Roundup: Historians' Take

Stephen Schlesinger: Obama's Internationalism: Echoes of FDR, HST, and JFK

[Stephen Schlesinger is an Adjunct Fellow at the Century Foundation in New York City. He is the former Director of the World Policy Institute at the New School University in New York City (1997-2006). Mr. Schlesinger received his BA from Harvard University and his JD from Harvard Law School...For twelve years, he served as Governor Mario Cuomo’s speechwriter and foreign policy advisor. ] President Obama gave a speech last week in Moscow that conjures up memories of our greatest fore

Juan Cole: Truth Commission Needed to Examine Cheney, Assassination Squads, Cover-Ups

It turns out that the secret CIA program that Leon Panetta cancelled, and which former VP Richard Bruce Cheney ordered hidden from Congress, was in fact an assassination squad focusing on al-Qaeda figures.The problem with assassination teams is that they are extra-judicial. They are killing people who have not been proven to have done anything wrong. The long litany of mistakes that security

Tom Palaima: The captivation of those who can offer diversion

[Palaima (tpalaima@sbcglobal.net) is a professor of classics at the University of Texas.] The full-saturation media coverage of Michael Jackson between his unexpected death June 25 and his memorial service Tuesday understandably has us wondering about celebrity in our country and our cultural values. There is a long tradition of such issues and an equally long tradition of cultures going gaga over famous performers of all kind

James MacGregor Burns: Judicial supremacy and the rise of the high court

[James MacGregor Burns is professor of government emeritus at Williams College and author of “Packing the Court: The Rise of Judicial Power and the Coming Crisis of the Supreme Court.’’] WHEN THE Senate Judiciary Committee begins confirmation hearings for Judge Sonia Sotomayor tomorrow, Americans will have an opportunity to evaluate her qualifications and judicial philosophy. But it may be more illuminating for us to reexamine the powers of the Supreme Court itself - especially its

Peter Winn: Education of Sonia Sotomayor

[Peter Winn was Sotomayor's thesis advisor at Princeton. He now teaches at Tufts.] The first time she walked into my office in Princeton University's Dickinson Hall, Sonia Sotomayor was holding a paper she'd written for my Contemporary Latin America course. It was marked up with my corrections in red ink. Spanish was her first language, and many of her errors reflected its syntax. Where she had written "dictatorship of authority," I had scribbled "authoritarian dicta

Bob Batchelor: Google and the End of Wisdom

[Bob Batchelor teaches at the University of South Florida and writes on modern American popular culture. He has written or edited 10 books, including The 2000s (Greenwood Press) and the four-volume American Pop: Popular Culture Decade by Decade. Bob is currently working on books examining John Updike and Bob Dylan. His Web site is at bobbatchelor.com and he runs the blog pr-bridge.com.] Driving my four-year old daughter to a park in our rural Florida town, a sign in large, black cap

Jonathan Zimmerman: Obama’s test in Ghana

[Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of history and education at New York University, is author of “Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory.’’ ] ACCRA, Ghana ‘OBAMA FEVER Grips Ghana.’’ So read a recent front-page headline in a local newspaper, as Ghana prepares to host President Obama this weekend. Wherever you look - from billboards and wall murals to T-shirts and soccer balls - you see Obama’s smiling face. His picture is often paired with a photo of Ghana’s n

Tom Engelhardt: Mourning Michael Jackson, Ignoring the Afghan Dead

[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

Daniel Pipes: Limping away from a Shattered Iraq

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] American forces departed Iraqi cities last week to parades, fireworks, and

Mark Naison: Recovery is NOT Around the Corner ... The Challenge Facing Today’s College Graduates

[Mark Naison is Professor of African American Studies and History, Fordham University.] I hate to be the bearer of bad news on a 4th of July weekend, but this years college graduates are going to face a really tough job market for at least the next five years The economic free fall that began last October is starting to ease, but that doesn’t mean the economy is going to start growing rapidly, and generating millions of new jobs, any time soon. The banks are sti

A rambling, incoherent Sarah Palin celebrates Independence Day by disrespecting the troops.

[Scott Eric Kaufman was christened a Doctor of Philosophy of English by University of California, Irvine in the Summer of 2008. He earned his B.A. from Louisiana State University.] Sarah Palin closed her confused resignation speech by quoting a famous American general: In the words of General MacArthur said, “We are not retreating. We are advancing in another direction.”*Of course, given the d

Peter Dreier and Dick Flacks: Progressives Take Back the Flag

[Peter Dreier teaches politics at Occidental College and is co-author of The Next L.A.: The Struggle for a Livable City. Dick Flacks teaches sociology at the University of California-Santa Barbara and is the author of Making History: The American Left and the American Mind.] This July 4 feels different. We no longer have a president in the White House who questions our patriotism if we disagree with him. We now have a president who understands that loyalty to country is neither conservati

Jim Downs: Michael Jackson Vilified By Vanity Fair Writer Maureen Orth

[Jim Downs is an assistant professor of history at Connecticut College, specializing in African American studies and 19th-century U.S. history.] In polite society, children are often told, "If you don't have something nice to say, then don't say anything at all." Yet in the hours following the death of Michael Jackson, a number of media outlets turned to an unlikely source for commentary — Vanity Fair's Maureen Orth, who used the opportunity to vilify Jackson and remind Am

Eugene Volokh: The Founding Fathers agreed that the First Amendment protected 'symbolic expression.'

[ Mr. Volokh is professor of law at UCLA. This op-ed is adapted from "Symbolic Expression and the Original Meaning of the First Amendment," published in the April 2009 issue of the Georgetown Law Journal. ] Congress is once again considering a constitutional amendment to ban the desecration of the American flag. The proposal, introduced this spring in the Senate by David Vitter (R., La.), and cosponsored by 20 other Republicans and Democrat Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, pro

Greg Grandin: Democracy Derailed in Honduras

[Greg Grandin, a professor of history at New York University, is the author, most recently, of Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan).] When Honduran president Manuel Zelaya--who was rousted out of his bed on Sunday morning by a detachment of armed soldiers and forced into exile still in his pajamas--took office in early 2006, unionists, peasant activists and reformers expected little of the center-right politician, a rancher and member of

Woody Holton: On Money, a Founding Mother Knows Best

[Woody Holton is the author of "Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution" and the forthcoming "Abigail Adams, A Life." He teaches at the University of Richmond.] Thomas Jefferson died so deep in debt that his beloved estate, Monticello, had to be sold to satisfy his creditors. James Madison also left behind mounds of financial obligations. But John Adams, the man Jefferson turned out of the White House in 1801, died rich and debt-free -- despite shari

Ivan Eland: Is Barack Obama’s Realism Better than George W. Bush’s Idealism?

[Ivan Eland is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute. Dr. Eland is a graduate of Iowa State University and received an M.B.A. in applied economics and Ph.D. in national security policy from George Washington University.] Barack Obama’s reaction to the mass protests and violence in Iran shows he is following through on his pledge to be more like George H.W. Bush rather than his son, George W. Bush. Obama has admired the father’s

Tom Engelhardt: The volunteer military is at odds with a democratic country

The All-Volunteer Force (AVF) exists for a reason captured in a study by Colonel Robert D. Heinl, Jr., author of the"definitive history of the Marine Corps," published in Armed Forces Journal in 1971. The U.S. military in Vietnam was at that moment at the edge of chaos. As Colonel Heinl put it, it was experiencing"widespread conditions... that have only been exceeded in this century by the French Army's Nivelle mutinies of 1917 and the collapse of the Tsarist armies [of Russia] in 1916

Dilip Hiro: The Clash of Islam and Democracy in Iran

[Dilip Hiro is the author of five books on Iran, the latest being The Iranian Labyrinth: Journeys Through Theocratic Iran and its Furies (Nation Books), as well as most recently Blood of the Earth: The Battle for the World's Vanishing Oil Resources. His upcoming book After Empire: The Rise of a Multipolar World will be publish

Chalmers Johnson: How to Deal with America's Empire of Bases

[Chalmers Johnson is the author of The Blowback Trilogy -- Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis (2006), all published by Metropolitan Books. Check out a TomDispatch audio interview with Johnson about the U.S. Empire of Base