Roundup: Historians' Take

Steve Hochstadt: Whom Do You Trust?

[Steve Hochstadt of Jacksonville is a professor of history at Illinois College. His column appears every Tuesday in the Journal-Courier and is available and on his blog at stevehochstadt.blogspot.com.] Lately we have been hearing how awful government is. Not governments like Iran or North Korea, not Communists or military dictatorships, but our own government. I find this ironic, since I am now teaching a course about the 1960s, when people who criticized our government

Julian E. Zelizer: Don't Judge the 111th Congress Yet

[Julian E. Zelizer is a history professor at Princeton University. He is the editor of an essay collection, “The Presidency of George W. Bush: A First Historical Assessment,” due out this fall, and the author of “Jimmy Carter.”] With all the political challenges Democrats face going into the midterms, one thing is clear: Despite talk of a broken branch of government, Congress has been enormously productive since President Barack Obama took office. The list of legislation that has pa

Alastair Reid: Let the Trade Unions into the Big Society

[Alastair Reid is a fellow of Girton College, Cambridge and editor of "History and Policy" (historyandpolicy.org). His latest book is "The Tide of Democracy: Shipyard Workers and Social Relations in Britain, 1870-1950" (Manchester University Press).] The Con-Lib coalition's ambition for a "big society" based on a reduction of central "big government" and support instead for local "people power" includes community organisers, social v

Lawrence Davidson: Does International Law Have a Future?

[Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University. He is the author of numerous books, including Islamic Fundamentalism and America's Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood.] Back on 23 August 2010 Israel’s most prestigious human rights organization, B’Tselem released a short report on the condition of water supplies in the Gaza Strip. Referencing the United Nations Environment Programme as well as the Palestine Water Autho

James Kwak: The Rich Took Over in the 1970s

[James Kwak holds a PhD in intellectual history from UC Berkeley.] It isn’t often that I read two books in a row that both cite Alexis de Tocqueville, probably my favorite Social Studies 10 author (although he was far from my favorite at the time). In Third World America, Arianna Huffington cited Tocqueville’s observation that democracy should promote the interests of “the greatest possible number”; as I pointed out, this is clearly no longer true in America (if it ever was). In Win

Julian E. Zelizer: Bush Was Right -- We're Not at War with Islam

[Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of "Arsenal of Democracy" and a book on former President Carter and editor of a book assessing former President George W. Bush's administration, to be published this fall by Princeton University Press.] In the aftermath of 9/11, Americans were angry, fearful and scrambling for answers.... A few Americans turned their rage against Muslims who were living in

John Paul Rossi: Lessons of Gulf Oil Spill Apply to Marcellus Shale Drilling

[John Paul Rossi is an associate professor of history at Penn State Behrend. He writes on business and economic history and is co-author of "Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Automobile Insurance: Samuel P. Black, Jr. and the Rise of Erie Insurance, 1923-1961" (jpr2@psu.edu).] BP's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the recent explosion of the Mariner Energy rig offers Pennsylvanians several important lessons that are directly applicabl

Andrew J. Bacevich: Hillary Clinton's 'American Moment' Was Nothing But American Blather

[Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His new book is Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War.] It came. It went. It vanished without a trace. Last week America’s secretary of state appeared before what passes in Washington for a gathering of the great and good and announced that a “new American Moment” had arrived. Unfortunately for Hillary Clinton (and her hopelessly pedestrian speechwriters), the secre

Joseph J. Thorndike: Americans Don't Mind Taxes -- They Hate Tax Loopholes

[Joseph J. Thorndike is the director of the Tax History Project at Tax Analysts in Falls Church and the author of "Their Fair Share: Why Americans Tax the Rich," forthcoming in 2011.] Americans hate taxes, right? We vote for candidates who promise to cut them and punish candidates who pledge to raise them. We tell pollsters we don't want to pay them. And we teach our children that the nation was founded to resist them. From the Boston Tea Party to Shays's Rebe

Daniel Martin Varisco: The Empire’s New Clothes

[Daniel Martin Varisco is professor of anthropology at Hofstra University.] In biblical times when an individual mourned, it involved tearing up everyday clothes and putting on coarse sackcloth and ashes. This is what the patriarch Jacob did when told his young son Joseph had been killed. When Job lost his family he sat on a dung pile. Both acts were motivated by humility rather than thoughts of revenge. As fitting as Job’s location might be for some of the memorial scenes

Walter Russell Mead: 9/11, Islam and War

[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.] Nine years ago this morning I came up from the subway stop at 68th Street and Lexington Avenue to hear from the breakfast cart vendor that a plane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers in lower Manhattan. It didn’t seem that important; I pictured a

Elwood Watson: The Season of Racial Discontent

[Dr. Elwood Watson is a full professor of history and African-American studies at East Tennessee State University. He is the author of several award-winning academic articles, several anthologies and is the author of the book “Outsiders Within: Black Women in the Legal Academy After Brown v. Board” (Rowman and Littlefield Publisher, Spring 2008).] For anyone who thought the election of Barack Obama ushered in an era of post-racial harmony, several events that have transpired over th

Jonathan Zimmerman: Can Conflict Abroad Mean Progress Here?

[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).] Hey, Americans, stop hating each other! Don't you know there's a war going on? That's essentially what the United States' top commander in Afghanistan said in a much-publicized interview, condemning a Florida pastor who has vowed to burn Qurans on Sept. 11.

Robert S. McElvaine: Could TV's "Mad Men" Heal America's Culture Wars?

[Robert S. McElvaine, a professor of history at Millsaps College, is completing a book manuscript on “The Young Sixties.” His most recent book is a new edition of "The Great Depression."] The extraordinary popularity of the television series "Mad Men," which recently won its third consecutive Emmy for Best Drama, suggests an interesting and important shift in Americans’ attitudes toward our culture and history. That shift may have profound, if so far subtle, poli

Shaun Jacob Halper: Why Iran Hawks are Obsessed with Hitler

[Shaun Jacob Halper is currently a PhD student of History at the University of California at Berkeley where he studies modern European History with a focus on subaltern histories including Jewish and gay history. Shaun graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia in '05 where he studied Art History and American and European History.]Any professional historian worth his academic chair knows that no two historical periods are ever truly the same. No matter how widely the cliché is used, hist

Victor Davis Hanson: October Surprises

[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 less than 60 days, the Democrats will probably suffer historic losses in both the House and the Senate. The eleventh-hour campaigning of the now-unpopular Barack Obama on behalf of endangered congressional candidates will not change much.

Juan Cole: The Great Pakistani Deluge Never Happened, If You Watch TV News

[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.]The Great Deluge in Pakistan passed almost unnoticed in the United States despite President Obama’s repeated assertions that the country is central to American security.  Now, with new evacuations and flooding afflicting Sindh Province and the long-term crisis only beginning in Pakistan, it has washed almost completely off American televi

Gary Leupp: Playing with Fire

[Gary Leupp is a Professor of History, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion at Tufts University, and author of numerous works on Japanese history. He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu.] Christians have a long tradition of book burning, dating back to the first decades of what some call the “Jesus movement.” The Book of Acts in the New Testament records how Christian believers in Ephesus collected books with offensive

Mark A. LeVine: ...Meanwhile, Over in Ghana

[Mark LeVine is a professor of history at UC Irvine and senior visiting researcher at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden. His most recent books are Heavy Metal Islam (Random House) and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books).] It was fascinating to watch Mubarak, Abdullah, Netanyahu, and Abbas-a rogue's gallery of oppressors and human rights violators if there ever was one-talk seriously about peace and protecting human and civil rig

David Bercuson: The Road to U.S. Economic Recovery?

[David Bercuson is a professor of history at the University of Calgary.] When it comes to American politics, Canadians are heavily Democratic. But Canadians might want to pause before hoping for a Democratic victory in November’s congressional elections. Canada is economically dependent on the United States and although Canada has fared much better than the U.S. in the Great Recession, Canada too is stuck in the economic doldrums and will remain so as long