Historians in the News Archive
This page includes, in addition to news about historians, news about political scientists, economists, law professors, and others who write about history. For a comprehensive list of historians' obituaries, go here.
SOURCE: James Oakes in the OAH Newsletter (8-10-09)
Although best known for his groundbreaking study of slavery, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South (1956), Stampp was his generation’s most formidable advocate of the thesis that the Civil War was an “irrepressible conflict” over slavery. His research was impeccable, his prose limpid, and passion seeped from his every sentence, engaging readers well beyond the academy. He was rewarded with high honorsa Guggenheim fellowship, the Lincoln Prize, the Harmsworth Professorship at Oxford, the Commonwealth Fund lectureship at London, the presidency of the OAH.
It was an impressive rise from modest beginnings. Stampp was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on July 12, 1912, to German-American parents of strict protestant virtue and democratic-socialist ideals. Stampp’s mother hoped her son would become “a good socialist lawyer,” but from an early age he was fascinated by the American past, telling a friend when he was still a young boy that he intended to become a history teacher. He earned his bachelor’s degree in 1935 at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, his M.A. a year later, and after a brief stint as a high school teacher he returned to Madison where he took his Ph.D. in 1942.
Being at Madison during the Great Depression reinforced the political commitments to which Stampp had been reared. He considered himself a socialist, attended a few communist party meetings, and minored in labor economics with Selig Perlman. His dissertation, which became his first book, was a study of Indiana Politics During the Civil War (1949) and it reflected the enormous sway that Charles Beard held over historians of that generation. The Beardian inflections were tempered in Stampp’s later work, but the passion never subsided.
Upon graduation, Stampp taught for a year at the University of Arkansas before moving to the University of Maryland, where he formed enduring friendships with Richard Hofstadter, Frank Friedel, and the sociologist C. Wright Mills. He took advantage of his residence near Washington, D.C., to do the research for his next book. In 1947, Stampp moved one last time to the University of California at Berkeley, where he would remain for thirty-seven years, before retiring in 1983 as the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor.
Stampp was at heart a historian of the Civil War era--but with a particular slant. From 1950 onward, all of his work was framed as a challenge to the “revisionist” interpretation of slavery and the sectional crisis--the view that the Civil War and Reconstruction were caused by nothing and did no good, that they were unnecessarily provoked by irresponsible politicians and wild-eyed radicals. Stampp spent forty years, Javert-like, hunting revisionists down. ...
SOURCE: Time (8-8-09)
You write that one of the major myths about American society is that we used to be prudent with our money and only recently did we go astray. What's the real history?
Americans are speculative people. During and after the Civil War, for instance, there was a lot of stock market and commodities speculation—people trying to make a quick buck. But it was only when financial institutions picked up on that and provided the methods whereby you could buy now and pay later—that very simple concept—that things started to change structurally. Now Americans are more highly leveraged than they were in the past.
Which makes our most recent downturn worse?
Yes, absolutely. We're out of proportion with our amount of personal debt. A good number of people are in debt to the point where they may not ever be able to pay their way out.
Why didn't lenders better capitalize on our speculative bent sooner?
Our banking system was never national. In fact it wasn't even retail in the 19th or early 20th century. The banks that were capable of doing the most lending to individuals didn't actually do it. We had to wait until Bank of America, for instance, got into business, and a lot of the companies like Household Finance that started making consumer loans, for this thing to actually warm up...
...You actually assign a lot of blame for our recent troubles on a lack of interest rate caps—that is, on the absence of strict usury laws. Why?
Almost every state had usury laws in the 1920s, and they were circumvented one by one. Prohibitions against excessive interest started to disappear [South Dakota, for instance, loosened its laws in 1980,] and once they did, the credit-card companies recognized a wonderful opportunity. They could charge as much as the market would bear, claiming that they had to charge more for bad credit risks. You can argue that's the democratization of credit, but it's in the interest of credit-card companies to keep people under the yoke. We've just swapped loan sharks for legitimate loan sharks...
...A lot of your book is about the history of borrowing money. Any favorite episodes?
Well, it's been a long road. During the Roman Empire, the first anti-usury law—and I think this says it all—was found in the Council of Nicea in the 4th century. It states that no clergyman could practice usury, so you can get a pretty good idea of what was going on then—lending to the flock. The odd part is, the Council of Nicea was also the council that confirmed the concept of the Trinity. Those are probably two of the most unlikely pieces of legislation you could find in the same piece of canon law.
SOURCE: NYT (8-6-09)
Mr. Hale went on to study at Cambridge, where he did his doctoral work on the evolution of the Viking longship. From there he embarked on a long archaeological career that has included many underwater searches for ancient warships. Decades later he’s finally gotten around to writing his first book, “Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy and the Birth of Democracy,” along the lines Mr. Kagan proposed.
Mr. Hale’s sea-level view of Athens during its Golden Age is, as Mr. Kagan had guessed, a novel and gripping way to approach a story that has been told many times before. What Mr. Kagan might not have guessed is that his student would become a far better than average writer. In “Lords of the Sea” Mr. Hale’s simple but vigorous sentences prick up your ears from the first page...
...Mr. Hale’s thesis in “Lords of the Sea” is that the construction of the mighty Athenian navy, composed largely of lightweight warships known as triremes, in which 170 oarsmen rowed in three tiers, led directly to Athens’s Golden Age and its advanced form of democracy. For more than a century and a half, from 480 to 322 B.C., Athens’s city-state of some 200,000 people had the strongest navy on earth. “Without the Athenian navy there would be no Parthenon, no tragedies of Sophocles or Euripides, no ‘Republic’ of Plato or ‘Politics’ of Aristotle,” Mr. Hale writes. “Before the Persian Wars, Athens produced no great traditions of philosophy, architecture, drama, political science or historical writing. All these things came in a rush after the Athenians voted to build a fleet and transform themselves into a naval power in the early fifth century B.C.” The hard work of building and maintaining a fleet pulled the society together. The protection the navy afforded Athens allowed it to prosper, to fend off the enemies that would have overrun it and changed its tolerant and inquisitive character. Among those who commanded fleets or squadrons of triremes were the playwright Sophocles and the historian Thucydides...
SOURCE: Steven Hahn in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (8-3-09)
Wondering how to make sense of such a large scholarly elision, I began to reflect on a more general and unusual problem: what historians don't write about—and why.
Why are there historical subjects we so easily avoid or disown, even when they are of genuine significance? Why are there interpretations we are reluctant to embrace, even when the empirical evidence nearly bites us in the face? And why do some frameworks of analysis become so deeply entrenched that even when accumulating scholarship calls them into question, they resist being displaced and instead assimilate new findings into more familiar categories?
Those questions rest at the heart of my latest book, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom, which pursues them through three episodes that span more than a century and a half of American history and range in subject matter from the emancipation process in the 18th and 19th centuries to the genealogies of black power in the 20th. It is, in effect, a book about politics, and chiefly African-American politics, in a double sense: about the political worlds of both history making and history writing. And it calls for three major reassessments.
One concerns the way we have come to think about the abolition of slavery in the United States. Ever since the antebellum period itself (and particularly since the Union side won the Civil War), historians and other observers have identified two discrete emancipations: one, relatively small in scale, that ended slavery in what we call the "North" by the early 19th century; and another, far larger in scale, that ended slavery in what we call the "South" during the Civil War. The "first" emancipation thereby created a "free-labor North" and a "slave-labor South" and a political framework of "sectionalism" that governed American politics between 1800 and 1860, setting the stage for secession, military confrontation, and the emancipation with which we are most familiar.
That is all well and good, but research over the past two decades has called such a framework into serious question. It has demonstrated both the importance of slavery all over North America during the 18th century and the extremely gradual course of abolishing it in the Northeast, Middle Atlantic, and even Midwest, leaving slaves there throughout the antebellum era (in New Jersey as late as 1860) and, owing to the Fugitive Slave Acts, making slavery a national rather than a sectional institution.
Emancipation, I suggest, should therefore be viewed not as two discrete events but as a single protracted process (more protracted than anywhere else in the Atlantic world), associated most closely with state formation—the rise, developing capacity, claims to authority, and consolidation of a nation-state—rather than with an "irrepressible" conflict between free and slave societies....
SOURCE: JTA (8-5-09)
The panel's first meeting will be Sept. 9, according to the announcement Wednesday by Federal Minister of the Interior Wolfgang Schäuble.
The panel, whose members are an ethnic and religious mix, is to report regularly on anti-Semitism and efforts to combat it in Germany. It also will make recommendations based on best practices and consult with other experts.
It includes grass-roots activists, educators, scholars and experts in historical and current anti-Semitism, in right-wing extremism and Islamic extremism.
The members are Aycan Demirel, co-founder and director of the Kreuzberg Initiative Against Anti-Semitism in Berlin; Olaf Farschid, expert on Islam and consultant to the Berlin State Interior Ministry; Elke Gryglewski, member of the educational department at the House of the Wannsee Conference, a memorial and educational program; Johannes Heil, an expert in historical anti-Semitism and prorector at the College for Jewish Studies in Heidelberg; Peter Longerich, historian at the London-based Centre for the Holocaust and Twentieth-Century History; and Armin Pfahl-Traughber, political scientist and sociologist at the Federal University in Brühl.
Also, Martin Salm, president of the board of the foundation "Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future" (EVZ), Berlin; Hans-Julius Schoeps, historian and director of the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European Jewish Studies at Potsdam University; Wahied Wahdat-Hagh, political scientist and fellow at the "European Foundation for Democracy" in Brussels; Juliane Wetzel, historian at the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism at the Technical University of Berlin.
SOURCE: London Evening Standard (8-5-09)
The Storm of War is comprehensive, compelling and full of vivid human detail drawing on private archives. The German generals could have won the war, argues Roberts, if they didn't have constant ideological and political demands placed on them by Hitler and if they had fought the war as soldiers rather than Nazis. The Holocaust deprived them of a labour force and of the scientists who could have made the nuclear bomb.
Roberts's book is subtitled A New History of the Second World War with characteristic aplomb. As if it needs retelling. But Roberts believes it does require retelling “especially when writing bottom-up history. In British attics there is enough material for hundreds more histories of the Second World War.”
Roberts became a historian only by default. After Cranleigh (“I was bullied, I was too cocky”) and Cambridge he joined Robert Fleming but realised that he was ill-suited to banking because he was innumerate. A friend suggested he write a biography of Lord Halifax and his career took off.
Eminent Churchillians followed and a series of other acclaimed books including A History of the English Speaking Peoples since 1900 and Lord Salisbury, which he believes to be his masterpiece. “I have met every single person who has read the book. It didn't sell more than a couple of thousand.”
He wrote Lord Salisbury in a frenzied six weeks after six years of research. Writing The Storm of War was a bit more of a slog. “I did Master and Commanders and The Storm of War at the same time, as the subjects overlapped. The research took two-and-three-quarter years and then I had 18 months to write them.
I go off to my aunt's farmhouse in Dordogne, which is very basic indeed. It doesn't have television, it doesn't have a telephone, it doesn't have a swimming pool. I averaged 17 hours' writing a day. I didn't see anybody for a 10-day period. It does get incredibly lonely and you end up talking to yourself.”
These long periods of isolation acount for his renowned love of socialising. Roberts attends up to five parties a night, leading me to wonder whether like his hero Winston Churchill he has a body double. “I don't deny it's a psychological disorder — the need to go to lots of parties.
It's a lonely task being a writer when you're stuck in archives and libraries. Susan says I don't have to but there is a gnawing feeling that if I don't I won't have anything amusing to tell my diary. I start work here between 5.30 and 6.30 in the morning however bad the hangover.”
Roberts is friends with David Cameron, who once famously saved him from a jellyfish on holiday. “I've known him for a long time but there is no way I am one of his best friends. And the idea that because we know one another socially I influence his political thinking is nonsense.
He is a tough man who knows what he wants and how he's going to get it. If people stand in his way he will get rid of them. You need to be a good butcher to be a good PM. I think he will be pretty ruthless as a prime minster and, therefore, one of the really effective ones.” Has Cameron been ruthless enough already? “No, he could have been an awful lot more ruthless over the expenses scandal.”
Roberts, an unavowed apologist for the Iraq war, believes all parties could be more ruthless on Afghanistan. "I just wish they would mention how many Taliban get killed. This constant reference to British deaths is understandable but I think it is undermining the support for the war that we don't talk about the successes. We should be talking abut the hundreds of enemy troops who have been killed, captured or turned. Nobody seems to want to do it." ...
SOURCE: The Chronicle of Higher Education (8-4-06)
In an interview with The Root, an online publication that he edits, Mr. Gates said he planned to draw upon his arrest as "a teaching experience," and he talked with PBS about producing a documentary about racial profiling.
Mr. Gates, director of Harvard University's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, appears intent on joining other academics whose work is directly influenced by incidents in which they saw themselves as victims of discrimination.
A number of faculty members in fields such as ethnic studies, history, and sociology say such personal encounters guide their classroom discussions or help chart the direction of their scholarly endeavors. Many say the result has been some of their best work. But other professors warn that the strong emotions involved can weaken the quality of scholarship.
SOURCE: Victoria Bynum at the Renegade South blog (7-3-09)
Related Links
Kevin Levin: A Statement About the State of Jones Dispute Response of John Stauffer & Sally Jenkins NYT news story
[Victoria Bynum, a history professor at Texas State University, San Marcos, is the author of “The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War.”]
This is the first installment of a three-part review [of The State of Jones, by Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer]. For part two, click here; for part three, click here.
The State of Jones, by Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer (Doubleday, 2009), aims to please, delivering a stirring narrative, lively and passionate prose, and richly-detailed Civil War battle scenes. For many readers, particularly those drawn to Civil War battlefields, this book will make the past come alive. Others, particularly students of the “Free State of Jones,” will find problematical the authors’ stretching of the evidence to support highly exaggerated claims that Newt “fought for racial equality during the war and after,” and “forged bonds of alliance with blacks that were unmatched even by Northern abolitionists” (pp. 3-4).
The history that Jenkins and Stauffer re-tell is well-known to Mississippians and familiar to many southerners and Civil War historians. It is certainly well-known to regular readers of this blog, for whom Newt Knight needs no introduction. As we all know, from October 1863 until war’s end, Newt was the leader—the captain—of the Knight Company, a band of deserters and draft evaders who led an armed insurrection against the Confederacy.
In this version of an old story, readers are treated to vivid depictions of Corinth, Vicksburg, and Kennesaw Mountain, all battles in which the 7th battalion Mississippi Infantry (in which the majority of Knight Company members served) fought. The final two chapters of the book recount the tragic history of Mississippi Reconstruction, an era riddled with violence and marked by the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacist campaigns that brought an unrepentant slaveholding class back to power. The authors give special attention to carpetbag governor Adelbert Ames, from whom Newt Knight received several important political appointments, and redeemer governor Robert Lowry, the same Col. Lowry whom Newt battled during the war in the Leaf River swamps.
Stauffer and Jenkins also re-tell one of the most fascinating, if long-known, elements of Newt Knight’s history: his long and intimate relationship with Rachel, the former slave of his grandfather. After the war, Newt lived openly with Rachel and their numerous children, bestowing property and affection on white and multiracial kinfolk alike.
As I began writing this review of State of Jones, I quickly realized it would have to be written in installments, as I could never critique the book in one post. This then is the first installment of what will be an ongoing series of reviews and discussions of the book’s various themes, topics, and arguments. I hope the reviews will become interactive, with readers joining in to discuss what they like or don’t like about the book.
The obvious place to begin is by assessing the startling assertions by Jenkins and Stauffer that Newt Knight rivaled northern abolitionists in his views about slavery and that he forged “alliances” with slaves during the war. Due to a maddening endnote style, however, it is often difficult, sometimes impossible, to determine the source for a particular conclusion. Add to this the authors’ use of “parallel stories” to take fanciful journeys into what “might” have happened, or what Newt “likely” would have thought or done, and you have a narrative that allows readers to easily glide past what is documented history and what is pure conjecture (reminiscent of Ethel Knight’s Echo of the Black Horn, minus the racism ).
Take, for example, the authors’ argument that Newt was likely raised a Primitive Baptist whose religious devotion led him to condemn slavery. Such conjecture is based on a single statement by Newt’s son, Tom Knight, who published a biography of his father in 1946. But Tom never stated that his father was raised a Primitive Baptist, only that he joined the Zora Primitive Baptist Church around 1885-86 (p. 14). Newt Knight may well have hated slavery, but the only definitive statement to that effect appears in Anna Knight’s 1952 autobiography, Mississippi Girl.
A problem that runs throughout this book is the authors’ uncritical use of Tom Knight’s biography whenever it suits their purposes. If there’s one thing that past historians of the Free State of Jones have agreed upon (including myself, Rudy Leverett, and Kenneth Welch), it’s that Tom’s words must be used with great care. Quite simply, The Life and Activities of Captain Newton Knight is shot through with errors. Tom’s determination to present his father as a devout Christian (like Tom himself), a loving father, and a sincere defender of the United States government led him to take great liberties with his father’s life story.
Yet Tom’s biography of Newt is the only source cited for many of the authors’ narratives about the activities of Newt Knight, particularly for the era of Reconstruction, for which archival records (with the exception of Newt’s multiple petitions for compensation as a wartime defender of the Union) provide only tantalizing glimpses of Newt’s political activities after the war.
Heavy reliance on Tom’s uncorroborated stories creates a problem for the authors that they are loath to admit.That is, if you’re going to use one Tom Knight story, why not another? Tom Knight certainly never presented his father as any sort of abolitionist, religious or otherwise. He also shared the common racist views of his generation and was deeply ashamed of Newt’s interracial relationships. As I have argued elsewhere, Tom’s shame may have motivated his claim that his father killed a slave while still a boy, or, even more shockingly, that Newt was responsible during Reconstruction for the disappearance (suggestive of a lynching) of a “young negro man” who was “slipping around the white women’s houses after dark,” (p. 37). For obvious reasons, the authors ignore this story. Their careless use of this deeply-flawed source is a luxury they cannot afford in a book that claims to be “Civil War history at its finest.”
To support their assertion that Newt formed “alliances” with slaves during the war, Stauffer and Jenkins leap far beyond his collaborative relationship with Rachel Knight. The authors provide an imaginative tale of Newt’s likely alliance with slaves while on the run from Corinth without a shred of concrete evidence to back them up. Appearing in the space of five paragraphs, the phrases “a fugitive slave who might well have stopped Newton as he groped his way,” (p. 146); or, “Newton would have come across men like Octave Johnson,” (p. 146); or, “Johnson could have shown Newton how to lure the dogs,” (p. 147); and “Newton would have learned how to hunt in the swamps,” (p. 147) are purely conjectural, drawn from published memoirs such as Rev. John Hill Aughey’s 1888 Tupelo (Aughey was a documented southern abolitionist), and Solomon Northrup’s Twelve Years a Slave, neither of which have any direct connection with Newt Knight. One can only hope that readers will turn occasionally to the vaguely-written endnotes at the back of the book to see that no primary sources are used to support what amounts to a subtle attempt to impose a northern abolitionist persona on Newt Knight.
Coming up in future reviews of State of Jones: Was Newt Knight at Vicksburg? What was the nature of Newt’s relationships with Serena and Rachel? And more–stay tuned!
SOURCE: Henry Louis Gates in the Boston Globe (7-31-09)
Sergeant Crowley and I, through an accident of time and place, have been cast together, inextricably, as characters – as metaphors, really – in a thousand narratives about race over which he and I have absolutely no control. Narratives about race are as old as the founding of this great Republic itself, but these new ones have unfolded precisely when Americans signaled to the world our country’s great progress by overcoming centuries of habit and fear, and electing an African American as President. It is incumbent upon Sergeant Crowley and me to utilize the great opportunity that fate has given us to foster greater sympathy among the American public for the daily perils of policing on the one hand, and for the genuine fears of racial profiling on the other hand.
Let me say that I thank God that (sic) live in a country in which police officers put their lives at risk to protect us every day, and, more than ever, I’ve come to understand and appreciate their daily sacrifices on our behalf. I’m also grateful that we live in a country where freedom of speech is a sacrosanct value and I hope that one day we can get to know each other better, as we began to do at the White House this afternoon over beers with President Obama.
Thank God we live in a country where speech is protected, a country which guarantees and defends my right to speak out when I believe my rights have been violated; a country that protects us from arrest when we do express our views, no matter how unpopular.
And thank God that we have a President who can rise above the fray, bridge age-old differences and transform events such as this into a moment in the evolution of our society’s attitudes about race and difference. President Obama is a man who understands tolerance and forgiveness, and our country is blessed to have such a leader.
The national conversation over the past week about my arrest has been rowdy, not to say tumultuous and unruly. But we’ve learned that we can have our differences without demonizing one another. There’s reason to hope that many people have emerged with greater sympathy for the daily perils of policing, on the one hand, and for the genuine fears about racial profiling, on the other hand.
Having spent my academic career trying to bridge differences and promote understanding among Americans, I can report that it is far more comfortable being the commentator than being commented upon. At this point, I am hopeful that we can all move on, and that this experience will prove an occasion for education, not recrimination. I know that Sergeant Crowley shares this goal. Both of us are eager to go back to work tomorrow. And it turns out that the President just might have a few other things on his plate as well.
SOURCE: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood, is published by the Federation of American Scientists (8-4-09)
In the early 1970s, the Nixon Administration plotted to interfere in Uruguay’s presidential elections in order to block the rise of the leftist Frente Amplio coalition. But when the State Department published its official history of U.S. relations with Latin America during the Nixon era last month, there was no mention of any such activities. Instead, the State Department Office of the Historian said that Uruguay-related records could not be posted on the Department website because of “space constraints.” Following repeated inquiries, however, the Historian’s Office revised its position last week and said it would include Uruguay-related records in its Nixon history after all.
The United States should work “overtly and covertly” to blunt the political appeal of the Frente Amplio and to diminish its chances for victory in the Uruguayan presidential elections, advised one declassified document (pdf) from 1971. Several important documentary records of that turbulent period were compiled by the National Security Archive in 2002. See “Nixon: ‘Brazil Helped Rig the Uruguayan Elections,’ 1971″ edited by Carlos Osorio.
Meanwhile, urban guerrillas who were violently challenging the governments of several Latin American countries drew the worried attention of U.S. intelligence officials. In particular, the Uruguayan Marxist revolutionary group known as the Tupamaros, which murdered a U.S. AID official in 1970, “has had a spectacular and rapid rise to prominence during the last few years,” according to a 1971 CIA analysis entitled “The Latin American Guerrilla Today” (pdf).
But none of this concern over Uruguay could be discerned from the State Department’s official history of U.S. policy towards the region. A July 10, 2009 State Department press release announcing the publication of the latest online volume of the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) on American Republics, 1969-1972, mentioned almost every Latin American country except for Uruguay. The original Preface of the new FRUS volume (pdf) made the peculiar assertion that: “Due to space constraints, relations with… Uruguay… are not covered here.” This assertion is doubly strange since the new FRUS volume was only published online, not in hardcopy, so that “space constraints” are hardly a factor.
By excluding the rather intense U.S. policy focus on Uruguay, the latest FRUS volume was not just practicing bad history, it may also have been committing a violation of the law, which requires that FRUS be “thorough, accurate, and reliable.”
The State Department did not respond to half a dozen inquiries over a two-week period regarding the decision to exclude Uruguay from the official history of the region or the nature of the supposed “space constraints.” The State Department’s Historical Advisory Committee did reply that it was unfamiliar with the issue.
But in a brief email message on July 30, FRUS Acting General Editor Dr. William B. McAllister wrote: “We have revised the Preface. This should clarify the situation.” The revised Preface to the new FRUS volume now states that a chapter on Uruguay “will be added” following completion of the declassification process. The newly revised Table of Contents includes a placeholder listing for Uruguay. There is no indication of what records may be declassified, or when they might become available.
Today, the Frente Amplio coalition whose rise alarmed the Nixon Administration leads the government of Uruguay.
SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed (8-4-09)
The incoming director of Middle Eastern studies at George Washington University last week published a post at his Foreign Policy blog that has set off a discussion about the next generation of Middle Eastern studies students and, eventually, professors.
Marc Lynch writes (and some others agree) that master’s programs and doctoral programs are starting to see an influx -- one he expects to grow -- of veterans, many of them military officers as well as those who worked for non-governmental organizations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The duration of the war, he writes, has led to an unusually large cohort of future thinkers about the Middle East shaped by their experiences there.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq may be about to change Middle Eastern studies -- and not just by adding plenty of new subject material.
The incoming director of Middle Eastern studies at George Washington University last week published a post at his Foreign Policy blog that has set off a discussion about the next generation of Middle Eastern studies students and, eventually, professors.
Marc Lynch writes (and some others agree) that master’s programs and doctoral programs are starting to see an influx -- one he expects to grow -- of veterans, many of them military officers as well as those who worked for non-governmental organizations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The duration of the war, he writes, has led to an unusually large cohort of future thinkers about the Middle East shaped by their experiences there.
And while Lynch notes that some scholars fear these students will “push the field to the ‘right,’ ” he anticipates a less ideological shift. “The officers I've met are all over the map politically and in terms of their intellectual aspirations. Indeed, I'd guess that the bias would be towards pragmatism and empiricism, and against any kind of ideological doctrines,” he writes, adding that “at any rate, the allegations of the politicization of Middle East studies -- particularly political science -- have always been wildly exaggerated.”
SOURCE: Juan Cole in Salon (8-3-09)
Both are former governors of a northwest frontier state with great natural beauty (in Ahmadinejad's case, Ardabil). Both are known for saying things that produce a classic Scooby-Doo double take in their audiences. Both appeal to a sort of wounded nationalism, speaking of the sacrifice of dedicated troops for an often feckless public, and identifying themselves with the common soldier. They are vigilant against foreign designs on their countries and insist on energy and other independence.
But above all, both are populists who claim to represent the little people against wily and unscrupulous elites, and against pampered upper-middle-class yuppies pretending to be the voice of democracy. Together, they tell us something about dangerous competing populisms in an age of globalization...
...An armed citizenry is important to Palin's conception of the republic, and she warned in her farewell address, "You're going to see anti-hunting, anti-Second Amendment circuses from Hollywood ..." She continued, "Stand strong, and remind them patriots will protect our guaranteed, individual right to bear arms ..." By talking about "patriots" "protecting" the individual right to bear arms, Palin skated awfully close to the militia or "patriot" movement on the right-wing American fringe (and not for the first time). Ahmadinejad is not similarly in favor of all citizens having guns, but he comes out of a popular militia, the Basij, which consists of hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizen patriots, armed and pledged to defend the constitution of the Islamic Republic.
Right-wing populism, rooted in the religion, culture and aspirations of the lower middle class, is often caricatured as insane by its critics. That judgment is unfair. But it is true that such movements often encourage a political style of exhibitionism, disregard for the facts as understood by the mainstream media, and exaltation of the values of people who feel themselves marginalized by the political system. Not all forms of protest, however, are healthy, even if the protesters have legitimate grievances. Right-wing populism is centered on a theory of media conspiracy, a "my country right or wrong" chauvinism, a fascination with an armed citizenry, an intolerance of dissent and a willingness to declare political opponents mere terrorists. It is cavalier in its disregard of elementary facts and arrogant about the self-evident rightness of its religious and political doctrines. It therefore holds dangers both for the country in which it grows up and for the international community. Palin is polling well at the moment against other Republican front-runners such as Mitt Romney, and so, astonishingly, is a plausible future president. At least Iranians only got Ahmadinejad because of rigged elections, and they had the decency to mount massive protests against the result.
SOURCE: http://wbztv.com (8-2-09)
FIRST PUBLIC APPEARANCE
In his first public appearance since sharing a beer at the White House on Thursday with the officer and President Barack Obama, Gates said the national debate over racial profiling sparked by his arrest shows that issues of class and race still run "profoundly deep" in the United States.
"They have not been resolved at all," he said, speaking to a crowd of more than 150 who came to see him at the Martha's Vineyard Book Festival.
Gates was mostly light-hearted during his speech and even poked fun at himself after a man in the crowd told him he admired his sense of humor.
"I should have been funnier in the kitchen of my house on July 16," he said.
But Gates also described how the incident and the subsequent national debate affected him personally.
He said he had to shut down his public e-mail and change his cell phone number after receiving numerous death and bomb threats, including one that read, "You should die; you're a racist."
SOURCE: http://www.roozonline.com (8-1-09)
Rooz: In your new book, Engaging the Muslim World, what is your general recommendation for the way the US should engage with the Middle East?
The US under Bush assumed aggressive intent toward the US mainland on the part of Middle Eastern actors such as Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the northwest of Pakistan, and Afghanistan (the latter with some justification, but still this was not an exact understanding). As a result, it launched two major wars itself and supported several proxy wars (Israel-Lebanon 2006 and Pakistan-Bajaur 2008). I would argue that the Bush administration misunderstood the difference between asymmetrical groups such as al-Qaeda, which were trying to hit the US, and regionally-oriented governments and parties that might be hostile to the US but were not actual dangers to it. So the first change I urge is to stop being so aggressive militarily and be more pragmatic toward the state and party challengers, while keeping presjysure on the asymmetrical terrorist groups. And, as for the non-hostile states and publics, stop alienating them by equating Islam with fascism or terrorism.
Rooz: Do you believe Obama’s policy will make a difference? Will he be an honest broker?
Obama’s policies are already making a difference. US soft power, which had greatly diminished, is returning in the Middle East. I think Obama wants to be an honest broker on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, though of course he faces substantial domestic constraints and he may not in the end succeed. But I think he does want to be even-handed, in a way that Bush was not and even Clinton was not.
Rooz: Obama has decided to send some additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan; do you think this is a good idea and will it make any difference in the direction the country is taking?
The US military is convinced that it can implement a ‘take, hold and clear’ counter-insurgency strategy in the Pashtun regions if only it has enough troops. U.S. and NATO forces combined are now up to 90,000 and growing. This reasoning assumes that the reason the Taliban have 10% of Afghanistan is that they are able to coerce people for lack of enough security. But if the Taliban are genuinely popular with 5% of Afghans and 10% of Pashtuns, and if the sources of discontent are the corruption and oppressiveness of the Karzai officials, resentment of forcible poppy eradication, and dislike of foreign troop presence, then the Obama strategy could backfire on a large scale.
Rooz: Do you believe Karzai, facing corruption and mismanagement charges, has a chance of being reelected? And if not, do you believe the other candidate; Abdullah Abdullah will be able to solve the many problems facing Afghanistan?
The polling suggests that Karzai will easily be reelected. Abdullah Abdullah has the disadvantage of being a Tajik who is known to be close to New Delhi, and he is unlikely to poll well in the Pashtun areas, which are something like 44% of the population. Substantial numbers of Pashtuns may dislike Karzai, but for them he really is the only game in town. And his choice of Mohammad Faheem, the Tajik warlord, as vice president, also undercuts Abdullah Abdullah with the Tajiks.
Rooz: Let’s talk about Iran. Since the elections, massive protests and consequent arrest and murder of opponents have taken place. Do you think Ahmadi Nejad has lost all legitimacy and that his government will fall?
Typically governments fall when the army and security forces turn on them, and so either become neutral or split. Until that happens, even unpopular regimes can survive for a long time. Look at Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The Baath Army, the officer corps of which was disproportionately Sunni and the armored corps of which was even more so, kept Saddam in power even after his 1991 defeat. So far in Iran we have not seen the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Basij popular militia, or the regular army display any ambivalence toward the regime....
SOURCE: Press Release (8-2-09)
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