Roundup: Historians' Take

Victor Davis Hanson: A New America in a New World Order

[NRO contributor 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 year is quite young, and yet it has already seen a multitude of disturbing events and trends — unrest in Cairo and North Africa; nuclearization in Iran; a growing anti-American alliance among Turkey, Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria; the expan

Sander A. Diamond: Will a Moderate Egypt Survive?

[Sander A. Diamond is a professor of history at Keuka College, N.Y.] At the center of the Islamic world sits Egypt, located on the western edge of the Fertile Crescent. It was here, in the Nile Valley, where civilization emerged 7,000 years ago. While most people know little about modern Egypt, they are familiar with ancient Egypt, which still casts a long shadow into the present.... And, of course, everyone knows that the Suez Canal, built in the mid-19th

R. Matthew Poteat: Long Road to Freedom

[R. Matthew Poteat is an Assistant Professor of History in the Virginia Community College System.] Condemned criminals of low birth were often hanged with a short rope and their bodies left to rot in a gibbet: an iron cage hung from gallows-type structure. Those of more fortunate social standing had their head chopped off by a large axe. Heretics and blasphemers were burned alive at the stake. Traitors were "hanged, drawn and quartered," meaning they were stra

Julian E. Zelizer: Middle East Changes May Defy History

[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.] Even the most hardened realist couldn't help but shed a tear when the news broke that pro-democracy protesters succeeded in ousting the regime of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. For the mo

Linda K. Kerber: Can the 14th Amendment Defend Itself?

[Linda K. Kerber is May Brodbeck Professor in the liberal arts, and professor of history, lecturer in law in the Department of History at the University of Iowa. She is also the author of "No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship" (Hill & Wang).] The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution clearly states that all people born in the United States are citizens. But some Republicans, in their wide-ranging attack on illegal immigrants,

Steven Fielding: Back to the Future? Austerity in 1931 and 2011

[Steven Fielding is Professor of Political History and Director of the Centre for British Politics in the School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham. He is writing a book for Bloomsbury on fiction and British politics. Steven.Fielding@nottingham.ac.uk] How similar is the current economic crisis to the one that hit the UK and the rest of the world before 1939? There have certainly been many comparison

Markha Valenta: The Clash of Clichés

[Markha Valenta holds appointments in the departments of history at the University of Amsterdam and of culture studies at the University of Tilburg. Her current work concerns the politics of religious diversity in relation to global urbanism, multiculturalism and secular democracy. Her openDemocracy column is Inter Alia.] At the beginning of the year, John Vinocur published a fascinating little article in the New York Times. John Vinocur is senior correspondent at the International

Juan Cole: Fear Not the Muslim Brotherhood Boogeyman

[Juan R.I. Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan.] The hysteria in American media about Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is not only ignorant and demagogic, it is hypocritical. The United States has actively promoted Muslim Brotherhood branches in other countries when it suited its purposes, including in Afghanistan and Iraq. Moreover, the Turkish and Indonesian cases of democratic transition in the Muslim world should have taught us

Stanley Kutler: Activist Judges Strike Again

[Stanley Kutler is the author of “The Wars of Watergate” and other writings.] Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen may have created a new gold standard for constitutional ignorance. The recent decision by a Florida federal judge to strike down the whole of the new federal health care law, a decision at odds with two other rulings, prompted Van Hollen to declare that “effectively, Wisconsin was relieved of any obligations or duties that were created” under terms of the law. Eve

Walter Russell Mead: Mubaraks, Mamelukes, Modernizers and Muslims

[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.] Pharaoh Hosni is out; the Mubarak dynasty is done. This had to happen and, whatever comes next, the downfall of an undemocratic leader well past his sell-by date is a good thing in and of itself. The nation of Egypt is not a personal possession to be handed down li

E. Randall Floyd: Democracy in the Land of Caliphs and Conquerors

[E. Randall Floyd is the author of more than 15 books and a former history professor at Augusta State University. He resides in Kurdistan, where he is a professor of history at the American University of Iraq-Sulaimani, and is working on several new books.] SULAIMANI, Iraq --- The rugged brown hills of northern Iraq are a long way from the lush gardens of Augusta, but this quiet and ancient land of caliphs and conquerors has been my home for the past year and a half. I

Jonathan Zimmerman: A Little Shame Goes a Long Way

[Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of history and education at New York University. He is the author, most recently, of Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory (Yale University Press).] Shame on us! The cat is finally out of the bag about what our students are learning, and it isn't pretty. It's more like a dog, or maybe a pig. A warthog, even. I'm talking about the much-discussed Academically Adrift by my New York University colleagu

James D. Le Sueur: Egypt and the Middle East, Stuck in the Past

[JAMES D. LE SUEUR is Professor of History at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. He is the author of Algeria Since 1989: Between Terror and Democracy.] Gamal Abdel Nasser pledged to thrust Egypt into the postcolonial time zone in 1952, when he wrested control of the government from the Egyptian monarch and the British Empire. As he wrote in his autobiographical essay, Egypt's Liberation, "The revolution marked the realization of a great hope felt by the people of Egypt sinc

Niall Ferguson: Egypt: How Obama Blew It

[Niall Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard University and a professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School.] The statesman can only wait and listen until he hears the footsteps of God resounding through events; then he must jump up and grasp the hem of His coat, that is all.” Thus Otto von Bismarck, the great Prussian statesman who united Germany and thereby reshaped Europe’s balance of power nearly a century and a half ago. Last week, for

Richard Wolin: A Fourth Wave Gathers Strength in the Middle East

[Richard Wolin teaches history and political science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His most recent book is The Wind From the East: French Intel­lectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s (Princeton University Press, 2010).] In January 1969, Jan Palach, a young philosophy student, set himself aflame in Prague's Wenceslas Square to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia five months earlier. Paradoxical though it may seem, his sel

Victor Davis Hanson: Reflections on the Revolution in Egypt

[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.] For nearly three weeks, the Biden/Clinton/Obama policy concerning the tottering Mubarak regime was contradictory, incoherent, and predicated entirely on the perceived pulse of the demonstrations. Finally, the confused administration seemed to have realized that U.S. foreign policy must center

Allen C. Guelzo: Mr. Lincoln’s Economics Primer

[Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College. This article first appeared in the Dec. 20, 2010, issue of National Review.] Abraham Lincoln’s greatest love was politics, but his intellectual passion was for what the 19th century called “political economy” — the way economics and politics intersected in society and government. According to his law partner William Herndon, Lincoln “liked political economy, the study of it,” and Shelby Cullo

David Schultz: What "Original Intent" Would Look Like

[David Schultz is a Hamline University professor in the School of Business and a professor of law at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of more than 25 books and 70 articles on American politics, policy, and law, including a two volume constitutional law text book, "Constitutional Law in Contemporary America," published by Oxford University Press (2010).] With reverence and awe, Michele Bachmann and the Tea Party pay homage to the original Constitution and frame

Michael Kazin: American Exceptionalism is a Flawed Idea, but Obama Should Still Use It

[Michael Kazin is a professor of history at Georgetown University and co-editor of Dissent. His next book, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation, will be published in August (Knopf).] Has the United States always been an exceptionally free and virtuous nation? If you have to ask the question, you are already well on the road to unpatriotic perdition—or so every Republican about to run for president seems to think. “Don’t kid yourself with the lie,” Rick Santorum recently

Max Boot: We Could Still 'Lose' Iraq

[Max Boot is a contributing editor to Opinion and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is writing a history of guerrilla warfare and terrorism.] My kids — the oldest is 13 — seem to think that anything that happened in the pre-iPad era is ancient history and therefore of little relevance to them. The American public and politicos must tacitly agree. How else to explain the sudden disappearance of Iraq from our public discourse? Remember Iraq? That cou