Roundup: Historians' Take

John William Templeton: Ken Burns' The National Parks and Historic American Beach

One of the great ironies of the racist outbursts by South Carolina politicians against President Obama this year (take your pick, Sanford, DeMint, Wilson) is the assumption on their part that these white conservatives have an entitlement to consider themselves the “real Americans.” They supposedly represent the state with the largest percentage of African-American residents — South Carolina. There’s a reason for that. The first non-indigenous settlers in what is now the United Sta

Clare L. Spark: Oil politics and Obama's "Israel"

[Clare L. Spark is Director The Yankee Doodle Society] Since James Traficant, ex-Congressman from Youngstown Ohio, newly released from jail, appeared on Fox last night (9-10-09) on Greta Van Susteren’s program, and since he explained recent American interventions in the Middle East as a product of omnipotent Jewish machinations (machinations that eventuated in the understandable attacks of September 11, 2001!), I thought it appropriate to review 1. the importance of oil to American

Moshe Dann: Netanyahu’s Deft Touch

[The author, a former assistant professor of history, is a writer and journalist living in Jerusalem.] Unlike President Obama, Bibi Netanyahu calculates his survival in the short term amidst the uncertain sea of Israeli politics, as he can be thrown out by a vote of no-confidence. Leading a coalition of conservative parties, Netanyahu broadened the government by including Labor, which lost dramatically in the last election, and he has tried to entice his biggest rival K

Victor Davis Hanson: Our National 9/11 Schizophrenia

[NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.] Ninety-six months ago, 19 Islamic terrorists — led by Mohamed Atta, organized by Khalid Sheik Mohammed, and ordered by Osama bin Laden — hijacked four American airliners. They destroyed the World Trade Center, damaged the Pentagon, and murdered 2,974 people. The al-Qaeda–planned attack was the most lethal on the American homeland in our history. In response, the United States quickly att

Victor Davis Hanson: Not This Pig, Some thoughts on the rocky road on which the Obama administration has set out.

[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.] I supp

Victor Davis Hanson: Once Upon a Time . . . Whatever happened to the old Barack 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.] Once u

Victor Davis Hanson: Van Jones' Resignation

[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.] Ah, the Dividends of

John Steele Gordon: What's in a Name? If It's "Reagan," Quite a Lot

[John Steele Gordon is a business and financial historian] Scott Rasmussen has a new poll out regarding political labels. The public, it seems, doesn’t like any of them. “Liberal” continues its long slide, and only 15 percent now regard it as a positive. “Progressive,” which is what liberal politicians increasingly tend to call themselves to avoid using the ever-more-toxic “liberal,” is now positive to only 32 percent, down from 40 just after the last election. “Conserv

Lacy K. Ford Jr: The Curse of One-Party Domination

[Lacy K. Ford Jr.is professor of history and chair of the department at the University of South Carolina. His most recent book, “Deliver Us From Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South,” was published by Oxford University Press this month.] Many South Carolinians of both parties have suffered unexpected embarrassment from two of the state’s most prominent Republicans — Governor Mark Sanford, who admitted an affair with an Argentinian woman, and Congressman Joe Wilson, who broke

Mary L. Dudziak: September 11 and the meaning of America

Eighth anniversaries are a bit awkward. Across the nation, Americans did not stop in their tracks today, as they did seven years ago, at the first moment of impact. Perhaps two

Colin Gordon: We’ve Been Here Before ... History and Health Reform

[Colin Gordon is a professor in the history department of the University of Iowa and author of Dead on Arrival: The Politics of Health Care in Twentieth-Century America. ] “We all have some experience of a feeling which comes over us occasionally, of what we are saying and doing having been said or done befo

Mark S. Schantz: What the "death-denying" culture of the contemporary United States might learn from the "death-embracing culture" of our nineteenth-century forebears

[In Awaiting the Heavenly Country (2008), Mark S. Schantz takes account of "the Civil War and America's culture of death."] Are American attitudes toward death and dying on the move again? Ever since the publication of Philippe Ariès's highly influential Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present (1974), it has been canonical to see much of the West, and particularly the United States, as engaged in an effort to make the presence of death "for

Frederick Kagan: A Stable Pakistan Needs a Stable Afghanistan

[Mr. Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and co-author of "Ground Truth: The Future of U.S. Land Power" (AEI Press, 2008).] Winning the war in Afghanistan—creating a stable and legitimate Afghan state that can control its territory—will be difficult. The insurgency has grown in the past few years while the government's legitimacy has declined. It remains unclear how the recent presidential elections will affect this situation. Tryi

Walid Phares: Beslan’s Horror ... Lowest Jihad deserving Global Response

[Dr Walid Phares is the author of The Confrontation: Winning the War against Future Jihad and a senior fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.] Wars have always had inhuman results, no matter what is the scale. Since the early 20th century, Terrorism has perpetrated mass killing of innocents, condemned by all moral values. Salafi Jihadism in particular has produced extreme scales of bloodshed against civilians, comparing with the monstrosity of totalitarian regimes un

Stephen Brown: Silence of the Graves (on Russia and Poland)

[Stephen Brown is a contributing editor at Frontpagemag.com. He has a graduate degree in Russian and Eastern European history.] Martin Menzel. That is the name of the German sailor who fired the first shot to start the Second War World in Europe seventy years ago. Menzel was serving on the naval training ship Schleswig-Holstein, an old, pre-World War One battleship visiting Poland, when it opened fire without warning on a Polish munitions depot in the Vistula River on S

Jonathan Zimmerman: Little Red Schoolhouse: gone, but unforgettable

[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," which was published last month by Yale University.] The Little Red Schoolhouse is dead. Long live the Little Red Schoolhouse. Seven years ago, the U.S. Department of Education unveiled eight new entrances to its headquarters in Washington, D.C. Each was shaped like a little red schoolhouse - with a sl

Tom Engelhardt: Afghanistan by the Numbers, Measuring a War Gone to Hell

[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.] Here may be the single strangest fact of our American world: that at least three administration

Jonathan Zimmerman: The problem with Obama's speech to kids: It's bland

[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," which was published last month by Yale University.] New York - Here's a quick quiz in preparation for President Obama's speech to America's students today. To succeed in school and in life, you should: a. work hard b. set goals for yourself c. take responsibility for your own a

Barry Rubin: The Limits of Polite Discourse: Exposing People to Evil Ideas or Exposing Evil Ideas as...Evil?

[Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan).] After publishing an op-ed by a radical Israeli professor urging a boycott of Israel, Los Angeles Times editorial page edi

Lawrence B. Glickman: Consumer Protection Redux: The Lessons of History

[Lawrence B. Glickman teaches history at the University of South Carolina and is the author of Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America.] "We're proposing a new and powerful agency charged with just one job: looking out for ordinary consumers," said the president on June 17th. The centerpiece of his proposed overhaul of the nation's financial system, the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA), is designed to end what the president called "failure o