Roundup: Historians' Take

Michael H. Hunt: Obama Pronounces on Afghanistan: Deja Vu All Over Again!

[Mr. Hunt is Everett H. Emerson Professor of History Emeritus, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.] Barack Obama has an impressive intellect, and he has given the decision on Af

Juan Cole: Top Ten things that Could Derail Obama's Afghanistan Plan

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] 1. Obama's plan depends heavily on training 100,000 new soldiers and 100,000 new policemen over the next three years. It has taken 8 years to train the first 100,000 soldiers fairly well, and the same period for the Europeans to train a similar number of police badly. Can the pace really be more than do

Juan Cole: Obama Partnering with Afghan Gov't But is there any there ?

[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 commitment to "finish the job" in Afghanistan by sending 55,000 US troops to that country (counting the 21,000 he dispatched last winter shortly after being inaugurated) depends heavily on a hope of building up an Afghan government and army over to which the US can even

Daniel Pipes: The Swiss Ban on Minarets: A Possible Turning Point

[Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.] On one level, the vote to ban minarets in Switzerland is a triviality. The constitutional amendment does not ban mosques, it does not pull down the country's four existing minarets, nor does touch the practice of Islam in Switzerland or bear on the many issues concerning Swiss Muslims. In all likelihood, the political establishment in Bern, wh

Juan Cole: Swiss Islamophobia Betrays Enlightenment Ideals

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] Switzerland on Sunday voted by 58 percent in favor of banning minarets.This campaign poster was banned for being racist, but apparently the goal of the poster, now that is all right.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Film has chaste appeal in a promiscuous time, 'Twilight' fans may be reacting to 'hookup' culture

[Jonathan Zimmerman lives in Narberth and teaches history at New York University. 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.] Do you want to "hook up"? If you're like lots of American high school and college students, the answer is "yes." But when you look at their reasons, you'll find

Jonathan Tremblay: Switzerland Bans New Islamic Structures: The Long-Standing Myth of Swiss Neutrality

[Jonathan Tremblay is a Historian and Breaking News Editor at the History News Network] The people of Switzerland have voted and passed a law banning the construction of new minaret towers or the domed tower above mosques from which Muslims call for prayer. By a majority of 57%, the law has been deplored internationally as stemming from a reactionary fear towards Islamic fundamentalism. Supporters of the measure however claim that it is a first step in curbing Muslim tendencies towa

Niall Ferguson: An Empire at Risk

[Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch professor of history at Harvard and the author of The Ascent of Money.] Call it the fractal geometry of fiscal crisis. If you fly across the Atlantic on a clear day, you can look down and see the same phenomenon but on four entirely different scales. At one extreme there is tiny Iceland. Then there is little Ireland, followed by medium-size Britain. They're all a good deal smaller than the mighty United States. But in each case the economic crisi

Juan Cole: IAEA Condemnation of Iran: An Omen of New Sanctions or a Symbolic Slap on the Wrist?

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] The board of the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency on Friday condemned Iran for secretly building a new nuclear enrichment facility at Fordo near Qom, and called on it to mothball the new site. The resolution was backed by the permanent members of the UN Security Council, including China

Alonzo Hamby: Afghanistan and the public opinion polls

Long ago, I did a quick and dirty comparison of public opinion polls re popular support for the Korean War and the Vietnam War (from mid-1965 on) and actually came to the conclusion that support for Vietnam lasted longer, despite the vociferous anti-war movement that began almost at the beginning re Vietnam. In general, I think, democratic publics recoil from sacrifice and tire of it over a prolonged period. (We must remember that, for us, World War II was a three and a half year e

Joshua Brown: LBJ also promised to get the job done (illustration)

[Joshua Brown doubles as a historian and illustrator. He is the co-director of the New Media Lab and Executive Director of the Center for Media and Learning/American Social History Project (ASHP) at the CUNY Graduate Center. He received his Ph.D. in American history from Columbia University. Since the beginning of the Iraq War he has become well-known for his caustic illustrations. ]

Victor Davis Hanson: The New War against Reason

[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.] Barack Oba

Jonathan Zimmerman: Doctors can't write Rx for reform

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory."] Should doctors make health care policy? At first glance, the answer would seem obvious: of course they should. They’ve fought in the trenches, bearing personal witness to every fault of our medical system: uninsured patients, stingy HMOs and runaway costs. To reform the system, then, we should all pay

Stanley Kutler: Obama Risks Losing His Judicial Prize

During the Civil War and Reconstruction era—best described as our “Second American Revolution”—the political parties marched in virtual lock step in consistent, rigid opposition to each other. Democrats steadfastly resisted the Republicans’ organic program for a new nation, including the Homestead Act, the land-grant college program, a protective tariff, a transcontinental railroad, a national currency and a reordering of judicial power. Party discipline soon weakened, and legislato

Daniel Pipes: Islamism 2.0

[Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.] To borrow a computer term, if Ayatollah Khomeini, Osama bin Laden, and Nidal Hasan represent Islamism 1.0, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (the prime minister of Turkey), Tariq Ramadan (a Swiss intellectual), and Keith Ellison (a U.S. congressman) represent Islamism 2.0. The former kill more people but the latter pose a greater threat to Western ci

Maura Elizabeth Cunningham and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom: Obama's Trip to China--The View from the Seventies

[Maura Elizabeth Cunningham is the Associate Editor of The China Beat electronic magazine and a graduate student in History at UC Irvine; Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is a Professor of History at UC Irvine and the author of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know forthcoming in April from Oxford University Press. ] Debate continues over whether Bara

Ruth Rosen: Why are Americans fascinated by Sarah Pahlin?

[Ruth Rosen, a former columnist for the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle, is professor emerita of history,teaches at the University of California, Berkeley and is the author of The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America (Penguin, 2006) www.ruthrosen.org] The meteoric ascent of Sarah Palin as a celebrity puzzles many Americans. Why, her detractors ask, did a presidential candidate choose an inexperienced a

Fred Siegel: 1919: Betrayal and the Birth of Modern Liberalism

[Fred Siegel is a contributing editor to City Journal and a visiting professor at St. Francis College in Brooklyn.] Today’s state-oriented liberalism, we are often told, was the inevitable extension of the pre–World War I tradition of progressivism. The progressives, led by President Woodrow Wilson, placed their faith in reason and the better nature of the American people. Expanded government would serve as an engine of popular goodwill to soften the harsh rigors of industrial capit

Nick Turse: The Pentagon Garrisons the Gulf

[Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com and the winner of a 2009 Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction as well as a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, In These Times, and regularly at TomDispatch. Turse is currently a fellow at New York University's Center for the United States and the Cold War. A paperback edition of his book The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan

Richard Williams: 47 Years after Housing Anti-discrimination Bill ... Where Do We Stand Today?

[Richard Williams, University of Notre Dame.] Forty-seven years ago, on November 20, 1962, President Kennedy signed Executive Order 11063, prohibiting federally-funded housing agencies from denying mortgages to any person based on their race, color, creed or national origin. Kennedy was fulfilling a campaign promise to make"one stroke of the pen" that would allow millions of black American children"to grow up in decency." Many strokes of many other presidents' pens followed, in