Roundup: Historians' Take

Source: Sightings, the newsletter of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
June 1, 2009

Martin E. Marty: Supreme Court Catholics

If/when Judge Sonia Sotomayor is sworn in as a member of the United States Supreme Court, there would/will be six Roman Catholics on it. My trained and focused eye -- trained to do "sightings" of public religion in the various media, including the internet, and focused on the chosen subject of the week -- has been seeking evidence of anti-Catholicism among mainline Protestant and Evangelical leaders, in the form of expressions of worry and prejudice. Unless between Saturday (when I wri

Source: Commentary
June 1, 2009

Arthur Herman: The Gitmo Myth and the Torture Canard

[Arthur Herman’s Gandhi and Churchill was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in general non-fiction.] On January 21, 2009, President Barack Obama issued his first executive order: He was closing the detention center at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba and calling a halt to the military commissions created in late 2001 to try terrorist suspects detained there. Like the startling opening chord of a Beethoven symphony, Obama’s action was intended to herald a new tone in Ameri

Source: Australian
June 1, 2009

David Burchell: The uprising China would have us forget

[Dr David Burchell is senior lecturer in politics and history at the Penrith campus of the University of Western Sydney.] Back in 1949, year zero of the Chinese Revolution, the exultant Jacobins of the new regime banned Qing Ming, treating it as yet another benighted symbol of the superstitious past, to be swept away as the slate was wiped clean. Last year, however, as part of the geological thawing of that great revolutionary winter, the Communist Party restored Qing Ming to the fe

Source: TPM (Liberal blog)
May 30, 2009

Jim Sleeper: If You Join the Sotomayor 'Race' Debate....

In the 1980s, when Judge Sonia Sotomayor was on the board of New York's Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, I was a columnist critical of some PRLDEF initiatives on racial election districting and on police and fire department promotional exams. I knew some PRLDEF staff but hadn't heard of Sotomayor, and since I've sworn off posting for awhile to w

Source: Special to HNN
May 30, 2009

Mark Naison: Sonia Sotomayor's Appointment Highlights a Time When Public Housing Was a Place of Hope and Possibility for Working Class Families in the Bronx

[Mark Naison is Professor of African American Studies and History, Fordham University.] There are many wonderful things about Sonia Sotomayor's appointment to the US Supreme Court, but one of special interest to me, as a scholar of Bronx history, is the way it highlights an era when public housing was a place of hope and possibility for working class families in the Bronx. Today, public housing is widely viewed as a failed experiment in social policy, a place where poor

Source: Edge of the American West (blog)
May 30, 2009

Louis Warren: Liberal Policies Didn't Lead to California's Collapse

[Mr. Warren is a professor of history at UC Davis and guest blogger at Edge of the American West.] California’s crisis is such that the number one manufacturing and farming state is unable to sell its bonds. As I explained in my last post, this condition stems in part from constitutional requirements of the supermajority. Some commentators on the right prefer

Source: Huffington Post
May 29, 2009

Stanley I. Kutler: The Supreme Court: New Face, Old Arguments

[Stanley Kutler taught constitutional and legal history at the University of Wisconsin.] The President has chosen Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. Of the reported finalists, she appears to be the easiest choice for confirmation. Sotomayor has the "right" gender, ethnicity, and experience; nevertheless, we can expect the Republicans to mount an "ideological" opposition, perhaps less strained for this nomination, but in what has become the familiar pattern of

Source: Times Literary Supplement
May 27, 2009

Ari Kelman: What the sixteenth President of the United States of America means to Barack Obama and others

[Ari Kelman is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of A River and Its City: The nature of landscape in New Orleans, 2003. ] On February 10, 2007, Barack Obama, then a relatively unknown US senator, stood on the steps of the Illinois statehouse. A crowd numbering in the thousands braved the winter weather to hear him speak. Obama first warmed his audience with inspirational snippets drawn from his autobiography. Then, setting up the

Source: This article appeared first in "Russian Analytical Digest." Shorter versions were published before in "Russia Profile" and "Open Democracy."
May 29, 2009

Andreas Umland: Fascist Tendencies in Russia’s Political Establishment ... The Rise of the International Eurasian Movement

[Dr Andreas Umland is Assistant Professor (Wissenschaftlicher Assistent) of Contemporary Russian History at The Catholic University of Eichstaett-Ingolstadt (http://ku-eichstaett.academia.edu ), general editor of the book series “Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society” (http://www.ibidem-verlag.de ) as well as co-editor of the German print and Russian web journals "Forum for the Ideas and History of Contempora

Source: Sightings, the newsletter of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
May 28, 2009

Lois Ann Lorentzen: Holy Death on the US/Mexico Border

[Lois Ann Lorentzen is Chair of the Theology and Religious Studies Department and Director of the Center for Latino Studies in the Americas at the University of San Francisco.] In the days just before Easter, the Mexican government bulldozed nearly forty shrines to La Santisima Muerte (Holy Death) along the US/Mexico border. The shrines, according to the military, formed an integral part of the “narco-culture” that the government is determined to wipe out. Does devotion to Santa M

Source: TomDispatch.com
May 28, 2009

William Astore: Educating Ourselves to Oblivion

[William Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), taught for six years at the Air Force Academy. He currently teaches at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. A TomDispatch regular, he also writes for History News Network and Nieman Watchdog. His essays have appeared in The Nation, Salon.com, Asia Times, Le Monde Diplomatique, and elsewhere. He may be reached at wastore@pct.edu.] Hardly a week goes by without dire headlines about the failure of the American education system. Ou

Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
May 27, 2009

Jonathan Zimmerman: Save summer school for those who need it

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University and lives in Narberth. His next book, "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory," will be published in June by Yale University Press.] What are you doing over the summer? That's what adults like to ask teenagers this time of year, as school draws to a close. And we're often surprised to hear the answer: more school. Believe it or not, the kids actually choose this option.

Source: Guardian (UK)
May 26, 2009

Anita Prazmowska: Breaking with Poland's past

[Anita Prazmowska is professor in international history at the London School of Economics.] All historic events seem to need a definition in terms of where they start and end. The collapse of communism in Poland was played out in full view of the world's media. The establishment of the Solidarity movement could well be treated as the starting point of this process. The alternative date could be that of the conclusion of the round table talks or even the first genuinely free e

Source: NY Review of Books
June 11, 2009

Niall Ferguson: The Crisis and How to Deal with It

This is the end of the age of leverage, which began, I guess, in the late 1970s, and saw an explosive rise in the ratio of debt to gross domestic product, not only in this country, but in many, many other countries. Once you end up with public and private debts in excess of three and a half times the size of your annual output, you are Argentina. You know, it's funny that people refer all the time back to the collapse of Lehman last September. Let's remember that this crisis actually began in J

Source: WSJ
May 26, 2009

Fouad Ajami: Pakistan's Struggle for Modernity (The country's voters have never endorsed religious extremism)

[Mr. Ajami is professor of Middle East Studies at The Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies and an adjunct senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. ] ... Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, was secular through and through. The pillars of his political life had been British law and Indian nationalism. Both had given way, and he set out for his new state, in 1947, an ailing old man, only to die a year later. He was sincere in hi

Source: American Thinker
May 24, 2009

Jack Cashill: Who Wrote [Obama's Book] Dreams and Why It Matters

[Jack Cashill has written six books this decade, one of which, "Hoodwinked," dealt with literary fraud. Cashill has also served as "literary doctor" on several other books, two of which were best sellers by household names. He has a Ph.D. in American studies from Purdue University.] While waiting for America's publishers to find their nerve, I had put my research into the authorship of Barack Obama's 1995 memoir Dreams From My Father on the back shelf. But the

Source: Executive Watch--A weblog of the Duke Law Program in Public Law
May 5, 2009

Peter M. Shane: The Ambivalent Presidency? Executive Power Under the Obama Administration

[Peter M. Shane's 2009 book, Madison's Nightmare: Unchecked Executive Power and the Threat to American Democracy, is published by the University of Chicago Press. He is the Jacob E. Davis and Jacob E. Davis II Chair in Law at the Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law, where he also directs the Project on Law and Democratic Development.]

Source: Counterpunch.com
May 22, 2009

Clive Hamilton: Bush's Shocking Biblical Prophecy Emerges: God Wants to "Erase" Mid-East Enemies "Before a New Age Begins"

[Clive Hamilton is a Visiting Professor at Yale University He can be reached at: mail@clivehamilton.net.au.] The revelation this month in GQ Magazine that Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary embellished top-secret wartime memos with quotations from the Bible prompts a question. Why did he believe he could influence President Bush by that means? The answer may lie in an alarming story about George Bush's Christian millenar

Source: Austin American-Statesman
May 25, 2009

Tom Palaima: Remember the costs of war

[Tom Palaima is professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin and a writer of commentaries and book reviews.] American soldiers have been risking and losing their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan for seven Memorial Days, longer than any American war except Vietnam. Omar Bradley's wisdom"nothing succeeds like excess" only applies to conventional warfare. Our overwhelming advantages in mobility, manpower and firepower are negated in guerilla wars of insurgency. Why have we let thi

Source: TruthDig.com
May 23, 2009

Stanley I. Kutler: Congressional Duck and Cover

[Stanley Kutler is the author of “The Wars of Watergate” and other writings. ] Congress is broken. The framers of the Constitution, building on nearly six centuries of parliamentary experience, situated Congress at the heart of the American constitutional system. Representative government was believed to be the purest, and yet workable, means of self-government. For the past 25, however, Congress has made a joke of that system, as it has trivialized and mocked any meaningful represe