one of the Hungarian capital’s oldest churches. Amid the postcards, statues and religious icons, my eye was drawn to a fine, brightly coloured map of Hungary hanging on the wall — mine for just a few thousand forints. It was no antique, but there was somet

Tom Engelhardt: Fixing What's Wrong in Washington... in Afghanistan

[Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.]Explain something to me.In recent months, unless you were insensate, you couldn’t help running across someone talking, writing, speaking, or pontificating about how busted government is in the United States.  State g

Victor Davis Hanson: Some Thoughts on the War on Terror

[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.] Is there any logic in the confusion of the Obama administration's actions and statements on fighting the war on terror? On the one hand, we had a two-year campaign (2007–08) of damning the Bush protocols, from renditions and military tribunals

Juan Cole: Mullah Baradar, No. 2 Man in Old Taliban, Captured by ISI in Karachi

[Juan R. I. Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. For three decades, he has sought to put the relationship of the West and the Mu] The NYT broke the news that the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence, with the cooperation of US intelligence, captured Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar a few days ago. Baradar, the number 2 man in the Old Taliban led by Mulla Umar, is the equivalent of military chief of staff for the organization. Depend

Juan Cole: The Decline of the Israeli Right and the Increasing Desperation of the 'Anti-Semitism' Charge

[Juan R. I. Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. For three decades, he has sought to put the relationship of the West and the Muslim world in historical context.]The great divide between liberal Jewish Americans and the Israeli Right has lurked as an issue since the Likud Party first challenged Labor dominance in the late 1970s. It is now coming to a boiling point, e

William J. Astore: Why the U.S. Military Fetishizes the Wehrmacht

[William J. Astore (wastore@pct.edu), a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and TomDispatch regular, teaches history at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. To catch him in a Timothy MacBain TomCast audio interview discussing the U.S. military's fascination with the Wehrmacht, click here.]I’ve always been interested in the German military, espe

Julian Zelizer: Obama Can Model Ike in Fighting Off GOP Hawks

[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.] This week on ABC, former Vice President Dick Cheney said he was concerned about Obama's "mind-set" and argued that it took him too long to "come to the recognit

Andrew J. Bacevich: Can the U.S. Military Bring Lasting Change in Afghanistan?

[Andrew J. Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations at Boston University, is completing a Lannan Writing Residency Fellowship in Marfa, Texas.] What you see depends on where you sit. My seat at present is in Marfa, a small town in rural West Texas. Yet Marfa turns out to be an oddly instructive vantage point from which to contemplate the latest developments in far-off Afghanistan. On Saturday, U.S. Marines and other coalition troops launched the larg

John Prados: Diplomats Among Warriors

[John Prados is a senior fellow of the National Security Archive in Washington, DC. He is author, most recently, of Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1954-1975_(University Press of Kansas) and How the Cold War Ended: Debating and Doing History (Potomac Books, forthcoming).] In Afghanistan at the moment (February 2010), U.S. Marines, allied troops, and Afghan government soldiers are embarked on an offensive at a town called Marja in Helmand province. American commander-in-ch

Holly Brewer: North Carolina's Devaluing of History

[Holly Brewer is associate professor of Colonial and Revolutionary American history at N.C. State University. She has taught future teachers for more than 15 years. This year, she is also a fellow at the National Humanities Center, and is the major contributor to the website Real History Reform, dedicated to overturning the state's proposed curriculum.] The current changes suggested by the state Department of Public Instruction for the K-12

Harvey Wasserman: Our Founders were NOT Fundamentalists!

[HARVEY WASSERMAN'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES is at www.harveywasserman.com, along with PASSIONS OF THE POTSMOKING PATRIOTS by "Thomas Paine." This article is written in honor of the spirit of Howard Zinn.] The New York Times Sunday Magazine has highlighted yet another mob of extremists using the Texas School Board to baptize our children's textbooks. This endless, ever-angry escalating assault on our Constitutio

Martin Kramer: America and Afghani, the Historical Hero of Afghanistan

[Prof. Kramer, the author of Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America, was a full-time tenured academic at Tel Aviv University. He is now a senior fellow at the Adelson Institution of Strategic studies and a Senior Fellow at the Olin Institute at Harvard.]This photograph caught my eye the other day. It’s Ambassador Frank Ricciardone, number two

Daniel Pipes: In Mideast, Bet on a Strong Horse

[Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.] Several excellent attempts to explain the pathology of Arab politics exist; my personal favorites include studies by David Pryce-Jones and Philip Salzman. Now add to these The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (Doubleday, $26), an entertaining yet deep and important analysis by Lee Smith, Middle East correspondent

Victor Davis Hanson: Why Did Rome Fall—And Why Does It Matter Now?

A German scholar twenty years ago listed, I recall, some 210 reasons for the collapse of the Western Empire. Readers, you have heard many of them, plausible and otherwise — corruption, civil strife, Germanic barbarians, Christianity, lead in the pipes of the elite, etc.... The point? We see something like this today. What made American culture boom through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were traditional American values like the Protestant work ethic, family thrift, l

Harold Holzer: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President

[Harold Holzer, winner of the Lincoln Prize for his Lincoln at Cooper Union (Simon & Schuster 2004), recently completed Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860-1861 (Simon & Schuster 2008).] On the frigid and stormy evening of February 27, 1860, so the newspapers reported, Abraham Lincoln climbed onto the stage of the cavernous Great Hall of New York’s newest college, Cooper Union, faced a room overflowing with people, and delivered the m

Jonathan Zimmerman: Great Literature is Often Profane and Offensive

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University and lives in Narberth. He is the author, most recently, of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory" (Yale University Press). He can be reached at jlzimm@aol.com.] "Books should offend you," a professor told my literature class 30 years ago, when I started college. "They should make you squirm and sweat. They should keep you up at night.&quo

Randal Maurice Jelks: What is Going on with the Congressional Black Caucus?

[Randal Maurice Jelks is Associate Professor of American Studies and African American Studies and Associate Editor of American Studies at the University of Kansas.]Yesterday the New York Times (NYT) reported on the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) and its foundation. It was a fairly incriminating piece about how some of the largest American corporations, many

Tom Engelhardt: Hold Onto Your Underwear, This Is Not a National Emergency

Let me put American life in the Age of Terror into some kind of context, and then tell me you’re not ready to get on the nearest plane heading anywhere, even toward Yemen. In 2008, 14,180 Americans were murdered, according to the FBI. In that year, there were 34,017 fatal vehicle crashes in the U.S. and, so the U.S. Fire Administration tells us, 3,320 deaths by fire. More than 11,000 Americans died of the swine flu between April and mid-December 2009, according to the Centers for