Roundup: Historians' Take

Jonathan Zimmerman: Are College Students Learning?

Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of history and education at New York University. He is the author of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory."In his State of the Union address last Tuesday, President Obama proposed several measures to lower college tuition. University leaders responded cautiously, warning that cost-cutting reforms might also cut into instructional quality.But here's the big open secret in American higher education: Most institutions have no meaningful way to measure the quality of their instruction. And the president didn't ask us to develop one, either....At most institutions, including my own, we have no idea if [students] are [learning anything]. Sure, professors assign grades in their courses, and students are asked to evaluate the classes they take and the professors who teach them. But neither measure gives us any real answer to the $200,000 question: What knowledge or skills are students acquiring in exchange for the skyrocketing tuition they pay?

Michael Lind: Who’s Afraid of Industrial Policy?

Michael Lind’s new book, "Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States", will be published in April and can be pre-ordered at Amazon.com.President Obama’s emphasis in his State of the Union message on revitalizing American manufacturing has led to predictable attacks by critics that he is practicing “industrial policy.”  This criticism is largely limited to the libertarian right, which has watched in dismay as Mitt Romney denounces unfair Chinese practices and Newt Gingrich promises to revive the government-backed American space-flight industry.In debates in the 1980s and 1990s, the term was often associated with proposals to emulate one or another aspect of the export-oriented Japanese model. Today, however, critics use “industrial policy” in blanket condemnations of any government support of particular technologies as well as particular industries and particular companies.  Industrial policy, they allege, is both un-American and doomed to failure.

Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp: Mormons’ Double Legacy

Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, a professor of American religious history, is the chairman of the department of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the author of the forthcoming "Mormonism: A History."American society has long held a wary admiration for Mormons. Today Mormons run major corporations, serve in Congress, promote patriotic sentiments, and extol conservative social ideals. They have a world-renowned choir, named by Ronald Reagan as “America’s Choir.” Clean-cut, wholesome and polite, Mormons are archetypes of the American way.

Julian Zelizer: Newt Gingrich is No Outsider

Julian Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of "Jimmy Carter" (Times Books) and author of the forthcoming book "Governing America" (Princeton University Press).Princeton, New Jersey (CNN) -- Newt Gingrich likes to fancy himself a counterestablishment rebel. He has attempted to tap into the anger of tea party Republicans by reminding voters about his glory days as a maverick conservative in the House of Representatives, which culminated in the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994.On NBC's "Meet the Press," he said, "In Florida, my case is going to be very simple. You have a clear establishment candidate in Mitt Romney. ... And you have somebody whose entire career has been a Reagan populist conservative."The trouble is that Newt Gingrich is about as establishment as one can get. The thinness of his claim to be some kind of populist outsider exposes the myth that many conservative Republicans promote when they distance themselves from the power they actually wield and claim that they are still outside the political system.

Niall Ferguson: How the Rising Bottom Billion Could Explode Inequality at Home

Niall Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard University. He is also a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford University, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His Latest book, Civilization: The West and the Rest, has just been published by Penguin Press.Everyone’s talking about inequality these days. President Obama made it a central theme of his State of the Union address: “We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well while a growing number of Americans barely get by, or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share.”...Thirty years ago the average American was around 43 times richer than the average Chinese. Today that figure is down to six. When a fifth of humanity achieves economic liftoff, the income gap between the West and the Rest is bound to shrink.

Steve Gillon: How Newt Gingrich, the Ultimate Washington Insider, Plays the Part of Outsider

Gillon is the author of “The Pact: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich and the Rivalry that Defined a Generation.”As we approach the critical Florida Republican primary, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has stepped up his attacks on rival Mitt Romney, criticizing the former Massachusetts governor for being too timid and too moderate — and styling himself in contrast as an anti-establishment warrior.The party establishment has fired back — dredging up reams of old opposition research on Gingrich. Former Sen. Bob Dole, whom Gingrich once dismissed as “the tax collector for the welfare state,” has joined the chorus of party leaders bitterly lambasting Gingrich.For anyone who knows Gingrich’s history, this fight is both predictable and absurd. Predictable because Gingrich has, throughout his career, always seen and styled himself as a Republican insurgent. Absurd because the very same man has spent decades as the consummate Washington power player.

Harold Holzer: The Lincoln-Douglas Debates Weren’t As Great As Gingrich Thinks

Harold Holzer’s many books on Lincoln and the Civil War include The Lincoln-Douglas Debates: The First Complete, Unexpurgated Text. For months, Newt Gingrich has floated the same challenge to President Obama that underdogs have hurled at their political rivals for more than a century: Let’s debate. And not just once or twice, but many times, with no moderators to intervene or inhibit us. Just two candidates, head to head — Lincoln-Douglas style. As a Lincoln historian, I’ve studied the famous meetings between challenger Abraham Lincoln and incumbent Stephen A. Douglas that set the prairies on fire during the 1858 U.S. Senate race in Illinois. Gingrich has even called me to discuss them. As I’ve told Gingrich, the problem is that, as famous as the debates are, their reputation far outweighs their value.

David S. Reynolds: Why Evangelicals Don’t Like Mormons

David S. Reynolds, a professor of American studies and English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is the author of “Mightier Than the Sword: ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ and the Battle for America.”According to a CNN exit poll of South Carolina Republican primary voters, Newt Gingrich, a thrice-married Catholic, won twice as much support from evangelical Protestants as Mitt Romney, a Protestant. And among voters for whom religion meant “a great deal,” 46 percent voted for Mr. Gingrich and only 10 percent for Mr. Romney.This is the second evangelical-heavy state Mr. Romney has lost. With a third, Florida, next on the list, it’s important to consider the often antagonistic skepticism that many evangelicals have of Mr. Romney’s brand of Protestantism: Mormonism....Many evangelicals assert that Mormonism denies the divinity of Christ and is therefore not a branch of Christianity. But the Mormon belief is that Jesus was the first-born child of God and a woman, and that humans can aspire to share his spiritual essence in the afterlife.

Victor Davis Hanson: The Perils of Obama’s Foreign Policy

NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author most recently of the just-released The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom.The mystery remaining about the Obama administration’s foreign policy is not whether it has worked, but whether its failures will matter all that much. That is no rhetorical question, given that it is hard to permanently damage, in just three years, the position abroad of the United States, given its vast military power and enormous economy.The Obama administration’s policy was predicated on three assumptions. First, world tensions and widespread dislike of the United States were due to George Bush’s wars and his cowboyish style. Therefore, outreach and reset would correct the Bush mistakes — given that unrest did not really antedate, and would not postdate, the strutting Bush. The unique personal narrative and heritage of Obama and his tripartite name, of course, would earn America fides in inverse proportion to Bush’s twang and evangelical way of speaking about God.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Evangelicals Now Vote for Catholics. Will They Also Vote for a Mormon?

Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of history and education at New York University. He is the author of “Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory” (Yale University Press).Many years ago, one of my best history teachers gave me advice I have never forgotten. “Don’t just listen to what people say,” he urged. “Listen to what they leave out, too.”......Gingrich and Mr. Santorum [are not, like the Mormon Mitt Romney,] evangelical Christians.... They’re Catholics.Their evangelical backing is a truly astonishing fact, given the long history of anti-Catholicism among evangelical Protestants in America. For more than three centuries, Evangelicals insisted that Catholicism represented a mortal threat to the body politic. But over the past three decades, they have joined hands with their former foes to change the face of politics altogether....

Michael Lind: How Conservatives Lie About Government

Michael Lind’s new book, "Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States", will be published in April and can be pre-ordered at Amazon.com.One benefit of the prolonged campaign for the Republican presidential nomination has been the revelation that most of the 20 or 30 percent of Americans who describe themselves as conservatives live in a fantasy world.  In their imaginations, Barack Obama, a centrist Democrat with roots in Eisenhower Republicanism rather than Rooseveltian liberalism, is a radical figure trying to take America down the path of “European socialism.” The signature healthcare reform of Obama and the Democratic Congress, modeled on Mitt Romney’s insurance-friendly Massachusetts healthcare program and closely resembling a proposal by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, is described as “statist,” “socialist” or “fascist” (as though Hitler came to power with the goal of providing subsidies to private health insurance companies).

Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman: How Slavery Led to Modern Capitalism

Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, historians at Harvard University and Brown University respectively, are co-editing "Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development," to be published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2013. The opinions expressed are their own.When the New York City banker James Brown tallied his wealth in 1842, he had to look far below Wall Street to trace its origins. His investments in the American South exceeded $1.5 million, a quarter of which was directly bound up in the ownership of slave plantations.Brown was among the world's most powerful dealers in raw cotton, and his family’s firm, Brown Brothers & Co., served as one of the most important sources of capital and foreign exchange to the U.S. economy. Still, no small amount of his time was devoted to managing slaves from the study of his Leonard Street brownstone in Lower Manhattan.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Reading about Moscow (With Beijing on My Mind)

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chair of the History Department at the University of California, Irvine, and the author, most recently, of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2010). His reviews and commentaries have appeared in newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and a wide range of magazines and journals of opinion, including New Left Review, the TLS, the Nation, the Huffington Post, Time and Newsweek. He is the Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies and co-founder of the UCI-based China Beat blog/electronic magazine. Read his first piece for LARB, "Hot Dystopic," which appeared in May 2011.

Naomi Oreskes: Verdict is in on Climate Change

Naomi Oreskes is a professor of history at the University of California San Diego and co-author of "Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming."...I study the history of climate science, and my research has shown that the think tanks and institutes that deny the reality or severity of climate change, or promote distrust of climate science, do so out of self-interest, ideological conviction or both. Some groups, like the fossil fuel industry, have an obvious self-interest in the continued use of fossil fuels. Others fear that if we accept the reality of climate change, we will be forced to acknowledge the failures of free-market capitalism.Still others worry that if we allow the government to intervene in the marketplace to stop climate change, it will lead to further expansion of government power that will threaten our broader freedoms.

Juan Cole: Can Europe’s Oil Boycott Really Sink Iran?

Juan Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan.  The following is reprinted from his blog Informed Comment. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Juan Cole.The European Union threatened Iran on Monday with cutting off petroleum imports into the 27 EU member states, and announced sanctions on Iranian banks and some port and other companies.Iran sells 18 percent of its petroleum to Europe, and Greece, Italy and Spain are particularly dependent on it. Europe also sells Iran nearly $12 billion a year in goods, which likely will cease, since there will be no way for Iran to pay for these goods. Some in Europe worry that the muscular anti-Iran policy of the UK, France and Germany in northern Europe will worsen the economic crisis of southern Mediterranean countries such as Greece.

Julian Zelizer: It Took a Scandal to Get Real Campaign Finance Reform

Julian Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of "Jimmy Carter" (Times Books) and author of the forthcoming book "Governing America" (Princeton University Press).As Americans read about the flood of private money that is going into the current presidential campaign, most can't help but shake their heads in disgust about how our democracy functions.With all the talk about changing Washington, voters are shrewd enough to understand that if contributors give this much money to the candidates in both parties, there is little chance that Washington will be much different in 2013.Americans tend to be cynical that campaign finance reform will ever work. The conventional assumption is that politicians will never be willing to fix the system and they will circumvent any laws that come their way. Trust in government continues to plummet.Yet we must remember that there have been moments when positive change happened. The most important episode in the history of campaign finance reform took place in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon....

Fouad Ajami: The Fall of the House of Assad

Fouad Ajami is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and co-chair of Hoover's Working Group on Islamism and the International Order.Bashar, son of Hafez Assad, has a son by the name of Hafez. But as the defiance and bloodletting in Syria would seem to suggest, Bashar needn’t worry about training his son for future rulership. The house that Hafez Assad built, some four decades ago, is not destined to last.

Juan Cole: South Carolina and Gingrich; Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood

Juan Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan.  The following is reprinted from his blog Informed Comment. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Juan Cole.The election results for Egypt’s lower house have been announced, and the Muslim religious parties appear to have gained over 70% of the seats. The Muslim Brotherhood is claiming its Freedom and Justice Party took 47% of the 498 seats in the lower house of parliament.The hard line fundamentalist Nur Party won 29% of the seats contested on a party basis.To have 51%, the Muslim Brotherhood party needs a coalition with another party. Its leaders have at least said that they prefer to make that alliance with a secular party like the Wafd rather than with the hard line Salafis.

Janet Golden: The Real “Food Stamp President”

Janet Golden is a frequent contributor to HNN and professor of history at Rutgers University.Political commentators have correctly called out the ugly racism infusing the claim that President Obama is the “food stamp President.”  Policy experts make two other points:  first, most recipients of what is now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) are children in working families and their parents and second, most of them are, in US census terms, “white.” And there is another error as well. The real “food stamp President” was Franklin D. Roosevelt.  His efforts to support the nutritional needs of hungry Americans began with the distribution of surplus commodities—an effort that became the foundation of the National School Lunch Program. Its history can be found here:  (http://www.fns.usda.gov/cnd/lunch/AboutLunch/ProgramHistory_4.htm) While the provision of surplus commodities helped some, in his second inaugural address in 1937 the President looked out on a nation and saw that one third remained “ill-nourished.”  One response was the US Department of Agriculture’s experimental food stamp program, which lasted from 1939 to 1943.  Its history can be found here.

Timothy Garton Ash: In France, Genocide Has Become A Political Brickbat

Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist. His personal website is www.timothygartonash.com.Next Monday the French Senate is to vote on a bill that will criminalise denial of the Armenian genocide of 1915, along with any other events recognised as genocide in French law. The bill has already passed through the National Assembly, the lower house of the French parliament. The Senate should reject it, in the name of free speech, the freedom of historical inquiry and article 11 of France's path-breaking 1789 declaration of the rights of man and citizen ("the free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the most precious rights …").