Roundup: Historians' Take

Howard Zinn: On "The People Speak," the Supreme Court, and Haiti

Note: Howard Zinn passed away on Jan. 27 at age 87. This is his latest published interview, conducted by Joan Brunwasser at OpEdNews.Howard Zinn is a historian, author, social activist, and American icon. His book"A People's History of the United States" has sold over two million copies. Welcome back to OpEdNews, Howard. The dust has had a chance to settle a bit since last month's airing of your documentary"The People Speak." What kind of feedback have you gotten so far?

Niall Ferguson: India Holds the Keys to Success

[Niall Ferguson is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor at Harvard Business School. This interview appeared in the Economic Times.]You have held the position that the financial crisis has not entirely played itself out. How long more do you think there is to go and why do you think so?In the sense that there are still significant problems in the US financial system and the European financial system, there

Victor Davis Hanson: Our Populist President?

I could believe President Obama’s postmortem take that the same populist sentiment that propelled Scott Brown to office also earlier sent him to the White House — if we saw fresh liberal Democrats winning seats in places like Alabama against entrenched Washington Republican insiders. But I don’t think that is happening quite yet. The populist anger that, in sequential fashion, accounted for Bush’s drop in the polls, Republicans’ loss of majority status in Congress, and Obama’s winni

Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis: Et Tu, ACLU?

[Attorney Bob Fitrakis & Historian Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection. Bob's Fitrakis Files are at www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared. Harvey's History of the US is at www.harveywasserman.com.] The Supreme Court's atrocious Citizen's United green light for unlimited corporate campaign spending had a willing accomplice---the American Civil Liberti

Jeff Biggers: Mr. President, Welcome to the Saudi Arabia of Coal

[Jeff Biggers is the American Book Award-winning author of Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland (Nation Books/Basic Books).] While President Obama addresses the US Congress in his historic State of the Union tonight, our nation will sit back and burn an estimated 115,000 tons of coal. Close to 250,000 tons of CO2 will be released from coal-fired plants during the hourlong presentation; hundreds of pounds of toxic mercury emissions will enter our air,

Henry Lewis Gates Jr.: It Wasn't the Devil that Hurt Haiti

If there is a curse on Haiti, we don’t have to sully another person’s religious beliefs to find it. Perhaps curses, like charity, start at home. And the first two places to search for the source would be the White House and Congress, especially those historically dominated by Dixiecrats. Starting with Thomas Jefferson and continuing in a steady march that only really began to end when President Bill Clinton sent General Colin Powell to broker the deal for the generals to “retire” and restore Hai

Tom Engelhardt: Our Wars Are Killing Us

[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.]Back in 2007, when General David Petraeus was the surge commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, he had a pen

Bruce J. Schulman: The Reagan Revolution: It's Alive!

[Bruce J Schulman, the William E. Huntington professor at Boston University, is the co-editor of “Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s.”] A year ago, the 30-year conservative ascendancy in American politics seemed to have run its course. Barack Obama entered the White House with a larger share of the popular vote than any Democrat since Lyndon B. Johnson’s liberal landslide in 1964. With huge majorities in both houses, including a supposedly “filibuster-proof” 6

Juan Cole: The Irrelevance of Bin Ladin

An audio message allegedly from Usamah Bin Laden was released Sunday, claiming that the attempted Christmas day airline attack over Detroit was his work. I'm going to go out on a limb here and assert two things about the audio. First, I do not think it is genuine. Second, I think it demonstrates that Bin Laden, whether he is dead or alive, is now irrelevant. Nothing about this 'message' smells right. The audio's claim that Bin Laden was behind the Christma

Julian Zelizer: Learn From History Mr. President

[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.] President George H.W. Bush once admitted that he was not good at the "Vision Thing." He was not able to convey a broader agenda that outlined the direction in which he wanted to move the country.

Sidney Mintz: Whitewashing Haiti’s History

[Sidney Mintz is professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. has studied Caribbean rural life, social history, and the Afro-Caribbean tradition from the time of his first fieldwork in Puerto Rico (1948), through his presentation of the W.E.B. Du Bois Lectures at Harvard (2003)] ...The New World’s second republic has indeed known political strife, bad leadership, and poverty. But to judge Haiti fairly, it is essential to remember that the country won its independence under the wors

Jonathan Trembley: Tiger Woods and King Edward VIII: When a Personal Problem Becomes a National Dilemma

For two months now, golf superstar Tiger Woods has had to contend with a media whirlwind surrounding his alleged multiples infidelities and possible spousal abuse by his wife. These highly personal problems are probably difficult enough to deal with without the constant hounding of paparazzi and continuous coverage by a media world that seems stuck in a perpetual ‘slow news day’. That being said, no one could tell the media and the celebrity-idolizing populations of the world to ‘mind their own

Rick Perlstein and Mark Schmitt: Theory of Change at Year One

[Rick Perlstein is the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America and Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus.] [Mark Schmitt is the executive editor of The American Prospect. Previously he was a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, director of the Governance and Public Policy program at the Open Society Institute, and policy director to Senator Bill Bradley.] This month marks not just the one-year anniversa

Larry Clayton: The Haiti I Remember

[Larry Clayton, an expert in colonial Latin America and U.S.-Latin American relations, is professor of history at the University of Alabama.] “The whole of Haiti,” I wrote in my journal in October of 1965, “excluding a minuscule segment, is poverty-stricken beyond belief. We brought some people-to-people stuff in [humanitarian assistance in today’s jargon] but the dent it made was nil at best.” I was a Lieutenant (j.g.), the Weapons Officer on the USS Donner (LSD 20) ma

Harold M. Hyman: Fight over 'Negro' has a Sad History

[Harold M. Hyman is the William P. Hobby Professor Emeritus of History at Rice University.] ...From the 1620s through our Civil War, generations of Africans were degraded into lifetime servitude in the American states and territories committed to slavery, a status their offspring inherited. In nonslave states, they were relegated to inferior economic and social existences. During the tragically long Jim Crow decades after Appomattox through World War II, many whites used “negro” and

Jesse Lemisch: George Clooney's Haiti -- and Beyond

[Jesse Lemisch is Professor Emeritus of History at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York.] George Clooney (currently in "Up in the Air") organized on short notice a technically and musically fine two hour fund-raising telethon, "Hope for Haiti," which was broadcast on January 22 on most networks, many cable channels, on the Web, and both in and beyond the US.... This was a worthy and well-intentioned endeavor, and we ought

Erika Lee and Judy Yung: Angel Island's History Offers Lessons on Immigration Policy

[Erika Lee is associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota. Judy Yung is professor emeritus of American studies at UC Santa Cruz. They are the authors of the forthcoming book, "Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America."] ...Built to enforce laws that specifically excluded Chinese and other Asian immigrants from the country, the Angel Island Immigration Station turned away countless newcomers and deported thousands of U.S. residents who were considered ri

Godfrey Hodgson: It’s the Presidency, Not the President

[Godfrey Hodgson is a fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. He is a former foreign correspondent for British newspapers who has worked in forty-eight of the fifty states. His most recent book is The Myth of American Exceptionalism (Yale, 2009)] To be disappointed is often to have had unreasonable or unachievable expectations. If many are disappointed with Barack Obama’s first year as United States president it may be because they did i

Daniel Martin Varisco: God is My Co-Sniper

[Daniel Martin Varisco is Chair, Anthropology Department at Hofstra University.] Not since Tammy Faye Baker embroidered Bible verses on her underwear has there been as eye-opening a scriptural scandal as the recent revelation that an American manufacturer routinely engraves Bible verses on U.S. military gun sights. As reported earlier this week, the Michigan-based corporation Trijicon has supplied the gun sights used by American marines to aim at and shoot the Taliban and their sym

Doris Kearns Goodwin: Following in JFK's Footsteps

[Presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin won the Pulitzer Prize for No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II and the author, most recently, of Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.] Probably the most important thing to think about in evaluating the first year is what it reveals about the temperament of the leader. The events and challenges may change in years two, three, and four, but the style of leadership, the strengt