Roundup: Historians' Take

John Q. Barrett: Irving Feiner, Supreme Court Litigant & Free Speaker

[Professor John Q. Barrett, St. John’s University School of Law.] This morning’s New York Times brought the sad news of the death ten days ago of Irving Feiner, age 84, of Nyack, New York. (For the obituary story, click here.) In 1949, when Feiner was a student at Syracuse University, he was arrested for disorderly conduct after he, speaking from a soapbox at a Syracuse street corner to a crowd of interested listeners and less enthusiastic onlookers, ignored police orders to shut

Sam Tanenhaus: Conservatism Is Dead

[Mr. Tanenhaus is the author of a biography of Whittaker Chambers and is the editor of the NYT Book Review.] In the tumultuous history of postwar American conservatism, defeats have often contained the seeds of future victory. In 1954, the movement's first national tribune, Senator Joseph McCarthy, was checkmated by the Eisenhower administration and then "condemned" by his Senate colleagues. But the episode, and the passions it aroused, led to the founding of National Revi

Michael Reynolds: Behind the blow-out at Davos

[Michael A. Reynolds is an assistant professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. He is currently a visiting scholar at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University, where he is at work on a book on Ottoman-Russian relations and the struggle for mastery of Anatolia and the Caucasus in the twilight of empire.] Origins of a cooperation. For the past two decades, cooperative relations between Turkey and Israel had been one of the constants of internation

Gordon Taylor: The Mona Lisa of Kurdistan

[Mr. Taylor is a former teacher in Turkey and the author of Fever and Thirst: An American Doctor Among the Tribes of Kurdistan. Academy Chicago Publishers, 2005.] Aynur ("moonlight") is her name, and though you can't see it, in her right hand she carries an AK-47. She died, aged 23, on 30 September 2005, somewhere on the slopes of Cudi Dagi (pron. Judi Dah), a mountain just north of the Iraqi-Turkish borde

Daniel Pipes: Obama, the Middle East and Islam - An Initial Assessment

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] Why, just two weeks into a 209-week term, assess a new American president's record on so esoteric a subject as the Middle East and Islam? In Barack Obama's case, because of:(1) A contradictory record: His background brims over with wild-eyed anti-Zionist

Martin E. Marty: Pope Benedict and the Jews

On January 22, responding to a post-speech questioner at St. Scholastica College in Duluth, which is (roughly) twenty-four percent Catholic and sixteen percent Lutheran, I observed that American Catholic criticisms of Pope Benedict XVI have often been muted, and that Lutherans held their fire and even admired some Benedict-ine actions. For example, he had guided a Lutheran-Catholic entente document through obstructions in 1999. On 'interfaith' in general, recalling the nightmare his quotation

Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian: How Government Prolonged the Depression

[Mr. Cole is professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Ohanian is professor of economics and director of the Ettinger Family Program in Macroeconomic Research at UCLA.] The New Deal is widely perceived to have ended the Great Depression, and this has led many to support a "new" New Deal to address the current crisis. But the facts do not support the perception that FDR's policies shortened the Depression, or that similar policies will pull our nation ou

Juan Cole: Fouad Ajami's Illusions

The odd collection of con men, carpetbaggers, mercenaries, court jesters, and professional propagandists that gathered around W. the way pilot fish jostle about a great white shark has now scattered to more obscure reefs. Now, as Meyrav Wurmser admitted, they are thinking about how to make money. They seek perches in the"think tanks" of kooky rich old white men, on the airwaves of corporate media, in the halls of the more corrupt corners of academia, or on the opinion pages of the wackie

Mark Naison: The Squeeze Is On! Why We Need to Explore Communal, As Well As Individual Responses to the Economic Crisis

[Mark Naison is Professor of African American Studies and History, Fordham University.] During the next year, and possible longer, the American economy will be squeezing out jobs at a rapidly accelerating rate. Americans working in finance, manufacturing, retail trades, transportation, entertainment, and goverment employment, will be pushed out of the labor market until the economy bottoms out sometime in 2010, and will be forced to scramble to find new sources of income and in some ca

Deborah Lipstadt: Has the Vatican no Common Sense?

[Ms. Lipstadt is Dorot professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies and director of the Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University.] The Vatican has done far more than set back Vatican/Jewish relations. It has made itself look like it is living in the darkest of ages. Pope Benedict XVI has reinstated as a bishop a man who both denies the Holocaust and suggests that 9/11 was an American plot. He has done so, it is reported, in order to strengthen relations with

Carl Sferrazza Anthony: Michelle Obama and the Covert Influence of First Ladies

[Carl Sferrazza Anthony is the National First Ladies Library (www.firstladies.org) historian, author of political biographies of Jacqueline Kennedy, Florence Harding and Nellie Taft and the two-volume history of the role, First Ladies.] "To what extent Mrs. Coolidge has influenced her husband's judgment only two persons many testify. One is too silent to say...and the other too smart!" -Editor William Allen White on the wife of tac

Michele Elam: Why Obama is Black Again

[Prof. Elam is an English professor and the Director of the Program in African & African American Studies. ] Barack Obama’s inauguration was for so many an awe-inspiring, historic and transnational event: It was full of grand pageantry and a good-humored pomp and circumstance that made D.C. the place to be. People were called together in many ways, and one of the more important ways they were asked to unite was over the contentious matter of race. But it is worthwhi

Jim Sleeper: Israel's Only Way Out

[Mr. Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale, is the author of The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York and Liberal Racism.] Everyone who has followed the Gaza war should read M.J.'s brave and necessary post, just below this one. I'm less hopeful than he that American news media are focusing on the suffering in Gaza, which requires and delivers little more political enlightenment than does their coverage of any other disaster. Still, Israel's l

Victor Davis Hanson: Obama's Arab interview

The problem with Obama's Al Arabiya interview (which I wrote about at length elsewhere): 1) It is never wise to contrast negatively American efforts in the region ("dictating") with those of a Saudi monarch ("courageous")—one could in theory draw the conclusion that the unelected head of a theocratic autocracy was portrayed more favorably than the U.S. State Department ("the United States"). 2) There is no reason to be apologetic about past

Timothy Garton Ash: Defending liberalism

[Timothy Garton Ash, a fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and the Hoover Institution at Stanford, is the author of “Free World: America, Europe and the Surprising Future of the West.”] GOVERNMENT and markets both have their place in a decent society, President Obama suggested in his Inaugural Address, but can become a force for ill if they are without restraint. Missing from Mr. Obama’s address was only the proper name of the political philosophy, coded into the constitutional

Martin Kramer: Gaza errors (or lies)

Henry Siegman, who must spend every waking hour hating Israel, has a piece in the London Review of Books, which is never complete without an Israel-bashing tirade. This one is called simply "Israel's Lies." Siegman spends a lot of time faulting Israel for the breakdown of the previous six-month cease-fire with Hamas, reached through Egyptian mediation in June 2008. In one passage, he accurately reports

Ruth Rosen: Poor Women are Not "Pork"

Responding to President Obama's request, House Democrats cut a provision from the stimulus package that would expand contraceptive family planning for Medicaid patients--usually poor women and girls. He, in turn, was responding to Republicans' opposition to expanding Medicaid family planning for poor women and girls. Why did this happen?For years, reproductive justice activists have argued that the religious right's real agenda is not just to eliminate abortion, but to end the hi

Yury Afanasiev: The end of Russia?

[Prof.Yury Afanasiev is a prominent historian and democratic activist. He is the founder of the Russian State University for the Humanities and Honorary President of the Russian State University.] I Russia's rulers behave like a government of occupation. So why do the people support them uncritically? In recent months we have witnessed a series of actions from the Russian government that seem at first glance paradoxical. I will list

Manisha Sinha: We Are All Americans in the Age of Obama

[Manisha Sinha is Associate Professor of Afro-American Studies and History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, Harvard University. ] The inauguration of Barack Obama had barely begun before Americans across the political spectrum started talking about the historic nature and meaning of the event. Indeed, the election of Obama represents, for the thronging millions in Washington at the very least, a seismic

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: 2008's Best China Books

[Jeffrey Wasserstrom is a Professor of History at UC Irvine, the author of"Global Shanghai, 1850-2010: A History in Fragments" (just published by Routledge), and a co-editor of the forthcoming"China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance." He blogs regularly at The China Beat and The Huffington Post.] In this look back at some of the best accessible China books of 2008, just think of me as your personal Amazon.com, a bundler of titles that go well together.  For my app