Roundup: Historians' Take

Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi and Robert Satloff: Why Palestinians Should Learn About the Holocaust

[Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi is the founder of the Wasatia movement, which promotes moderation in Islam, and the director of the American Studies department at Al-Quds University. Robert Satloff is executive director of the Washington Institute and the author of “Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands.”] Should Palestinian and other Arab schools teach their students about the Holocaust? This is not an academic question. Many Pale

David W. Lesch: The Syrian President I Know

[David W. Lesch, a professor of Middle East history at Trinity University, is the author of “The New Lion of Damascus: Bashar al-Asad and Modern Syria.”] WHERE has President Bashar al-Assad of Syria been this past week? Thousands of Syrians across the country have staged demonstrations against the government, and dozens of protesters have been reported killed by security forces. The cabinet was dismissed on Tuesday, although that’s a meaningless gesture unless it’s foll

Juan Cole: An Open Letter to the Left on Libya

[Juan Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. For three decades, he has sought to put the relationship of the West and the Muslim world in historical context. His most recent book is Engaging the Muslim World (Palgrave Macmillan, March, 2009) and he also recently authored Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).] As I expected, now that Qaddafi’s advantage in armor and heavy weapons is being neutralized

Tariq Ali: Libya is another case of selective vigilantism by the west

[Tariq Ali is a Pakistani writer and historian.] The US-Nato intervention in Libya, with United Nations security council cover, is part of an orchestrated response to show support for the movement against one dictator in particular and by so doing to bring the Arab rebellions to an end by asserting western control, confiscating their impetus and spontaneity and trying to restore the status quo ante. It is absurd to think that the reasons for bombing Tripoli or for the t

Kate Masur: Capital Injustice

[Kate Masur, an assistant professor of history at Northwestern, is the author of “An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle Over Equality in Washington, D.C.”] On March 29, 1961, the states completed ratification of the 23rd Amendment, which gave residents of the District of Columbia the right to vote in presidential elections. The anniversary is worth remembering, both because the amendment was an important step toward full political equality for citizens of the na

Jon Wiener: Wisconsin's Cronon Affair: The Power of a Simple Fact

[Jon Wiener teaches US history at UC Irvine. His most recent book is Historians in Trouble.] More than a million people teach at colleges and universities in the United States, but only one faces a Republican demand for his e-mails: William Cronon, who teaches history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.... The Republican Party of Wisconsin last week filed an open records request demanding access to any e-mails Cronon sent or received since Jan. 1 containing the sea

Yoni Appelbaum: The Political Perils of Pragmatism

[Yoni Appelbaum is a social and cultural historian of the United States. He is a doctoral candidate at Brandeis University, and a lecturer in history at Babson College. He previously contributed to TheAtlantic.com under the name Cynic.] President Obama's pragmatic approach to foreign policy has long frustrated observers. His decisions -- drawing down forces in Iraq while surging troops into Afghanistan, leaving the Fifth Fleet docked in Bahrain while the Sixth Fleet pummels Libya --

Bruce Ackerman: Obama’s Unconstitutional War

[Bruce Ackerman, a professor of law and political science at Yale, is the author of The Decline and Fall of the American Republic.] In taking the country into a war with Libya, Barack Obama's administration is breaking new ground in its construction of an imperial presidency -- an executive who increasingly acts independently of Congress at home and abroad. Obtaining a U.N. Security Council resolution has legitimated U.S. bombing raids under international law. But the U.N. Charter i

Thomas J. Sugrue: Detroit: A Dream of Integration Still Deferred

[Thomas J. Sugrue, a professor of history and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of “The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit.”] AT first glance, the numbers released by the Census Bureau last week showing a precipitous drop in Detroit’s population — 25 percent over the last decade — seem to bear a silver lining: most of those leaving the city are blacks headed to the suburbs, once the refuge of mid-century white flight.

Simon Sebag Montefiore: Every Revolution Is Revolutionary in Its Own Way

[Simon Sebag Montefiore is the author of the forthcoming “Jerusalem: The Biography.”] A REVOLUTION resembles the death of a fading star, an exhilarating Technicolor explosion that gives way not to an ordered new galaxy but to a nebula, a formless cloud of shifting energy. And though every revolution is different, because all revolutions are local, in this uncertain age of Arab uprisings and Western interventions, as American missiles bombard a defiant Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Liby

Julian E. Zelizer: Obama Needs to Show He's on Top of Crises

[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.] Major crises can inflict great political damage on U.S. presidents. Regardless of all the weapons that come with the office, presidents throughout American history have discovered that they can quickly b

Jonathan Zimmerman: The Real March Madness: Duke, Uncle Tom, and Success as a "White" Value

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author most recently of “Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory.”] A few summers ago, I took my daughter and a few of her friends to see the rapper Lil Wayne in concert. He bounded onto the stage in a blaze of blinking lights, then served up the usual menu of songs about gangsters, hustlers, and pimps. And the mostly white audience cheered. Why? There

Jeffrey Herf: Why Germany was Against the Libya Intervention

[Jeffrey Herf, a professor of modern European history at the University of Maryland in College Park, has published extensively on memory and politics in postwar Germany. He is the author most recently of Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World.] It may have come as a surprise to many people that Germany—the lynchpin of the NATO alliance on the European continent and a close ally of the United States since 1949—voted to abstain from the U.N. resolution authorizing force against Muammar Qa

Deborah E. Lipstadt: Trial and Error

[Deborah E. Lipstadt, author of Nextbook Press’ The Eichmann Trial, is Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University.] A few months ago, as I was finishing my book on the Eichmann trial, a friend asked me, “What do you know now that you did not know before you began your work?” I launched into a discourse on the various details of this fascinating trial. Before I could get too far, he stopped me. “No, I’ll read the book to get the story. Instead

Toby C. Jones: High Anxiety

[Toby C. Jones is assistant professor of Middle East history at Rutgers University. He is author of Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia and an editor at Middle East Report.] Saudi Arabia's ruling elders are anxious. Recent decisions in Riyadh, including dispatching a Saudi military contingent to help violently smash the pro-democracy protests in Bahrain, suggest that the kingdom's elites are more than a little unsettled by the unraveling of the old order in

Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni: How the Filibuster Wrecked the Roman Senate—and Could Wreck Ours

[Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni are the co-authors of a forthcoming book on Cato and the Roman Republic.] ...It's hard to shake the public impression that there's no such thing as a principled, "veil of ignorance"-style case against the filibuster -- a case that boils down to more than helping the majority enact its policy preferences. More importantly, the senators with the power to restrict the filibuster understand that today's majority is tomorrow's bystander. The most rec

John Summers: Elite Institutions Exercise a Stranglehold on Power in the U.S.

[John Summers is visiting scholar in history at Boston College.] Our institutions tremble and sway, but it's a rare week that passes without opinion leaders reminding us of the stability, excellence - nay, glory - of the US higher education system. Here is the last American piety, a liturgy incanted in newspaper columns by Thomas Friedman (Brandeis University, 1975) and Nicholas Kristof (Harvard University, 1981) in The New York Times and in think-pieces by the likes of James Fallow

Robert Darnton: A Digital Library Better Than Google’s

[Robert Darnton is a professor and the director of the Harvard University Library.] ON Tuesday, Denny Chin, a federal judge in Manhattan, rejected the settlement between Google, which aims to digitize every book ever published, and a group of authors and publishers who had sued the company for copyright infringement. This decision is a victory for the public good, preventing one company from monopolizing access to our common cultural heritage. Nonetheless, we should not

Fouad Ajami: Obama's Holbrooke Moment

[Mr. Ajami is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.] The right thing, at last. The cavalry arrived in the nick of time. Help came as Moammar Gadhafi's loyalists were at the gates of the free city of Benghazi. There was no mystery in the fate that awaited them. The despot had pretty much said what he intended. He would hunt down those who had found the courage to stand up to him, show them no mercy and

William Tsutsui: Tokyo Disaster Fantasies

[Tsutsui is dean of Dedman College of Humanities & Sciences and professor of Japanese history at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and author of Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters.] Of the many images of disaster coming to us from Japan, one continues to haunt me: a dark, angry, roiling wave of water, thick with cars and homes and soil, sweeps across a flat landscape and swallows farms and fields into its churning blackness. I can’t help