Roundup: Historians' Take

Madhusree Mukerjee: Dancing Around the Flame

[Madhusree Mukerjee is the author, most recently, of Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II (Basic Books).] ON CHRISTMAS Eve, 2010, an Indian court sentenced Binayak Sen, a doctor who has for decades given medical care to indigenous people in forests of central India, to life imprisonment for sedition and conspiracy. Sen’s real crime was to have investigated and publicized the forced expulsion, accompanied by killing, rape, torture,

Sean Foley: The New 'Disorder' of Hope

[Sean Foley is an assistant professor of history at Middle Tennessee State University in the US and a Fulbright scholar at the International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilisation in Malaysia. He specialises in the contemporary history of the Middle East and political and religious issues throughout the Muslim world and Southeast Asia. To view more of his work, visit seanfoley.org.] In 1935 Lieutenant-Colonel Hodgen, the British political agent for Kuwait, wrote to the Britis

Jay Winter : The birth of the Muslim Brotherhood

[Jay Winter is a professor of history at Yale University and the author, with Blaine Baggett, of "The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century."] To understand the Muslim Brotherhood, and to assess its role today in a shifting Middle East, it is necessary to first examine the forces that led to the organization's birth. And that takes us back to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The Ottoman Empire had been, before World War I, the str

Niall Ferguson: How to Get Gaddafi

[Niall Ferguson is a Harvard professor and Newsweek columnist.] President Obama is reluctant to intervene in the bloody civil war now underway in Libya. As a senior aide told The New York Times last week, “He keeps reminding us that the best revolutions are completely organic.” I like that notion of organic revolutions—guaranteed no foreign additives, exclusive to Whole Foods. I like it because, like so much about this administration, it is both trendy and ignorant. Was

Victor Davis Hanson: Obama as Hamlet

[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.] I have been as critical as anyone of the administration’s finger-in-the-wind, “Mubarak is a dictator, Mubarak is not a dictator” policy during the last two months. In the case of Libya, Obama has seemed almost Shakespearean in his public musings about wheth

David Bosco: Would ElBaradei Make a Good President for Egypt?

[David Bosco is an assistant professor at American University's School of International Service and the author of "Five to Rule Them All: The U.N. Security Council and the Making of the Modern World." He writes the Multilateralist blog for ForeignPolicy.com.] This past week, Mohamed ElBaradei finally announced what people who have been watching Egypt's political transformation had long assumed: "When the door for presidential nominations opens, I intend to nominate my

David A. Nichols: Obama Should Model Eisenhower in the Mideast

[David A. Nichols is an authority on the Eisenhower presidency and the author of the just-released book "Eisenhower 1956: The President's Year of Crisis — Suez and the Brink of War."] The Middle East will undoubtedly continue to be unstable. Its legacy of colonialist exploitation, badly drawn borders, decades of power struggles, the scramble for oil and, since 1948, the Arab-Israeli conflict has ensured a rocky future. For every American president, the question is not whet

Leon Fink: A Hard Break with Wisconsin's Past

[Leon Fink, who formerly taught at UNC-Chapel Hill, is distinguished professor of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of the recently published "Sweatshops at Sea."] CHICAGO -- Picture the state of Wisconsin trying to clean up after a devastating economic slump. Foreclosed farms and homesteads, high unemployment. Schools overcrowded and streets badly in need of repair. The gap between rich and poor more gaping than ever before. With rising property

Mark LeVine: Mid-East Battle of the Sociologists

[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).] I received an email from BAE Systems the other day. According to the company's website, BAE is the largest military contractor on earth, with 100,000 employees globally "engaged in the development, deliver

Jonathan Zimmerman: Rooting for BYU's Sex Ban

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University and lives in Narberth. He is the author of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory" (Yale University Press). He can be reached at jlzimm@aol.com.] I did not attend Brigham Young University, and I'd be shocked if either of my teenage daughters decided to go there. But Brandon Davies did decide to attend BYU, where every student signs an annual pledge to re

Victor Davis Hanson: The Procrastinating Generation

[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 Obama administration figures it has read the national mood well. This therapeutic generation of Americans loves to talk and worry about problems and then assume that either someone else will solve them or they will go away on their own. And why not, sin

Thomas S. Kidd: Muslim Americans: What Would Jesus (or George Washington) Do?

[Thomas S. Kidd teaches history and is a senior fellow at Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion. He is the author of "God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution." Follow his writings via Facebook.] With the current unrest in Egypt and across the Middle East, Americans would do well to consider the collective messages we send to the Muslim world, including the Muslims of America. Along these lines, I recently wrote an opinion piece for th

Conrad Black: The State of Obama

[Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom and Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full. He can be reached at cbletters@gmail.com.] An observer is entitled to wonder if this administration has taken leave of its senses. I have often written here that it might do better at some point, but it has been in office for 26 months and its policy record is a shambles. It has given precisely no indication of what it proposes

Thomas G. Palaima: Closing Doors to the Future

[Palaima is a classics professor at the University of Texas; palaima@sbcglobal.net] When my friends and I were growing up, public education was held sacred by our parents. As the children of immigrants, education had been their way into American society and their way up the economic ladder. The Russians launched Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957, two days before my sixth birthday. The Cold War with the totalitarian Soviet Union gave our

Nawaf Obaid: Why Saudi Arabia is Stable Amid the Mideast Unrest

[The writer is a senior fellow at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies and is pursuing a doctorate on the rise of Saudi nationalism at the Department of War Studies at King's College, London.] Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt have toppled their regimes. Unrest continues in Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Algeria and Oman. Yet the host of the world's largest energy reserves and the birthplace of Islam, Saudi Arabia, remains conspicuously quiet.

Nelson Lichtenstein: Is Wisconsin a Victory for Unions?

[Nelson Lichtenstein is the MacArthur Foundation professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he directs the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy. He is the author of "The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business" and editor, with Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, of the forthcoming "The American Right and U.S. Labor: Politics, Ideology, and Imagination."] Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has won an impor

Timothy Garton Ash: At 150, Italy gives the lie to the stories we tell the world about Europe

[Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist.] The 15th-century pope Pius II, who really initiated the modern discourse on "Europe", wrote a famous letter to Sultan Mohammad II, the conqueror of Constantinople, in which he celebrated the manifold powers of the old continent: "Spain so steadfast, France so warlike, Germany so populous, Britain so strong, Poland so daring, Hungary so active and Italy so rich, high-spirited and experienced

Lewis Pyenson: Technology's Triumph Over Science

[Lewis Pyenson is a professor of history at Western Michigan University. This essay was adapted from a presentation to the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge.] Recently, after an absence of many decades, I returned to the place of higher learning where I began studying physics. I hardly recognized the laboratories. In my time, they were given over to model experiments, such as a ballistic pendulum (in which a rifle delivered a bullet into a block of woo

David Wright: Canada Must Stand Up to China's Claim to the Arctic

[David Wright is a research fellow of the Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute and associate professor of history with the University of Calgary.] Acute observers in China know the resources of the Canadian Arctic and its Northwest Passage will continue to guarantee Canada's status as a wealthy and developed country well into the 21st century. Not all of them are happy about this, given Canada's tiny population and the burgeoning and resource-hungry populations of the wo

Julian E. Zelizer: Why Obama Will Be Tough to Beat

[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.] Republicans are looking ahead -- some with glee and others with fear -- to the presidential election in 2012.... But Republicans have also expressed a significant amount of hesitation about