Roundup: Historians' Take

Victor Davis Hanson: America's Obama Obsession

[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.] For 30 months the nation has been in the grip of a certain Obama obsession, immune to counterva

Victor Davis Hanson: Presidential Purpose?

[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.]Whom is Barack Obama Afraid of? — Another Barack Obama One of the reasons w

Victor Davis Hanson: All Falling Down . . .

[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.]Money Obama’s mega-borrowing is predicated on a rather thin margin of safety. W

The image of the prophet in Islam: the real story

by Oleg Grabar

Are representations of the Prophet Muhammad permitted in Islam? To make or not to make images of the Prophet: that is the question I will try to answer. 

Juan Cole: Should US Troops in Iraq be held Hostage to the next Election?

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.]Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the Iraqi parliament again on Thursday failed to pass an electoral law to govern the holding of the planned January 16 parliamentary elections. The Kurdish delegates refused to come into the parliament building, thereby denying the session a quorum. The Turkmen and Arab delegates had demanded that K

Patrick Buchanan: Iraq and Afghanistan ... Would We Do It Again?

[Patrick Buchanan is the author of the new book Churchill, Hitler, and ‘The Unnecessary War,’ now available in paperback.] If we had it to do over, would we send an army into Afghanistan to build a nation? Would we invade Iraq? While these two wars have cost 5,200 dead, a trillion dollars and a divided America facing an endless war, what have we won? Gen. Stanley McChrystal needs 40,000 to 80,000 more troops, or we risk “mission failure” in A

Charles Geisst: 1929 Crash and Today: It's the Consumer

[Charles Geisst is a professor of finance at Manhattan College. Geisst is the author of Wall Street: A History his most recent book is Collateral Damaged: The Marketing of Consumer Debt to America.] The Crash of 1929 and the credit market crisis have one inescapable fact in common. Both originated with a decline in consumer-related spending that precipitated a larger crisis leading to depression-like conditions. When the economy is driven by two thirds to 75% consumption, it would b

Julian E. Zelizer: Running the Senate ain't easy

[Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School. His new book, “Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security — From World War II to the War on Terrorism,” will be published by Basic Books in December.] In recent months, many commentators have been critical of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). After Democrats took control of Congress in 2006, Reid failed to persuade Republicans who were unhappy wit

Victor Sebestyen: U.S. Can Learn From Russia's Afghan War

[Victor Sebestyen is the author of “Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire.”] The highly decorated general sat opposite his commander in chief and explained the problems his army faced fighting in the hills around Kabul: “There is no piece of land in Afghanistan that has not been occupied by one of our soldiers at some time or another,” he said. “Nevertheless much of the territory stays in the hands of the terrorists. We control the provincial centers, but we cannot maintain

Victor Davis Hanson: Truman and the Principles of U.S. Foreign Policy

[Mr. Hanson is a senior fellow in classics and military history at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Most recently he is the editor of "Makers of Ancient Strategy," forthcoming from Princeton University Press.] Upon entering office, Barack Obama knew little about foreign policy. But then neither did Vice President Harry S. Truman when Franklin Delano Roosevelt died suddenly on April 12, 1945. President Obama often invokes the supposed mess abroad—espec

Richard Sylla: 1929: 'Great Crash' Vs. 'Break in the Market'

[Richard Sylla is Henry Kaufman Professor of the History of Financial Institutions and Markets at New York University] Because their teachers and their history books said so, most people know that the Great Crash of 1929 caused the Great Depression of the early 1930s. I am not one of these people. What I know is that the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 306 the day before Black Thursday, October 24, 1929, and at 199 on November 13, three weeks later. That drop of

Daniel Pipes: Karzai's Brother and Washington's Kept Politicians

[Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.] Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of the Afghan president, "a go-between between the Americans and the Taliban," and "a suspected player in the country's booming illegal opium trade," the New York Times informs us, "gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years."

Thomas Frank: Obama Is Right About Fox News

[Thomas Frank founded The Baffler magazine in 1988, and he edits it to this day. He has a PhD in American History (U. of Chicago 1994) and is the author of four books, all of them having to do with the cultural inversions of our times: The Conquest of Cool (1997), One Market Under God (2000) and What's the Matter With Kansas? (2004). His book about conservative governance, The Wrecking Crew, was published in 2008.] Journalism has a special, hallowed place for stories of its practiti

LeeAnna Keith: Not Just Another (Black Is) Beautiful Face

[LeeAnna Keith teaches history at Collegiate School in New York City. She is the author of 'The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction.' In the article below, Keith reflects on the role race may have played in the decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama.] Even the most outspoken critics of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize have hesitated to suggest that President Obama was rewarded simply for his good loo

Juan Cole: Obama's foreign policy report card

Why can't the administration of President Barack Obama get the word out about its policy successes? President Obama campaigned on an ambitious platform of withdrawing from Iraq, engaging Iran on its nuclear program and persuading the Pakistani government to take on the Taliban and al-Qaida. Despite the charge by critics from both the right and the left in the wake of his winning the Nobel Peace Prize that he has accomplished little so far, in fact he has already set in motion significant change

Daniel Pipes: Turkey: An Ally No More

[Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.] "There is no doubt he is our friend," Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, says of Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, even as he accuses Israel's foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman of threatening to use nuclear weapons against Gaza. These outrageous assertions point to the profound change of orientation by Turkey's

Gerald Horne: Stalin Was No Worse Than the Founding Fathers

[Gerald Horne is Professor of History and African-American Studies at University of Houston. This is a Letter To the Editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education.] Jonathan Brent expresses surprise—if not shock and disgust—at what he sees as the rehabilitation of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in contemporary Russia ("Postmodern Stalinism," The Chronicle Review, September 25).Pray tell: Is there an analytica

Jim Sleeper: American Brethren: Hebrews and Puritans

[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).] For most of us, the Old Testament names given to scores of American towns (Canaan, Bethlehem, Sharon, Lebanon, even Jerusalem) and the Hebrew phrases on the seals of Yale, Dartmouth, and Col

Jonathan Tremblay: The BNP on BBC: Democracy and Racism (A Short History of British Fascism)

[Jonathan Tremblay is a historian and is currently an intern for History News Network] Britain has recently succumbed to the televised political debate, a forum which has become the norm in America but that remains tentative and novel across the pond. Indeed, in a show of impartiality, the BBC-hosted event invited all the major players but one invitation, that of Nick Griffin from the British National Party (BNP), has stirred up a fair amount of protest. The BBC reiterates its impar

Mark Bauerlein: Rush and Race: A Guest Post by Donald Lazere

[Mark Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory University. Donald Lazere is professor emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and currently teaches at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.] In the current controversy over whether Rush Limbaugh is a racist, he and his supporters have based their denials on what they claim are inaccurate accounts of radio and TV broadcasts. A more verifiable source, however, is the text of his two mega-be