Roundup: Historians' Take

Tom Engelhardt: All-American Decline in a New World

[Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book is The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books).] This is a global moment unlike any in memory, perhaps in history.  Yes, comparisons can be 

Andrew J. Bacevich: The Arabs are Doing It Without Us

[Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His most recent book is "Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War."] The ongoing upheaval in the Arab world (and in Iran) has rendered a definitive judgment on U.S. policy over the last decade. Relying on their own resources and employing means of their own devising, the people of the Middle East intent on transforming that region have effectively consigned the entire &

Timothy Garton Ash: This tortured Polish-Russian story is something we can all learn from

[Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist. His personal website is www.timothygartonash.com.] Adam Daniel Rotfeld, a former Polish foreign minister, has on his visiting card one of the world's more extraordinary titles. It reads: Plenipotentiary for Difficult Matters. What a wonderful idea. Every country, every company, every family should have one. The difficult matters Rotfeld is tasked to

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 ga

Robert Darnton: 1789—2011?

[Robert Darnton is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard and director of the Harvard University Library. 
His new book, Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris, was published in November. (December 2010)] The question has come to haunt every article and broadcast from Egypt, Tunisia and other countries in the region whose people have revolted: what constitutes a revolution? In the 1970s, we used to chase that question in cour

Lynn Parramore: What the Right Forgets About Labor History

[Lynn Parramore is a media fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, where she edits the New Deal 2.0 blog. She is also a co-founder of Recessionwire and the author of "Reading the Sphinx," named a "notable scholarly book for 2008" by the Chronicle of Higher Education.] For years, American workers’ wages have stagnated even as they produced more. Since 2008, they have been socked with staggering new bills for bank bailouts and hammered by a Great Recession brought on by

Mary L. Dudziak: Carl Schmitt and Post-9/11 Legal Thought

[Mary L. Dudziak is the Judge Edward J. and Ruey L. Guirado Professor of Law, History and Political Science at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law.]One of the more curious turns in post-9/11 legal scholarship was the embrace of the work of German theorist and “Nazi fellow-traveler” Carl Schmitt. References to Schmitt proliferated in an ongoing discourse of excep

Walter Russell Mead: Race To The Bottom?

[Walter Russell Mead is professor of foreign affairs and the humanities at Bard College and editor-at-large of The American Interest. A longer version of this article appears in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs.] Is America in a race to the bottom, or are we going through what the Austrian born economist Joseph Schumpeter would call a process of “creative destruction”? As readers over thirty will remember, Ronald Reagan used to tell the story of two boys: a pess

Tariq Ali: This is an Arab 1848. But US hegemony is only dented

[Tariq Ali is a Pakistani writer and historian.] The refusal of the people to kiss or ignore the rod that has chastised them for so many decades has opened a new chapter in the history of the Arab nation. The absurd, if much vaunted, neocon notion that Arabs or Muslims were hostile to democracy has disappeared like parchment in fire. Those who promoted such ideas appear to the most unhappy: Israel and its lobbyists in Euro-America; the arms industry, hurriedly trying to

Mary L. Dudziak: "Wartime" Becomes "Crisis Time" in Post-9/11 Legal Thought

[Mary L. Dudziak is the Judge Edward J. and Ruey L. Guirado Professor of Law, History and Political Science at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law.] With the tenth anniversary of September 11 coming up this year, we are sure to see efforts to take account of the past decade.  There will be tireless repetition of the idea that “everything changed” on September 11.  But it should also be an occasion for meaningful examination of the era of 9/11 as a moment in h

Dirk Vandewalle: Is This Libya's New Revolution?

[Dirk Vandewalle, associate professor of government at Dartmouth University, is the author of "A History of Modern Libya."] (CNN) -- The thought of any sustained opposition and open dissent in Libya boggles the mind of even the most seasoned observers of Col. Moammar Gadhafi's tightly controlled country. Since he came to power in a bloodless coup in 1969 that replaced the pro-Western Sanusi monarchy, Libya's leader has ruled with an iron-fisted hand that left

Diane Ravitch: I Stand With the Teachers of Wisconsin

[Ravitch is the author of “The Death and Life of the Great American School System.” This article appeared on her blog in the form of a letter to her colleague Deborah Meier.] Dear Deborah, As I write, thousands of teachers are staging a protest in the state capitol in Wisconsin. Others stand with them, including the Green Bay Packers, other public-sector workers, and even public-sector workers who are not affected by the proposed legislation, namely, firefighters and p

Andrew E. Kersten: All’s Noisy on the Midwestern Front

[Andrew E. Kersten is a professor of U.S. history in the Department of Social Change and Development at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. His new biography of Clarence Darrow will be published this May by Hill and Wang. He can be reached at kerstena[at]uwgb[dot]edu.] AS I sit here at my computer, the button I wore today is still on my shirt. It was given to me by the American Federation of Teachers-Wisconsin organizer on my campus so I could show my solidarity with others who a

Anne Applebaum: In the Arab World, It's 1848 - Not 1989

[Anne Applebaum writes a column for the WaPo.] "Each revolution must be assessed in its own context, each had a distinctive impact. The revolutions spread from one point to another. They interacted to a limited extent. . . . The drama of each revolution unfolded separately. Each had its own heroes, its own crises. Each therefore demands its own narrative." That could be the first paragraph from a future history of the Arab revolutions of 2011. In fact, it comes

Alan Baumler: Sinai-etic Analogies

[Alan Baumler teaches East Asian history at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.]Jeremiah Jenne has a post up at Fallows

Nelson Lichtenstein: Why Everyone Needs Unions

[Nelson Lichtenstein teaches 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.”] So public employees are legally protected from managerial caprice. But as anyone who has dealt with a government bureaucracy knows, such rules require enforcement. You can hire a lawyer, but for the vast majority of low- and middle-

Julian E. Zelizer: What's Wrong with Presidential Rankings

[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.] Since the late 1940s, it has been an American custom for pollsters and publications to release a ranking of U.S. presidents. Usually based on a survey of historians and journalists or of the

Jeremiah Jenne: China: Not Quite a Revolution

[Jeremiah Jenne is a PhD candidate in Chinese history, living and working in Beijing. He is the author of the blog Jottings from the Granite Studio.] First of all I want to thank Jim for giving me this opportunity. My usual audience consists of two classes of Chinese history students per semester and a handful of loyal readers who follow my blog, Jottings from the Granite Studio. There has been a lot written in the past 24 hours about China's still-born "Jasmine

Juan Cole: The Gates of Hell Have Opened in Tripoli

[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.] I am watching Aljazeera Arabic, which is calling people in Tripoli on the telephone and asking them what is going on in the capital. The replies are poignant in their raw emotion, bordering on hysteria. The residents are alleging that the Qaddafi regime has scrambled fighter jets to str

Roxane Farmanfarmaian: What Makes a Revolution Succeed?

[Dr Roxane Farmanfarmaian is an affiliated lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge University. She is also a Visiting Scholar at the Middle East Center of the University of Utah. She lived in Iran during the Revolution and Hostage Crisis.] On February 12, 32 years this week, Iran proclaimed its revolution a success: the Shah was gone, the military had been decimated, and a new era could dawn. Although what followed turned out very d