Roundup: Historians' Take

Bob Buzzanco: Plaintains and Fried Rice, Dollars and Yuan: Latin America, the PRC, and the United States

[ Bob Buzzanco is a professor in the history department at the University of Houston. ] The ghost in the room, Cuba, was the most important topic when President Barack Obama, in his opening remarks at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, offered a “new beginning” with Havana. The specifics at this point are not huge: family travel, remittances, perhaps Cuban membership in the OAS, but Obama has shown, unlike his predecessor, that at least he has a grip on reality.

Martin E. Marty: One hundred years of "America," the Catholic publication

It is not hard to sight what I am sighting for Sightings this week, since its shiny gold “100 Years” cover is almost blinding. I am speaking of the centennial issue of America, one of the magazines on which many of us depend for comment on both Catholicism and a wider world. Fattened up by advertisements placed by religious orders and firms which appeal to Catholic interests— remember them?—and many letters of greetings from presidents and pope, this April13th issue boasts ninety-two pages. Sinc

Julian Zelizer: Will Obama, GOP make a deal?

[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 on current events.] President Obama could be opening up an important debate with the Republican Party on Monday by meeting with his Cabinet and instructing them to outline specific

Jonathan Zimmerman: Columbine and the folly of overvaluing school sports

[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 will be published in June.] In December 1999, just eight months after 15 people died there, Columbine High School won its first state football championship. Americans love a happy ending, and this one was made for TV. National newscasts ran footage of the celebrations at Columbine, which followed a predictable

Julian Zelizer: Obama's raised expectations overseas like Woodrow Wilson. Uh oh.

[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. For more information about this author, see www.julianzelizer.com.] One of the most dramatic moments during the 2008 campaign occurred when then-candidate Barack Obama tra

Dermot Quinn: The Wilhelm Roepke solution to our economic woes

[Dermot Quinn is professor of history at Seton Hall University and a fellow of the James Madison Program at Princeton University.] ... Fecklessness and stupidity are nothing new, but even by American standards of giantism this latest iteration of boom and bust takes some beating. Yet none of it need have happened had we listened to Wilhelm Roepke. Two generations ago, when postwar Germany lay in ruins, Roepke helped to lay the foundation of its extraordinary renewal. To be sure, tha

Mark Naison: Republicans Are Doing More to Publicize Socialism in the US Than Anyone Since Karl Marx

[Mark Naison is Professor of African American Studies and History, Fordham University.] As a historian of the American labor movement, I have long been aware that socialism has been far less popular in the United States than it has in other industrialized nations. There has never been a Social Democratic or Labor Party in the US which has competed for power on the national scene, as it has in Canada, Germany, Britain or Scandinavia and most working class Americans, even in the

Liz Cohen: How four men and one woman, with very different backgrounds and views, shaped the New Deal

Re: Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America by Adam Cohen, Penguin Press, 372 pages, $29.95 Re: The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR's Secretary of Labor and his Moral Conscience by Kirstin Downey, Doubleday, 458 pages, $35.00 Obama-watching has become a new national -- even international -- sport. First, all eyes were glued to his miraculous triumph over seven opponents in the primaries, followed

Eric Hobsbawm: Socialism has failed. Now capitalism is bankrupt. So what comes next?

[Eric Hobsbawm's most recent publication is On Empire: America, War, and Global Supremacy.] The 20th century is well behind us, but we have not yet learned to live in the 21st, or at least to think in a way that fits it. That should not be as difficult as it seems, because the basic idea that dominated economics and politics in the last century has patently disappeared down the plughole of history. This was the way of thinking about modern industrial economies, or for that matter an

Fred Siegel: Taking Communism away from the Communists ... The Origins of Modern American Liberalism

[Fred Siegel is a professor of history at the Cooper Union for Science and Art.] Modern liberalism has been defined conceptually as the experimental method applied to politics and as the mentality which insists that culture, not nature, puts the future of humanity in its own hands. In terms of American history, modern liberalism is presented as an adaptation of nineteenth-century laissez-faire liberal individualism to the growth of big business, and as an updated expression of Jacks

Mackubin T. Owens: What To Do About Piracy?

[Mackubin T. Owens is a Senior Fellow of FPRI, editor of Orbis, and Associate Dean of Academics for Electives and Directed Research and Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island.] Piracy, a scourge that had been stamped out in the 19th century, still flourishes in those Hobbesian areas of the world where order and the"rule of law" do not exist. The seizure of a U.S.-flagged vessel, the Maersk Alabama, earlier t

Roger Morris: Nixon Goes to Europe (Part II)

Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle — as Richard Nixon often referred to the French president, a full name he thought resonant of “grandeur, glory, greatness” — was the last of the great World War II leaders still on the world stage in 1969: former commander of the Free French, peer of Roosevelt and Churchill, and an outsized figure to a young Southern California lawyer and postwar congressman named Richard Nixon. The new president, as White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman saw it, was simply

Kevin Boyle: Requiem ... Detroit and the Fate of Urban America

[Kevin Boyle teaches modern American history at Ohio State University. His most recent book, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age won the National Book Award for non-fiction, the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Tolerance Book Award, and the Society of Midland Authors Book Award. ] I saw the ad on a real estate web site a week ago. For sale: 3952 Chatsworth Street, Detroit, Michigan. A five bedroom, three bath brick h

Diane Ravitch: Is Arne Duncan Really Margaret Spellings in Drag?

... I have been watching and listening to our new secretary of education, trying to understand his views on the most important issues facing our schools and the nation's children. I wanted to believe candidate Barack Obama when he said that he would introduce real change and restore hope. Surely, I thought, he understood that the deadening influence of No Child Left Behind has produced an era of number-crunching that has very little to do with improving education or raising academic standards.

Greg Grandin: What Can Obama Do in Latin America?

[Greg Grandin is the author of Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (Metropolitan) and Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City, forthcoming in June. He can be reached at grandin@nyu.edu.] What if Barack Obama had picked the Nation's Katrina

William Lambers: Open Skies policy should be used by Koreas

[William Lambers, a Delhi Township resident, is the author of "Nuclear Weapons" and "Open Skies for Peace."] North Korea's nuclear weapons and missile development are a threat not just to Asia, but also the United States. In time North Korean missiles, armed with nuclear weapons, may be capable of striking the United States. Of course, nuclear fears are nothing new, as we have lived with them since the early years of the Cold War. The Soviet Union te

Jonathan Zimmerman: The neighborhood school helps to define who we are. Consolidation threatens that.

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University and lives in Narberth. He is the author of the forthcoming "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory" (Yale University Press).] Imagine two school districts somewhere on America's checkered educational landscape. Each district has 1,000 students. But each one also has its own superintendent, clerical employees, and buses. And neither can afford electives in art, music, or technology.

Julian Zelizer: Obama's Pirate Coup

[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.] Some Democrats are hopeful that President Obama’s calm demeanor and the Navy Seals’ crack performance in rescuing Capt. Richard Phillips from Somali pirates will undermine persistent Republican claims that this presi

Juan Cole: The great right-wing freak-out

President Obama's recent trip to Europe, Turkey and Iraq was a fairly bland freshman outing in foreign affairs, notable for the enormous good will it generated toward the U.S., along with some practical achievements and a few minor errors. It lacked the drama of the untested young Kennedy grappling over Berlin with the wily old Khrushchev in Vienna in 1961. On the American right, however, Obama's trip produced a hysteria not seen since radio listeners mistook Orson Welles's 1938 radio production

Jean Edward Smith: How to End a War, Eisenhower’s Way

[Mr. Smith's latest book is an award-winning biography of FDR.] President Obama’s unscheduled visit to Iraq suggests a president determined to see a war zone first hand and draw his own conclusions. Lincoln availed himself of that opportunity during the Civil War, but the most pertinent example may be Dwight D. Eisenhower, who toured the battlefront in Korea shortly before his inauguration. Ike had pledged to go to Korea if elected, and most voters assumed that the supreme commander