Roundup: Historians' Take

Andrew J. Bacevich: U.S. Must Resist Urge to Meddle in the Mideast

[Bacevich is the author of Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War.] The upheaval engulfing the Arab world presents the United States with two choices. Washington can either embrace change, stand on the sidelines, and accept whatever results. Or it can intervene, insert itself in the process, and try to shape the outcome. Advocating the latter would be to assume reserves of power, not to mention wisdom, at Washington’s disposal. At the moment, however, the U.S. possesses n

Steve Hochstadt: The Value of Collective Bargaining

[Steve Hochstadt of Jacksonville is a professor of history at Illinois College.] I have never paid union dues. I have been a white collar worker most of my life, in jobs where there are no unions. But I have benefited greatly from unions. One of my first jobs was delivering mail for a summer. That was too short a time to join the mail carriers’ union, but I was paid the good wage that they had won through collective bargaining. In college, I worked summers digging ditch

Jim Downs: Teenage Dreams: Masculinity and Katy Perry

[Jim Downs is an assistant professor of history and American Studies at Connecticut College. His books include Taking Back the Academy and Why We Write.] Is Katy Perry changing what it means to be a man? It all seemed to start this past fall on Glee when Blaine Anderson played by the self-identified straight actor Darren Criss serenaded Kurt Hummel, played by Chris Colfer, who earned a Golden Globe award for his palpable portrayal of gay teen angst. Since Kurt had been

Efraim Karsh: A Legacy of Violence

[Efraim Karsh is professor of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at King's College London, editor of the Middle East Quarterly and author of Islamic Imperialism: A History.] Turbulent times often breed nostalgia for a supposedly idyllic past. Viewing the upheavals sweeping the Middle East as a mass expression of outrage against oppression, eminent historian Bernard Lewis fondly recalled past regional order. "The sort of authoritarian, even dictatorial regimes th

Jonathan Zimmerman: Teachers Must Not Give Away Fundamental Freedoms

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University and lives in Narberth. He is the author most recently of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory" (Yale University Press). He can be reached at jlzimm@aol.com.] In 2001, high school English teacher Shirley Evans-Marshall gave her class a copy of the American Library Association's "100 Most Frequently Challenged Books." She asked her students to

Walter Russell Mead: Blue State Dems Turn on State, Local Workers

[Walter Russell Mead is professor of foreign affairs and the humanities at Bard College and editor-at-large of The American Interest] Who is killing the public unions? Some people, like the tens of thousands of protesters in Madison and the tens of millions of Americans who agree with them, believe that the villains are scheming corporate interests, Fox News, Tea Party ‘fanatics’ and opportunistically populist politicians like Scott Walker. Many of their op

Daniel Pipes: Erdoğan and the "Al-Gaddafi Prize"

[Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. He has lived for three years in Egypt.]The slogan of the"Al-Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights" is"As the sun shines for everyone, freedom is a right for everyone." Lovely, no, especially at a moment when Mu'ammar al-Qaddafi's war planes are raining down death and destruction on his own

Julian E. Zelizer: Liberal Tradition is Under Assault

[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.] In one of the unexpected moments from the past few weeks, some defenders of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's attack on public unions have pointed to President Franklin Roosevelt. Patrick McIlhe

Niall Ferguson: Un-American Revolutions

[Niall Ferguson is a Harvard professor and Newsweek columnist.] Americans love a revolution. Their own great nation having been founded by a revolutionary declaration and forged by a revolutionary war, they instinctively side with revolutionaries in other lands, no matter how different their circumstances, no matter how disastrous the outcomes. This chronic reluctance to learn from history could carry a very heavy price tag if the revolutionary wave currently sweeping across North A

Fouad Ajami: How the Arabs Turned Shame Into Liberty

[Fouad Ajami, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the author of “The Foreigner’s Gift: The Americans, the Arabs and the Iraqis in Iraq.”] PERHAPS this Arab Revolution of 2011 had a scent for the geography of grief and cruelty. It erupted in Tunisia, made its way eastward to Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain, then doubled back to Libya. In Tunisia and Egypt political freedom seems to have prevailed, with r

John Foot: A Qaddafi Son, Italian Soccer and the Power of Money

[John Foot, the Professor of Modern Italian History in the Department of Italian at University College in London, splits his time between England and Milan. Foot’s book, “Winning at All Costs: A Scandalous History of Italian Soccer” (Nation Books, $17.95), is a comprehensive and entertaining history of calcio, or soccer, in Italy.] Over the years, one of the charges against the murderous regime of Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi was that state funds were being used to further the footbal

Eric Foner: Return of the Class Struggle

[Eric Foner teaches history at Columbia University.] Thanks to the public employees of Wisconsin, thousands of whom have occupied the state capitol building for the past several days, the class struggle has returned to the United States. Of course, it never really left, but lately only one side has been fighting. Workers, their unions and liberals more generally have now rejoined the battle. As many commentators have pointed out, Governor Scott Walker’s plan to eliminat

Keith Knutson: Unions have History of Protecting Workers

[Keith Knutson is a history professor at Viterbo University in La Crosse, WI.] ...It was a unionized nation that defeated fascism in World War II. In turn, the American dream of fair compensation for hard work would be achieved. A golden age of unionized progress and our most equitable wealth distribution came about in the 1950s. Yet even then, Wisconsin produced U.S. Sen. Joe McCarthy, who led a campaign against our unions and helped establish fear in the

Timothy Stanley: Tory Nostalgia for Victorian Era is Dangerous

[Timothy Stanley is a research fellow in American history at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He is the author of Kennedy vs. Carter: the 1980 Battle for the Democratic Party's Soul] The promos for the upcoming public service white paper suggest that ideology is driving the government's agenda. David Cameron has stated that his goal is to defund and deconstruct the welfare state, to "dismantle big government and build the big society in its place". His ambitio

Gary Leupp: Iran and U.S. in the Suez Canal

[Gary Leupp is a Professor of History at Tufts University, and author of numerous works on Japanese history. He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu.] On Wednesday the U.S. Navy official website reported: “Enterprise Carrier Strike Group (CSG) transited the Suez Canal and entered the U.S. 5th Fleet area of responsibility (AOR), Feb. 15.” This refers to the passage of the world’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the USS Ent

Juan Cole: 90% of Libya in Rebel Hands

[Juan Cole, who maintains the blog Informed Comment, is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan and author, most recently, of Engaging the Muslim World.] The LAT reports that the rebellion against Muammar Qaddafi’s 41-year dictatorship in Libya headed toward an end-game on Wednesday, as Misurata, the country’s third-largest city (pop. 600,000), fell to the opposition. Significantly, Misurata is in the west of the country, where support f

Yitzhak Reiter: King Solomon's Vanishing Temple

[Yitzhak Reiter is an associate professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Ashkelon Academic College and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.] The recent round of peace negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and Israel, when it was not interrupted by disputes over settlement freezes and other marginalia, focused on the same set of issues that has typified the negotiating agenda for many years: borders, Jerusalem, security, refugees, water and so on. We know them so we

Adam Arenson: The Making of America’s Most Dangerous City

[Adam Arenson is an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at El Paso. He is the author of "The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War."] U.S. News and World Report is out with another ranking of America’s most dangerous cities, using analysis from FBI crime data. And, once again, St. Louis has been ranked #1.... Yet at moments like these I am reminded of a maxim favored by of one of St. Louis’s famous residents, M

Joseph A. McCartin: Convenient Scapegoat: Public Workers under Assault

[Joseph A. McCartin teaches history at Georgetown University, where he directs the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor. His book on the PATCO strike, Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.] “WE MAY, at long last, have a way to liberate our nation from the domination of those who should be our public servants but instead are frequently our union masters.” Conserva

Victor Davis Hanson: After Obama, the Deluge

[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] President Obama established a bipartisan debt-reduction commission — and then ignored its findings, which called for unpopular reductions in entitlements and across-the-board spending cuts. His first two budgets led to the largest deficits in U.S. history. The ensuing $3 trillion in red ink gav