Roundup: Historians' Take

Juan Cole: Pakistani Reaganism Must End

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.]Leaks to the Indian press by security officials in charge of interrogating the captured terrorist, Ajmal Amir Kamal (or Qasab?) are fleshing out the background of the attack on Mumbai and clarifying the evidence that it was an operation o

Ron Radosh: Will Bush-bashing End?

There is a strange symmetry between the Bush hatred that emanated from the Left and what the writer John Avlon calls “irrational Obama exuberance.” Barack Obama has not spent one day as President, yet his admirers speak and write as if he has not and will not do anything wrong. I agree with Avlon that Obama’s centrist Cabinet choices have encouraged confidence in his ability

Stanley Kutler: Bush’s 11th-Hour Bid for Secrecy

[Stanley Kutler wrote “The Wars of Watergate,” and he liberated the Nixon tapes. ] The times are unprecedented. Not since 1861 have we watched the last gasps of an outgoing administration with such anxiety. Then the nation was concerned with drift and inertia; now we watch for further ideological mischief. Republicans were aghast in 2001 to discover that President Bill Clinton’s staff allegedly had dropped the “W” from White House computer keyboards. Frat house stuff. G

Juan Cole: India ... Please Don't Go Down the Bush- Cheney Road

Many Indians have called the attacks in Mumbai "India's 9/11." As an American who lived in India, I can feel that country's anguish over these horrific and indiscriminate acts of terror. Most Indian observers, however, were critical in 2001 and after of how exactly the Bush administration (by which we apparently mainly mean Dick Cheney) responded to September 11. They were right, and they would do well to remember their own critique at this fateful moment. Wha

Daniel Martin Varisco: Mumbai and the Blame Game

[Daniel Martin Varisco is Chair, Anthropology Department at Hofstra University.] Must every country have its 9/11 moment and must these tragedies continue to be the work of extremists who attack and kill as if they were commanded by Allah? This is a rhetorical question, of course. The latest events in Mumbai have trumped the economic slump in the news. Once again billowing smoke from a famous building clouds the sky; again Islam is tainted as the religion that fosters terrorists. And t

Jonathan Zimmerman: Nepal's ban on private schools is unjust

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of "Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century."] In 1983, I joined the Peace Corps and went to Nepal to teach English. I was posted at a school in the Himalayan foothills, in a part of the country that everyone called "Red." At first I thought the name referred to the color of the mud that clogged the region's roads and rivers during the monso

Victor Davis Hanson: The Hysterical Style

[Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.] Politicians now predict the implosion of the U.S. auto industry. Headlines warn that the entire banking system is on the verge of utter collapse. The all-day/all

Mark Naison: Any Long Term Solution to the Economic Crisis Requires Raising Wages and Redistributing Income

[Mark Naison is Professor of African American Studies and History, Fordham University.] The roots of the current economic crisis in the United States are strikingly similar to those which provoked the Great Depression of the 1930's. In each instance, the economic collapse followed a long period of economic expansion in which profits far outpaced wages, leading to massive speculation in unregulated financial products and the stimulation of consumer demand by having wage earners t

Martin Kramer: What do the financial crisis and U.S. Middle East policy have in common?

[Mr. Kramer, the author of Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America, was a full-time tenured academic at Tel Aviv University. He is now an Olin Institute Senior Fellow at Harvard. Click here for his blog.]Behind the financial crisis was a well-practiced mechanism for concealing risk. The risk was there, and it was constantly growing, but it could be disguised, repackaged and renamed, so that in the end it seemed to have disappeared.

Ezra Klein vs. Eric Rauchway: Is the Great Depression Relevant?

Ezra Klein in the American Prospect : Brad DeLong, Tyler Cowen, and Justin Fox all make much of Christina Romer's expertise on the causes of the Great Depression. And, indeed, Romer does seem to be an expert on the Depression. She even wrote the Encyclopedia Brittanica entry on the subject. This is a point you frequently hear in Ben Berna

Victor Davis Hanson: What Went Wrong?

Conservatives have already in the three weeks after the election come up with three competing explanations — and remedies — for their congressional defeats and the victory of the relatively unknown Barack Obama. Post-election voting patterns and statistical data can be interpreted in various ways to support any of the following three exegeses, which I understand as being roughly the following: It was a sort of fluke. Party faithful will shrug that almost everything cons

Tyler Cowen: The New Deal Didn’t Always Work, Either

[Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University.] MANY people are looking back to the Great Depression and the New Deal for answers to our problems. But while we can learn important lessons from this period, they’re not always the ones taught in school. The traditional story is that President Franklin D. Roosevelt rescued capitalism by resorting to extensive government intervention; the truth is that Roosevelt changed course from year to year, trying

Frederick Kagan: Out of Conflict, a Partnership

[Frederick W. Kagan is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former professor of military history at the United States Military Academy.] IRAQ offers the Obama administration an extraordinary opportunity. Overall violence and American casualties have dropped remarkably since the surge began last year. Iraqi security forces have grown in size and effectiveness. American and Iraqi troops have inflicted a series of defeats on insurgents and militias. The slow but

Philip Carl Salzman: What Anthropology has to offer to strategic studies

[Philip Carl Salzman made these remarks to a working session on strategic studies and the disciplines, convened by MESH at Harvard University on September 23.] There is one central lesson that cultural anthropology has to offer. It is the lesson of Franz Boas, who founded American anthropology, of his students Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, and of their intellectual descendants, such as Clifford Geertz, arguably the most influential American cultural anthropologist of the second h

Anthony J. Badger: Can Obama lead another New Deal?

[Anthony J. Badger is Paul Mellon Professor of American History at Cambridge University and Master of Clare College. He is the author of "FDR: The First Hundred Days," "North Carolina and the New Deal" and "The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933 --1940."] ... The situations in 1933 and 2009 do have similarities. In both cases, there is a discredited outgoing administration, a financial crisis, a lame-duck Congress which finds it difficult to act, a ne

Stanley Kutler: Kissinger Unplugged

[Stanley Kutler liberated the Nixon (and Kissinger) tapes in 1996. His court settlement insured that everyone would have the pleasure of hearing their leaders at work.] Thomas Friedman, the one-time eloquent cheerleader for the Iraq War, a liberal voice who deemed it realistic to rid the world of Saddam Hussein, notwithstanding the loss of a useful buffer against Iran to the rest of the Western world. Oh, those heady days of Iraqis greeting us with flowers and their reconstruction c

Tom Engelhardt: The Pentagon's Argument of Last Resort on Iraq

[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. The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a co

Brian Britt: Drinking the Kool-Aid

[Brian Britt is Professor of Religious Studies in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Virginia Tech, and currently a fellow at the Zentrum fur Literatur-und Kulturforschung Berlin. Emi Scott provided research assistance for this piece.] Thirty years have passed since the murder-suicide of over nine hundred members of Jim Jones's People's Temple, on November 18, 1978. A sign hanging in the pavilion of Jonestown at the time read, "Those who do not remember the past a

Juan Cole: Obama is the anti-Malcolm X

[Mr. Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan. His website is http://www.juancole.com.] Ayman al-Zawahiri attacked Barack Obama in a video released on the internet on Tuesday. Fox News reprinted the whole transcript here. I'm a little bit confused by this step, since I thought the US networks had agreed under pressure from Bush only

Matthew Pinsker: Lincoln and the myth of 'Team of Rivals'

[Matthew Pinsker, author of "Lincoln's Sanctuary: Abraham Lincoln and the Soldiers' Home," teaches Civil War history at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania.] People love Doris Kearns Goodwin's book on the Lincoln presidency,"Team of Rivals." More important, for this moment in American history, Barack Obama loves it. The book is certainly fun to read, but its claim that Abraham Lincoln revealed his"political genius" through the management of his wartime Cabinet deserves a h