Roundup: Historians' Take

Ted R. Bromund: Churchill, Edward VIII, and ‘Arms and the Covenant’

[Ted R. Bromund holds a PhD in history from Yale University. He blogs for Commentary Magazine.] Christopher Hitchens doesn’t like The King’s Speech. Not because of its cinematic qualities, which he appreciates, but because of its political ones. According to him, the movie is a “a gross falsification of history” because it shows Churchill as “generally in favor of a statesmanlike solution to the crisis of the abdication” and because it neglects to portray Edward VIII as “a firm admi

Juan Cole: The Corruption Game

[Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History and the director of the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Michigan.  His latest book, Engaging the Muslim World, is just out in a revised paperback edition from Palgrave Macmillan. He runs the Informed Comment website.]Here’s one obvious lesson of the Tunisian

Willy Lam: The Military Maneuvers of Xi Jinping

[Mr. Lam is a professor of China studies at Akita International University, Japan, and an adjunct professor of history at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.] As Communist Party General Secretary Hu Jintao visited Washington last week pledging friendship and cooperation, back in China the generals were having a field day bashing America. Popular media commentator Major General Peng Guangqian, for example, called the U.S. a "trouble maker in the Asia-Pacific." He alleged t

Victor Davis Hanson: Anatomy of an Obama Moment

[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.] In a news-obsessed culture, sometimes the media simply ignores profound stories, such as the cause of the almost inexplicable — and quite brilliantly constructed — recovery of Obama’s poll ratings. Just a few weeks ago, the nega

James M. Banner Jr.: An Amendment Rooted in Past Failures

[James M. Banner Jr., a historian in Washington, is a founder of the National History Center.] There's a move afoot to give the states the authority to repeal measures enacted by Congress and signed by the president. It's a bad idea. It's also dishonorable. The measure, led by Republican Rep. Rob Bishop of Utah and taking the form of a proposed amendment to the Constitution, would allow the dis-enactment of "any provision of law or regulation" upon the vote of

Jill Lepore: The Battle over the Constitution

[Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University where she is also chair of the History and Literature Program. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale in 1995.] It is written in an elegant, clerical hand, on four sheets of parchment, each two feet wide and a bit more than two feet high, about the size of an eighteenth-century newspaper but finer, and made not from the pulp of plants but from the hide of an animal. Some of the id

Julian E. Zelizer: What Obama Can Learn from Clinton, Reagan

[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.] Many political analysts are urging President Obama to give a State of the Union Address that is conciliatory toward Republicans and that acknowledges that voters are unhappy with the direction of his pol

Rick Perlstein: What Would Ronnie Do?

[Perlstein is the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.] Ronald Reagan scored a comfortable victory in 1980, promising a new day in Washington and the nation. Then Reaganomics ran into brick wall. Unemployment—7.4 percent at the beginning of his term—was heading toward 10 percent by the summer of 1982. The gross domestic product declined 1.8 percent. On Election Day, voters punished him by taking 27 House seats from his Republican Party, includi

Edmund Morris: Did Reagan Have Alzheimer’s in Office?

[Morris, the author of Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, recently published Colonel Roosevelt, the final volume of his trilogy on the 26th president.] Young Ron—as I still think of him, although he’s no longer the 20-something in red high-top Reeboks who eavesdropped with me through a cracked door at the U.S.-Soviet summit in 1985—is the only one of the four Reagan children to share their father’s sunny equanimity. Unlike his elder siblings (Maureen died in 2001), Ron seems free of

Victor Davis Hanson: Civility for Thee

[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.] An evil psychopath, Jared Lee Loughner — a man with no discernible ideology or political affiliation, and declared by those who know him to be both unhinged and unacquainted with contemporary media — shot a U.S. congresswoman, murdered a fed

Jonathan Tremblay: Wikileaks and a History of the Whistleblowers

[Jonathan Tremblay is a historian and Breaking News Editor for the History News Network Since 2007, the website Wikileaks has aimed to provide an anonymous way for individuals to reveal incriminating, irresponsible, immoral and/or unethical information about their employer or governement. More specifically, Wikileaks says that it accepts “classified, censored or otherwise restricted material of political, diplomatic or ethical significance.” As such, the whistleblowing intermediary

Michael Willrich: Why Parents Fear the Needle

[Michael Willrich, an associate professor of history at Brandeis University, is the author of the forthcoming “Pox: An American History.] DESPITE overwhelming evidence to the contrary, roughly one in five Americans believes that vaccines cause autism — a disturbing fact that will probably hold true even after the publication this month, in a British medical journal, of a report thoroughly debunking the 1998 paper that began the vaccine-autism scare. That’s because the p

Charles L. Zelden and R.B. Bernstein: Amendment Politics: How to Look Like a Statesman

[Charles L. Zelden, professor of History at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, is author of "Bush v Gore: Exposing the Hidden Crisis of American Democracy." R.B. Bernstein, distinguished adjunct professor of law at New York Law School, is the author of "The Founding Fathers Reconsidered" and "Amending America."] Those who call themselves "constitutional conservatives" have odd ideas about what treating the Constitution conservati

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom: Hu's Chicago Stop-Over and the Future of US-China Summits

[Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, the Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies, and the author, most recently, of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know(published in April by Oxford University Press). A co-founder and regular contributor to

Juan Cole: Ala. Governor Apologizes to Muslims, Hindus, Jews

[Juan Cole, the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan, maintains the blog Informed Comment. His most recent book, just out in paperback, is “Engaging the Muslim World.”] Gov. Robert Bentley, the new governor of Alabama, created a firestorm of controversy on Monday when he said that if you are not a Christian he does not consider you his brother or his sister. He added, “… so anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ

Elizabeth Abbott: The Ghosts of Duvalier

[Elizabeth Abbott is senior research associate at Trinity College, University of Toronto, and the author of Haiti: The Duvaliers and Their Legacy, to be reissued in summer 2011 as Haiti Revisted: The Duvaliers and Their Legacy in a Shattered Land.] Perhaps the best way to understand former Haitian dictator and would-be president-for-life Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier's quixotic return to his homeland after 25 years in exile in France is through William Faulkner's classic

Victor Davis Hanson: The Bloomberg Syndrome

[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.] After the recent Tucson shootings, Pima County sheriff Clarence W. Dupnik, a Democrat, almost immediately and without evidence claimed that conservative anti-government speech had set off alleged killer Jared Lee Loughner. Yet the more the unfolding details informed us that the Co

Timothy Garton Ash: Tunisia's revolution isn't a product of Twitter or WikiLeaks. But they do help

[Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist.] 'The Kleenex Revolution"? Somehow I think not. Unless, that is, you follow Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi. In a televised denunciation of the popular uprising that has deposed his friendly neighbouring dictator, he ranted: "Even you, my Tunisian brothers, you may be reading this Kleenex and empty talk on the internet." (Kleenex is how Gaddafi refers to WikiLeaks.) "Any useless person,

Tom Engelhardt: In the Crosshairs

[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). You can catch him discussing war American-style and that book in a Timothy M

Ilan Pappé: The “Stuttgart Declaration” Represents a Paradigm Shift

[Ilan Pappé, Israeli historian, Professor of History at the University of Exeter (UK), has written many books and works with local and international journals.] Recently the organizers of the Stuttgart conference and especially those who signed the Stuttgart declaration came under sever criticism from various writers and politicians in Germany and were exposed at time even to typical German center left abrasive language. Setting aside the insignificant aspects of the dia