Roundup: Historians' Take

Richard Falk: Post-Mubarak Revolutionary Chances

[Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Visiting Distinguished Professor in Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has authored and edited numerous publications spanning a period of five decades, most recently editing the volume International Law and the Third World: Reshaping Justice (Routledge, 2008). The Egyptian revolution has already achieved extraordinary results: after

Neve Gordon: Israeli Media 'Fears' the New Egypt

[Neve Gordon is the author of Israel's Occupation and can be reached through his website.] Over the past three weeks the Israeli media has been extremely interested in Egypt. During the climatic days of the unprecedented demonstrations, television news programmes spent most of their airtime covering the protests, while the daily papers dedicated half the news and opinion pages to the unfolding events. Rather than excitement at watching history in the making

Walter Russell Mead: The Tea Party and U.S. Foreign Policy

[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.] The rise of the Tea Party movement has been the most controversial and dramatic development in U.S. politics in many years. Supporters have hailed it as a return to core American values; opponents have seen it as a racist, reactionary and ultimately futile protest a

Stanley Kutler: What Gov. Walker Won’t Tell You

[Stanley Kutler is the author of “The Wars of Watergate” and other writings. He taught constitutional and legal history for 35 years at the University of Wisconsin.] There is a kernel of truth in Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s claim of a “budget shortfall” of $137 million. But Walker, a Republican, failed to tell the state that less than two weeks into his term as governor, he, with his swollen Republican majorities in the Wisconsin Legislature, pushed through $117 million in tax bre

Niall Ferguson: Sale of the Century

[Niall Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard University and a professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School.] In my favorite spaghetti western, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, there is a memorable scene that sums up the world economy today. Blondie (Clint Eastwood) and Tuco (Eli Wallach) have finally found the cemetery where they know the gold is buried. Trouble is, they’re in a vast Civil War graveyard, and they don’t know where to find the loot. Eastw

Glenn W. LaFantasie: Who's the Worst President of Them All?

[Glenn W. LaFantasie is the Richard Frockt Family Professor of Civil War History at Western Kentucky University. He is working on a book about Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.] In 2006, while the Bush administration smashed its way through two wars, countless constitutional constraints, and a fragile economy constructed on the slippery slope of tax cuts for the wealthy, Sean Wilentz, a Princeton historian, pondered in Rolling Stone whether W. would be regarded as America's wors

Kiron K. Skinner: Ronald Reagan and the African American

[Kiron K. Skinner is the co-author of Reagan, in His Own Hand and other books. She is on the advisory board of the George W. Bush Oral History Project, teaches international relations at Carnegie Mellon University, and is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.] Ronald Reagan, who narrowly lost the Republican party’s presidential nomination in 1976, realized that his party needed to broaden its base into a durable coalition that would help its members win and maintain office at

Arthur Herman: Rumsfeld's legacy

[Arthur Herman, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is writing a book on the Arsenal of Democracy.] Publication of Donald Rumsfeld's memoirs, "Known and Unknown," has renewed the fierce debate about the most controversial secretary of defense since Robert McNamara. Most of the debate centers around what many see as mistakes and misjudgments on Rumsfeld's watch from 2001 to 2006: the invasion of Iraq in search of weapons of mass destruction which didn't

Victor Davis Hanson: Pruning Farm Subsidies

[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.] In times of massive deficits, why are we borrowing millions to subsidize profitable agribusiness? Lots of presidents have asked that question. George H. W. Bush tried to cut farm subsidies. Bill Clinton did, too. George W. Bush wanted them ended as well. All failed. The so-called

Joseph A. McCartin: What's Really Going On in Wisconsin?

[Joseph A. McCartin is associate professor of History and director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University. This fall, Oxford University Press will publish his book Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America.] Anti-labor forces have waited decades for the opportunity that they are now trying to seize in Wisconsin. Republican Governor Scott Walker’s plan, echoed in proposals put forwa

Stephanie Taylor: What Wisconsin's Governor is Really Threatening

[Stephanie Taylor is a co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, and a doctoral candidate in American history at Georgetown. Her research focuses on the relationship of labor and the state in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.] Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has declared war on state workers, almost literally. First, he proposed a state budget that would cut retirement and healthcare for workers like teachers and nurses, and strip away nearly all of their c

Jonathan Zimmerman: Why the Islamic Right Should Act Like the Christian Right

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of “Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory.”] Can democracy and religious fundamentalism co-exist? That’s the question of the moment in the Middle East. In Egypt, the ouster of Hosni Mubarak has raised Western fears of an Islamist takeover by the Muslim Brotherhood. Similar worries surround protest movements in Yemen, Bahrain, and Algeria: Would the fall of

Tom Engelhardt: Cutting $100 Billion?... Easy

[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)]Here’s the latest news from Congress, in case you’ve been in Afghanistan for the last couple of weeks.  A debate about slashing the federal budget is now upon us, while fears of a possible

Juan Cole: The Great Arab Revolt

[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 Arab world’s presidents for life and absolute monarchs are quaking in the aftermath of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. Arab politics had been stuck in a vast logjam for the past thirty years, from which its crowds are now attempting to blast it loose. The protesters put their

Joel Beinin: Egypt's Workers Rise Up

[Joel Beinin is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and a professor of Middle East history at Stanford University. His latest book is The Struggle for Worker Rights in Egypt (Solidarity Center).] “Egyptian Workers Join the Revolution,” proclaimed the headline of Al-Ahram, the government-owned daily, the day before ex-President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation. Tens of thousands of workers—in textiles, military production, transportation, petroleum, cement, iron and steel, hospit

Walter Russell Mead: Is Fear The Father Of Us All?

[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.] If a specter haunts the chancellories of America, it isn’t communism and it isn’t Karl Marx. It’s Thucydides, the chronicler of the 30 year Peloponnesian War between ancient Sparta and Athens that led to the comprehensive defeat of the world’s first great democrati

Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg: Mississippi is Still Lying about History

[Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg are professors of history at Louisiana State University, and most recently co-authors of "Madison and Jefferson."] Surprise! Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour has put his foot in his mouth. His impulse when confronted by reporters earlier this week was to refuse to condemn those in his state who would resurrect the infamous Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, slave trader and Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and put his image o

Nathan J. Brown: Egypt's Constitutional Ghosts

[NATHAN J. BROWN is Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University and a nonresident Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.] Egyptians seeking to build a new future after the rule of Hosni Mubarak hope to draw on, as well as correct, the flaws in the country's longstanding constitutional tradition. In the days since a military council took power from Mubarak, the country's political opposition has been quick to a

Robert Zaretsky: Egypt and the Longue Durée

[ROBERT ZARETSKY is Professor in the Department of History and Honors College at the University of Houston. He is, most recently, co-author of France and its Empire Since 1870.] There are worse places to begin a search for the sources of Egypt's current political earthquake than in the company of a middle-aged French soldier imprisoned in a German stalag during World War II. For the prisoner, Fernand Braudel, captivity felt -- if not like an eternity -- at least like an awfully long

Timothy Garton Ash: Listen to this message of hope from Europe's Arabs – and the warning

[Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist.] I thought I should see for myself the impact of these revolutions on the Arab street. The Arab street in Europe, that is. So I have come back to the Calle de Tribulete in Madrid. Along this one narrow street, with its seedy bars and phone-and-internet locutorios, where immigrants talk to their convulsed homelands, you meet Moroccans, Tunisians, Algerians – and, in a dusty little shop called the House of Ph