Roundup: Historians' Take

Bernard Lewis: The Arab World in the Twenty-first Century

[BERNARD LEWIS is Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emeritus at Princeton University and the author, with Buntzie Ellis Churchill, of Islam: The Religion and the People.] As the twentieth century drew to an end, it became clear that a major change was taking place in the countries of the Arab world. For almost 200 years, those lands had been ruled and dominated by European powers and before that by non-Arab Muslim regimes -- chiefly the Ottoman Empire. After the d

Dan Edelstein: Republicans rewrite history in crying 'socialism'

[Dan Edelstein is an assistant professor of French at Stanford University. His book, "The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution" (Chicago), will be published this fall. He wrote this article for the Mercury News.] There was a time when politicians thought they could learn from history. Today, history is used as a form of profanity. The favorite historical curse word in Washington now is "socialism." Rat

Danielle Allen: How does one learn to construct and to lead a republic?

[Danielle Allen is UPS Foundation Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study and the author most recently of Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago).] How does one learn to construct and to lead a republic? Monarchies do not provoke this question, or at least not with the same urgency. When King George III took the throne in Britain in 1760, he had some thirty-three predecessors in England alone, if one goes bac

Robert Dallek: How Not to End Another President’s War (L.B.J. Edition)

[Mr. Dallek is the author of histories of JFK, LBJ, and Nixon/Kissinger.] On Nov. 24, 1963, two days after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, President Lyndon B. Johnson met with his principal national security advisers to consider the most volatile issue he had inherited: Vietnam. A coup at the beginning of November — approved by the Kennedy administration — had toppled Ngo Dinh Diem’s government and taken his life. Concerns about the ability of his untested successors to withstand V

Jon Pahl: The Religious Violence of "Defending Marriage"

[Jon Pahl is Professor of the History of Christianity in North America at The Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia. He recently edited and published An American Teacher: Coming of Age and Coming Out, the Memoirs of Loretta Coller (Infinity Publishing, 2009). ] A recent article in The Atlantic and recently released Lutheran documents give good reasons to revisit the status of gays and lesbians across American society. Unfortunately, few commentators to date have addressed

Chris Bray: So I'm Reading the Iraqi Constitution...

...and I arrive at the Article 20, Section 1:"No Iraqi shall be surrendered to foreign entities and authorities." I searched news stories, and it looks like no one is reporting on the implications of this clause. But it looks to me like Iraq is about to ratify a constitution that forbids Iraqi authorities to hand suspected insurgents to the US military -- which seems to me to be a pretty significant development, yeah? How d

Fritz Stern: Lessons from Germany About Democracy

[Fritz Stern, University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, is the author of The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology. This essay is adapted from a speech that he gave at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York last year.] We who were born at the end of the Weimar Republic and who witnessed the rise of National Socialism are left with that all-consuming, complex question: How could this horror have seized a nation and corrupted so much of Europe? W

NPR: When was the last time Americans owed as much as they do today? Scary answer.

HNN Editor: In this transcript of a recent episode of "This American Life" Columbia Business School Professor David Beim argued that US banks should not be pressed by Congress to loan more money. Why? Because Americans are already too much in debt. ... David Beim has a much more profound reason why banks shouldn't lend. He shows me something on his computer. David Beim: Ok, so here is a picture, a

Robert Kuttner: Worse than 1929?

[Mr. Kuttner is the founder of the American Prospect and an economist.] This crisis doesn't yet have a name. It has all the hallmarks of a depression, but people are understandably reluctant too use the D-word. So let me suggest one: The Great Collapse, since this was both a financial collapse and an ideological one. This great collapse doesn't have to be a second Great Depression – if government does nearly everything right, and soon. And when we come out the other sid

Richard Kahlenberg: Obama, race and northern whites

[Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, is author of, most recently, Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy.] ... All hell broke loose in May 1968, when the community control school board in Ocean Hill-Brownsville summarily fired eighteen white unionized educators. The liberal teachers union, led by Albert Shanker, who had marched with King in Selma and sent teachers to Freedom Schools in the South, went on a s

Tom Engelhardt: Addicted to Force, Addicted to Failure

[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 American Age of Denial. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Ver

Martin Kramer: Chas Freeman and 9/11

HNN Editor 3/10/09: Chas Freeman has withdrawn from consideration as chair of the National Intelligence Council. Click here. [Prof. Kramer, the author of Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America, was a full-time tenured academic at Tel Aviv University. He is now a senior fellow at the Adelson Institution of Strategic studies and a Senior Fellow at the Oli

Daniel Pipes: Netanyahu as Prime Minister - Déjà Vu?

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] With Binyamin Netanyahu, head of the Likud Party, about to become Israel's next prime minister, one wonders whether he will stick to his more controversial campaign promises – not that of confronting the Iranian threat, which is widely backed, but such as ending Hamas control o

Juan Cole: Pakistan Political Crisis Deepens

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] The Pakistani Taliban are not going to take over the Pakistani government. That worry doesn't keep me up at night. They are small, and operate in a rugged, remote area of the country. They can set off bombs and be a destabilizing force. But a few thousand tribesmen can't take over a country of 165 million w

Martin E. Marty: Mainline Clergy

While the number of Americans coded as “Mainline Protestant” has gone down (almost) twenty percent in (almost) fifty years, still (almost) one in five Americans and (almost) one in four voters are part of this often (almost) invisible cohort which receives (almost) no prime time or front page media and even (almost) no slot when pollsters interview and rank voters. You will see and hear more than usual about them, thanks to a Public Religion Research survey released Friday, entitled Clergy Voic

Harvey Kaye: Americans Should Embrace Their Radical History

[Harvey J. Kaye is Professor of Social Change and Development at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay and the author of"Thomas Paine and the Promise of America" (Hill & Wang, 2005). He is currently writing"The Four Freedoms and the Promise of America."] The following resolution and argument was prepared at the invitation of the Yale Political Union (YPU).  An organization composed of Yale student political groups from across the political spectrum, the YPU is the oldest collegia

Jonathan Zimmerman: Professors could rescue newspapers

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of20"Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory," which will be published in June.] The American newspaper is dead. Long live the American newspaper! OK, so reports of the demise of daily journalism are a bit premature. But you can't open up the newspapers today without reading news about the papers. Declining circulation and advertising revenues hav

Thomas Bertonneau: Students no longer are reading serious works

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a three-part series (to be published on Fridays). By analyzing the responses of his Survey of Literature students on their exams, Thomas F. Bertonneau, who teaches at SUNY-Oswego, offers insight into where education is failing today. The first essay sets the stage. Since the mid-1980s, I have taught a standard survey of literature course to undergraduates in California, Michigan, and most recently upstate New York. This course introduces canonical

Ron Radosh: The Left’s Romance With Tyranny and Terror

[Ronald Radosh was a Prof.of History at the City University of New York, and is now an Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute.] After 9/11, the social-democratic political philosopher, Michael Walzer, asked the readers of Dissent magazine a tough question: “Can there be a decent Left?” His essay was in reality an appeal for its creation, since Walzer was smart enough to realize that so many who spoke in the name of the Left that horrific year were anything but. But now, so many yea

Frederick Morton: The Armageddon Waltz

[Frederic Morton is the author of “Thunder of Twilight: Vienna 1913-1914.”] IN the depth of winter of 1913, at the height of pre-Lenten carnival, the Vienna Bankers Club gave a Bankruptcy Ball at the opulent Blumensaal hall. Some ladies appeared as balance sheets, displaying voluptuous debits curving from slender credits. Others came as inflated collateral: faux enhancements amplified the bust or upholstered the posterior. As for the gentlemen, thin ones were costumed as deposits, f