Roundup: Historians' Take

Max Boot: It's in America's Interest to Stay in Iraq

[Mr. Boot is a senior fellow in national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.]  Secretary of Defense Bob Gates was in Iraq early this month urging Iraqi leaders to decide whether they want U.S. forces to stay beyond Dec. 31. "If there is to be a presence, to help with some of the areas where [the Iraqis] still need help," he said, "we're open to that possibility. But they have to ask."

Jon Wiener: Bob Dylan in Beijing: No Sellout

[Jon Wiener teaches US history at UC Irvine. His most recent book is Historians in Trouble.] Bob Dylan did not sell out to the Chinese government when he performed in Beijing on April 6. The “sellout” charge was made in the New York Times on Sunday by Maureen Dowd, along with several other people. The problem: Dylan submitted his set list to the Chinese culture ministry, according to The Guardian’s Martin Wieland in Beijing, and as a result the concert was performed "strictly

Nezar AlSayyad: Cairo’s Roundabout Revolution

[Nezar AlSayyad, a professor of architecture, planning and urban history and the chairman of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of “Cairo: Histories of a City.”] IT has become fashionable to refer to the 18-day Egyptian uprising as the “Facebook revolution,” much to the dismay of the protesters who riveted the world with their bravery in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. But revolutions do not happen in cyberspace, even if they start

Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, Libya Is Not Iraq

[NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the editor of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome, and the author of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.] The Left is terribly embarrassed about the U.S. intervention in Libya. We have preemptively attacked an Arab Muslim nation that posed little threat to the national-security interests of the United States. President Obama did not have majorit

Amanda Foreman: The American civil war battles go on

[Amanda Foreman is a historian and author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and A World on Fire: an Epic History of Two Nations Divided. She is also the recipient of the 1998 Whitbread Award for biography.] In 1961 an official US commission oversaw thousands of events to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the American civil war. All 50 states joined in, but not surprisingly the biggest events took place in the 11 southern states that made up the defeated Confederacy. Citizens in A

Victor Davis Hanson: First, Do No Harm in the Middle East

[Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern] At some point, the Obama administration is going to recognize a simple paradox that has been apparent to almost everyone but them: In theory, those pro-American autocratic regimes that are tottering or gone (the Gulf States, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, etc.) should have been more amenable to gradu

Julian E. Zelizer: Republicans are Winning Budget Debate

[Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of "Jimmy Carter," published by Times Books, and editor of a book assessing former President George W. Bush's administration, published by Princeton University Press.] Following the announcement of the budget deal on Friday night, South Dakota Sen. John Thune told Politico, "The debate is now on our side of the field. This is just the opening act. But these upcomi

Hayrettin Yücesoy: A Mission to 'Civilise' the East, Again?

[Dr. Hayrettin Yücesoy is an Associate Professor of History at Saint Louis University and author of Messianic Beliefs and Imperial Politics in Medieval Islam (Columbia: South Carolina University Press, 2009) and Tatawwur al-Fikr al-Siyasi inda Ahl al-Sunna (Amman: Dar al-Bashir, 1993). Columbia] As was announced recently by UK prime minister David Cameron, Britain, Germany, France and the US have begun talks to support Libya's transition away from a violent dictatorship and t

Mark LeVine: The Shifting Zeitgeist of the 'Arab Spring'

[Mark LeVine is a professor of history at UC Irvine and senior visiting researcher at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden. His most recent books are Heavy Metal Islam (Random House) and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books). Palestine] ...Libya has until now served as the polar opposite of the Egyptian and Tunisian experience – its long-serving strongman has refused to leave, and his deployment of large-scale deadly violence

Anthony Grafton: Academic Freedom After the Cronon Controversy

[Anthony Grafton is Henry Putnam University Professor of History and the Humanities at Princeton University.] Many observers are worried about the latest skirmish in the battle to destroy American higher education, which involves the distinguished environmental historian William Cronon at the University of Wisconsin. As has now been widely reported, on March 17, Stephan Thompson—an operative for the Republican Party of Wisconsin—used the state’s Open Documents law to demand copies of al

Philip Jenkins: Mexico’s Crisis of Faith

[Philip Jenkins teaches at Penn State University and is Distinguished Senior Fellow at Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion.] For all the crises and confrontations that the United States faces around the world, some observers think that the most alarming situation of all might be on our own doorstep. Back in 2008, the U.S. Joint Forces Command warned that both Mexico and Pakistan might suffer "rapid and sudden collapse." If Mexico did succumb to its escala

Walter Russell Mead: Life Beyond Blue: Faith and the Inner City

[Walter Russell Mead is Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. He blogs at The-American-Interest.com.] There are two big mistakes most Americans make about our inner city problems: we believe that the troubles of the inner city are mostly about race, and we believe that they can be solved without God. The failure of the blue social model to solve the pr

Judith Stein: Remember the Unemployed

[Judith Stein is a professor of history at the City College of New York Graduate Center. She is the author of The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modern Society, Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy, and the Decline of Liberalism, and Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies.] ...During the first six quarters of Reagan’s post-recession years, the economy gained 4.2 million jobs; in the comparable period during the

Gary J. Bass: Why humanitarian wars can go so wrong

[Gary J. Bass is a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School. He is the author of “Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention” and “Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals.”] All wars are terrifying gambles, but the wars justified with moral claims of humanitarianism carry a distinctively harrowing set of risks and problems — above all, the challenge of preventing massive human catastrophe

Niall Ferguson: The Mash of Civilizations

[Niall Ferguson is a Harvard professor and Newsweek columnist.] It is a truth universally acknowledged that information technology—in particular social networking through the Internet—is changing the global balance of power. The “Facebook Generation” has already been credited with the overthrow of the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. For a brief period, the darling of Tahrir Square was the young Google executive Wael Ghonim. Yet there is another side to the story. It is

Timothy A. Hacsi: Stop Waiting for a Savior

[Timothy A. Hacsi, an assistant professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, is the author of “Children as Pawns: The Politics of Educational Reform.”] DID Cathleen P. Black, the former publishing executive who was removed last week after just three months as New York City’s schools chancellor, fail because she lacked a background in education? In this respect, she has had quite a bit of company over the decades. In 1996, Washington hired a former th

William Shawcross: Lessons From Nuremberg

[William Shawcross is the author of the forthcoming “Justice for the Enemy: From Nuremberg to Khaled Sheikh Mohammed.”] GEORGE ORWELL is usually a footsure guide across political battlegrounds. In late 1943, when the tide had turned in the Allies’ favor, he wrote about postwar trials. Oddly, he advocated Hitler and Mussolini slipping away. His verdict for them would not be death unless the Germans and Italians themselves carried out summary executions (as they eventually did in Muss

Richard Rapaport: The Fight That Just Won't Die

[Richard Rapaport is completing "Joe's Boys," a biography of the young men around Sen. Joseph McCarthy. He can be reached at: rjrap@aol.com] Gore Vidal tells of an apocryphal pilgrimage each April 12, the anniversary of Franklin D. Roosevelt's death at Warm Springs, Ga. The trek, organized by the Dutchess County New York Republican Central Committee, supposedly wends its way up the old Albany Post Road from Poughkeepsie to Springwood, FDR

Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg: What They Really Mean by "American Exceptionalism"

[Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg are professors of history at Louisiana State University and coauthors of "Madison and Jefferson."] Newt Gingrich can't get enough American exceptionalism. In "A Nation Like No Other: Why American Exceptionalism Matters," due out soon, the former House speaker and prospective Republican presidential candidate gives a new definition to the term, linking it directly to conservatives' understanding of the importance of the individu

Arthur Milnes: Jimmy Carter's Exposure to Nuclear Danger

[Arthur Milnes, an award-winning Canadian journalist, is the Inaugural Fellow in Political History at Queen's University Archives in Kingston, Canada and the editor of "Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter: A Canadian Tribute" (2011 McGill-Queen's University Press and the Queen's School of Policy Studies ). He can be reached at arthur.milnes@sympatico.ca] Though Georgia is a continent and an ocean away from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear