Roundup: Historians' Take

Ashley Cruseturner: Are the Two Major Parties Too Lost to Right this Ship?

[Ashley Cruseturner teaches American history at McLennan Community College in Waco, Texas. ] Eerily like the Democratic Party of 1854, the Democratic Party of 2010 may be a presidential election victory away from an ignominious repudiation and a decades-long detour through the political wilderness. Like the 1850s, the thrilling and astonishingly decisive victory of a handsome dark horse, paradoxically, may mask the structural instability of the Democratic ascendancy. Under the sw

Victor Davis Hanson: Our Obama Saga

[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. He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College, where he teaches each fall semester courses in military history and classical culture. This article originally

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China and the U.S.: Too Big to Fail

[Wasserstrom is a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, to be published in April by Oxford University Press] Beijing has fervently denounced U.S. President Barack Obama's plan to sell more arms to Taiwan, and loudly demanded that he break his coming date with the Dalai Lama. Is this proof that China-U.S. relations have entered a radically new and deeply worrisome phase? It'

Judith Stein: 'Green' Jobs Go to China, Too

[Judith Stein is a professor of history at the City University of New York and the author of the forthcoming"Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies" (Yale University Press). She can be reached at judithstein@worldnet.att.net.] The political tsunami in Massachusetts has concentrated the Democratic mind on the economy and employment. President Obama had thought he could turn his attention to health care while banking on the trinity of finan

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Big China Books: Enough of the Big Picture

[Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, specializing in Modern China. He is a contributor to the blog China Beat.] A Texas-based media-tracking organization recently announced that it had concluded, via a sophisticated statistical analysis of news sources, that China's leapfrog up the global economic hierarchy was the top story of the past decade. This claim is debatable: the Iraq War, climate c

Robert Zaretsky: Le Parti Thé

[Robert Zaretsky, a professor of French history at the University of Houston Honors College, is the author of “Albert Camus: Elements of a Life.”] More than 100,000 angry citizens united in the nation’s capital to take their country back: back from the tax collector and the political and financial elites, back from bureaucrats and backroom wheelers and dealers and, more elusively and alarmingly, back from those who, well, were not like them.... ...[T]his scene didn’t take plac

Juan Cole: Was US-Iran Rivalry Driving the Exclusion of Candidates in Iraq?

I am going to speculate a little today, but I am hoping it is informed speculation. I think an end-game drama is playing out in Iraq between the United States and Iran, and possibly among factions of Americans in Iraq, over the likely leader of the next Iraqi government. I am going to argue that the disqualification of 500 candidates, some of them prominent Sunni Arabs, was not a sectarian measure, but a strategic strike at a single candidate. Update: The ban on the 500 candidates has just been

Julian Zelizer: Americans Want Government Reforms

Responding to President Obama's State of the Union comments about the"deep and corrosive doubts about how Washington works," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that"the American people don't care about process." Yet Americans have indicated that they are quite unhappy with how their government is working. According to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, only 28 percent of those polled believe that the federal government is"working well," while seven out of 10 believe that the"u

Peter A. Coclanis: Haiti Needs to Be Built, Not Rebuilt

[Mr. Coclanis is a professor of history and director of the Global Research Institute at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.] In our haste to help Haiti, we need to resist the kind of sloppy thinking that can lead to false assumptions and overly optimistic plans. The recent call by International Monetary Fund Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn for a "Marshall Plan" for Haiti, which is now being echoed by many others, is a case in point... The

Bruce J. Schulman: House Should Pass Senate Health Care Bill

As the congressional leadership ponders the way forward on national health care reform, a sense of anti-climax overwhelms Washington and the nation. The stunning special election in Massachusetts and the president’s State of the Union, with its vague language, have only intensified the confusion.... The architects of the most important social legislation in U.S. history, the Social Security Act of 1935, felt the same ambivalence abut their handiwork — and the same letdown about the

Lawrence Wittner: Taxing the Rich

[Dr. Wittner is professor of history at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is "Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement" (Stanford University Press).] Decades ago, right wingers began championing cuts in income taxes for the rich and - when that lowered government revenue - turned around and claimed that government could no longer "afford" to maintain vital public services like education and health care

Daniel Pipes: How to Save the Obama Presidency: Bomb Iran

[Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.] I do not customarily offer advice to a president whose election I opposed, whose goals I fear, and whose policies I work against. But here is an idea for Barack Obama to salvage his tottering administration by taking a step that protects the United States and its allies.... ...Obama can give orders for the U.S. military to destroy th

Max Hastings: Lessons from Chilcot on the Atlantic Alliance

[The writer is an FT contributing editor.] Tony Blair’s appearance on Friday before the Chilcot inquiry on the Iraq war conformed to expectations. It was an exercise in self-justification, indeed self-righteousness, at one with everything the former UK prime minister has said since 2003. It may be argued that no national leader can afford to apologise for mistakes of the highest importance. To do so would be to surrender to the vultures the carcass of his reputation. I

John Q. Barrett: Justices on Fidelity to Precedent

[John Q. Barrett is professor of law at St. John's University School of Law.]Last week, the Supreme Court decided in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (click here) that a corporation’s political electioneering expenditures are protected by the First Amendment. The Court thus invalidated federal statutory limits on such expenditures and explicitly overruled two earlier decisions that had declared that such laws were constitutional.Because a foundational pri

Tom Engelhardt: Seven Days in January

[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. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.]Sometimes it pays to read a news story to the last paragraph where a reporter can slip in that little

Greg Grandin: Muscling Latin America

[Greg Grandin is professor of history at New York University.] In September Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa, delivered on an electoral promise and refused to renew Washington's decade-old, rent-free lease on an air base outside the Pacific coast town of Manta, which for the past ten years has served as the Pentagon's main South American outpost. The eviction was a serious effort to fulfill the call of Ecuador's new Constitution to promote "universal disarmament" and opp

Raymond Ibrahim: How Taqiyya Alters Islam's Rules of War

[Raymond Ibrahim is associate director of the Middle East Forum. A longer version of this article appeared in Middle East Quarterly]Islam must seem a paradoxical religion to non-Muslims. On the one hand, it is constantly being portrayed as the religion of peace; on the other, its adherents are responsible for the majority of terror attacks around the world. Apologists for Islam emphasize that it is a faith built upon high ethical standards; others stress that it is a religion of t

Jonathan Trembley: China Renames a Mountain for Avatar: Making History More… Exciting?

In China’s Zhangjiajie National Forest Park stand a multitude of ancient pillars that have been shaped by erosion over countless millennia. One of the most impressive such ‘rock-needles’ was called the Southern Sky Pillar up until last week. It is now called the Avatar Hallelujah Mountain in ‘honour’ of the recent movie. The question must be asked if historical monuments, people and places should remain untouched by man, preserving authenticity, or if, to service popular interest and financial c

Burt Folsom: Why Doesn't Government Control Work?

[Burt Folsom is professor of American history at Hillsdale College] In the debate over universal healthcare, one question has rarely been asked of its supporters: “What examples from U. S. history support the transfer of funds and power from private to government control?” In other words, do we have historical precedents for subsidizing businesses, or having them taken over by government, which then improved American lives? I know of no peacetime example that would e

Max Boot: Foreign Policy AWOL in State of the Union

I realize that Barack Obama, like most of his predecessors, came to the Oval Office primarily focused on his domestic agenda, not foreign policy, but I nevertheless find it stunning how little coverage national-security affairs received in this State of the Union. By my count, in a speech of 7,077 words, only 932 — 13 percent — were devoted to America’s role abroad, despite the fact that Obama’s most important responsibility is to act as commander in chief in wartime. Not surprisingly, giv