Roundup: Historians' Take

Daniel Pipes: Swiss Minarets and European Islam

[Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.] What importance has the recent Swiss referendum to ban the building of minarets (spires next to mosques from which the call to prayer is issued)? Some may see the 57.5 to 42.5 percent decision endorsing a constitutional amendment as nearly meaningless. The political establishment being overwhelmingly opposed to the amendment, the ban

Stanley Kutler: Financial Oversight: We're Still Waiting, Mr. President

[Stanley Kutler is the author of “The Wars of Watergate” and other writings.] Even if President Barack Obama doesn’t deliver the change he promised, at least he could restore basic oversight in key financial areas. The need was highlighted by a story out of Cleveland last week. On Friday, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. regulators seized the AmTrust Bank, the fourth-largest U.S. bank or savings institution to fail in 2009. The AmTrust debacle—the FDIC had dutifully guar

Victor Davis Hanson: Riding the Back of the Tiger

[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.] …is what A

Jonathan Tremblay: Vladimir Putin to Run for Third Term: A History of Russian Baldness

[Jonathan Tremblay is a historian and a Breaking News Editor for the History News Network] Vladimir Putin, currently serving as Prime Minister of Russia and former President (2000-2008), has said he is considering a run to regain his presidential title. The Russian constitution restricts a person to two terms yet the amount of time for each of these terms has recently been increased to six years rather than four. As such, Putin could run to serve four more years. The Russian elector

Victor Davis Hanson: Our Present Anxieties

[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.]These

Richard F. Miller: Obama's not very good "Midst of Battle" speech

A combat-embedded Harvard-trained historian executes an academic takedown on Obama’s West Point speech. What follows is a guest post from Richard F. Miller, author of In Words and Deeds: Battle Speeches in History. I picked up Miller’s book the other day, intrigued by the idea of a military historian who takes his deadly subject matter seriously enough that he sought to experience it firsthand.* We had a brief email exchange, and this quick, off-the-cuff assessment of Obama’s Afghanistan escalat

Michael Burleigh: Al-Qaeda's Decade of Terror

[Michael Burleigh is the author of Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism.] Around the world, the decade of terror has generated different anniversaries, the latest being the 12 months separating Indians from the Mumbai gun and grenade atrocities. The announcement that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11 atrocity, and four accomplices are to be tried in New York, also makes this an apt moment to assess the deeper impact of terrorism. Al-

Luke A. Nichter: Who Was Fritz Kraemer? And Why We Should Care.

[Mr. Nichter is Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M University-Central Texas. He prepared this article for www.nixontapes.org.] Whether Vietnam, Iraq, or now Afghanistan, wars come and go, but the real battle is a philosophic one between two sects of conservatives. In The Forty Years War: The Rise and Fall of the

Jill Lepore: Health care hopes ... from the 1910s

“At present the United States has the unenviable distinction of being the only great industrial nation without compulsory health insurance,” the Yale economist Irving Fisher said in a speech in December. December of 1916, that is. More than nine decades ago, Fisher thought that universal health coverage was just around the corner. “Within another six months, it will be a burning question,” he predicted. Oh, well. What’s a century, give or take? Health care has been on the docket lon

Susan M. Reverby: A New Lesson from the Old "Tuskegee" Study

[Susan M. Reverby is the McLean Professor in the History of Ideas and Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College and is the author of Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and its Legacy.] “Don’t take the swine flu vaccine. Remember the Tuskegee Experiment Syphilis Vaccine,” a recent post on Twitter warns. The message is simple: “Tuskegee,” America’s notorious medical research study, is still considered as our own equivalent to Nazi experimentation that links state po

Jonathan Zimmerman: You think you know Tiger Woods?

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University.] Do you know Tiger Woods? Of course you don't. But you think that you do. That's why you care so very much about Mr. Woods' apparent extramarital affairs, which have swirled around the golf star ever since his November 27 car crash near his Florida home. And that's also why Woods' plea for privacy – posted on his website yesterday – sounds so poignant, and also so preposterous. Modern

Tom Engelhardt: Victory at Last! Monty Python in Afghanistan

[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.] Let others deal with the details of President Obama’s Afghan speech, with the on-ramps and off-ram

Andrew J. Bacevich: Obama's folly

[Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University.] Which is the greater folly: To fancy that war offers an easy solution to vexing problems, or, knowing otherwise, to opt for war anyway? In the wake of 9/11, American statecraft emphasized the first approach: President George W. Bush embarked on a "global war" to eliminate violent jihadism. President Obama now seems intent on pursuing the second approach: Through mil

Jon Wiener: From Grant Park to Afghanistan: Obama's Defining Moment

[Jon Wiener started writing for The Nation in 1984. Since then he's written more than 100 stories and reviews for the magazine, many about American history, university politics, and California life. He's also professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and a Los Angeles radio host.] When Barack Obama gave his victory speech on election night last November, he picked Chicago's Grant Park – the legendary site of the battle between anti-war demonstrators and Chicago c

Gary Leupp: It's Obama's War Now

[Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades. He can be reached at:

Juan Cole: Obama's surge: Has the president been misled by the Iraq analogy?

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] President Barack Obama’s just-announced plan for Afghanistan seems modeled less on Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam strategy than on George W. Bush’s Iraq exit strategy. Or, at least it is modeled on the Washington mythology that Iraq was turned from quagmire into a face-saving qualified success by sheer indomit

Jim Sleeper: Commander-in-What?

[Jim Sleeper, a writer and teacher on American civic culture and politics and a lecturer in political science at Yale, is the author of The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York (W.W. Norton, 1990) and Liberal Racism (Viking, 1997, Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).] Barack Obama spent two years campaigning to become the leader of a corporatist, national-security state whose ways of wielding power aren't those of a republic. "States hover like crow

Victor Davis Hanson: Why the Liberal Anger Over the Asian Tour?

[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.] There is

Victor Davis Hanson: Dean Obama

[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.] That w

Victor Davis Hanson: A Manifest Disaster

[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.] Two po