Roundup: Historians' Take

Juan Cole: Col. Reese on a Quick Withdrawal

The NYT on Friday published a memo from Col. Timothy R. Reese, Chief, Baghdad Operations Command Advisory Team, MND-B, Baghdad, Iraq, in which he argued for a more or less immediate departure of US troops from Iraq. AP notes that most US officers in Iraq do not agree with Reese. Some believe he is bein

Timothy R. Furnish: Hizb al-Tahrir emerges -- in Chicago

[Timothy R. Furnish, who holds a Ph.D. in Islamic history, is an analyst and author who specializes in Islamic eschatology and sects.] Last month, the transnational Islamist group Hizb al-Tahrir -- "Party of Liberation" -- held its inaugural American meeting in the Chicago suburb of Oak Lawn, Ill. Hizb al-Tahrir (HT) is officially dedicated to resurrecting the caliphate, the office of "successor" to Islam's founder, the Prophet Muhammad. While banned

Julian E. Zelizer: Obama has to speak up for health care reform

[Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University and author of the forthcoming, “Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security From World War II to the War on Terrorism.”] Presidents need to accomplish two goals when pushing for major legislation: explain their vision and resolve the details. President Obama has been surprisingly reticent about explaining his vision for health care reform. To avoid President Clinton’s fate in 1994, wh

David Wright: The Profiling of Sgt. Crowley

[David Wright is an associate professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and author, with David Zoby, of Fire on the Beach: Recovering the Lost Story of Richard Etheridge and the Pea Island Lifesavers (Scribner, 2001.)] It's 1999, summer, and night has just fallen. I'm a faculty fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard, and another young black faculty member, Arnold, and I are walking down Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, near the campus. A pas

Ingrid Lilly: The Religious Underpinnings of the Sotomayor Hearings

[Ingrid Lilly is Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies at Western Kentucky University.] Following the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings for the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, Mike Seidman, law professor at Georgetown, argued that the proceedings revealed only the “official version” of the American judicial system: that “fidelity to uncontested legal principles dictates results.” This simple claim, adopted by Sotomayor in her opening statemen

Chalmers Johnson: Three Good Reasons To Liquidate Our Empire

[Chalmers Johnson is the author of Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2006), and editor of Okinawa: Cold War Island (1999).] However ambitious President Barack Obama's domestic plans, one

James Millward: The Urumchi Unrest Revisited

[James Millward is professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He is the author of Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang and an expert on China and Central Asian history.] The violence in Xinjiang took place almost a month ago, but it continues to generate interesting commentary (see, for example, this

Julian Zelizer: How presidents work Congress

[Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. His new book, “Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security — From World War II to the War on Terrorism,” will be published this fall.] Woodrow Wilson, a student of Congress, moved with partisan efficiency, using his Democratic majority to steamroll the opposition. Franklin D. Roosevelt, a man of multiple positions, flooded t

Julian Zelizer: Why be afraid of government?

[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 this fall by Basic Books. Zelizer writes widely about current events.] Health care reform has gotten off track. The president's news conference fell flat. Polls show growing unease with the proposals currently in play. An

Jonathan Zimmerman: The Gates cop, in perspective

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. His most recent book is "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory.] Should police Sgt. James Crowley have arrested Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. on July 16, after Crowley responded to a 911 report of a possible break-in at Gates' Cambridge, Mass., house? And to what degree was the arrest related to the fact that Gates is black and Crowley is white? I don't know

Juan Cole: Empire's Paranoia About the Pashtuns

[Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan. His most recent book, Engaging the Muslim World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), was published this spring. He has appeared widely on television, radio, and on op-ed pages as a commentator on Middle East affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com. He has written, edit

William R. Polk: Waiting for the Obama We Elected

[William R. Polk was the member of the Policy Planning Council responsible for North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia from 1961 to 1965 and then professor of history at the University of Chicago where he founded the Middle Eastern Studies Center. He was also president of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs. His most recent book is Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism Guerrilla Warfare from the American Revolution to Iraq (New York: HarperCollins, paper

Josh Marshall: Obama's birth story

For all the obvious reasons, I hesitate to even enter this discussion. But (famous last words) I can't help myself. As you know, high on the list of current right-wing conspiracy theorizing (and sort of a stalking horse for underlying beliefs that President Obama's race and name make him rather less than fully American) is the claim that President Obama wasn't really born in Hawaii but was rather born abroad. And because of this, we're led to believe, he's ineligible to serve as pre

Peniel E. Joseph: Our National Postracial Hangover

[Peniel E. Joseph is an associate professor of African and Afro-American studies at Brandeis University. He is the author of Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (Henry Holt and Company, 2006). His new book, Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama, will be published in January by Basic Books.] My first reaction to watching the unfolding Saga of Skip Gates's Cambridge Arrest was that America's postracial bubble, like its rec

Walter A. McDougall: U.S. Foreign Policy Traditions and the Middle East

[Walter McDougall is co-chair of FPRI’s History Institute for Teachers and Alloy-Ansin Professor of International Relations, University of Pennsylvania. This essay is based on his presentation at “U.S. Foreign Policy and the Modern Middle East,” a Summer Institute for Teachers sponsored by The American Institute for History Education and The Wachman Center of

Glenn C. Loury: Obama, Gates and the American Black Man

[Glenn C. Loury, a professor of economics and social sciences at Brown University, is the author, most recently, of “Race, Incarceration and American Values.”] IN a speech delivered earlier this year, during Black History Month, Attorney General Eric Holder drew headlines by criticizing the tenor of public discourse on race. “Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot,” Mr. Holder said, “in things racial we have always been and I believe continue to be

Stephen M. Walt: 10 lessons on empire

[Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations at Harvard University.] As I mentioned awhile back, I devoted a good chunk of my vacation out west reading Piers Brendon's The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997. As you might imagine, I spent a lot of time thinking about possible parallels and lessons for America's current global position, just as English imperialists spent a lot of time pondering the Roman experience (ably documented by Edw

Timothy B. Weston: A Cultural Symbol Passes from the Scene: Ji Xianlin, Not Michael Jackson

[Timothy Weston teaches in the department of history at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is a participant in the National Committee on US-China Relations' Public Intellectuals Program and author of The Power of Position: Beijing University, Intellectuals, and Chinese Political Culture, 1898-1929 (UC Press, 2004).] It’s been moving to watch the response in China to the July 11 death of renowned scholar, Ji Xianlin (1911-2009). While Ji’s unsurprising departure at the ripe old

Tom Engelhardt: Don't Turn the Page on History

[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

Houston Baker: The myth of the post-racial United States

[The following post is by Houston Baker, Distinguished University Professor at Vanderbilt University and the author of many books, most recently Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era.] The surreal arrest of Professor Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr. in Cambridge, MA, this week highlights as well as any bizarre event might that we are not citizens of a “post-racial” Am