Roundup: Historians' Take

Zheng Wang: It’s All About Mao

Zheng Wang, an associate professor of diplomacy and international relations at Seton Hall University and a global fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, is the author of “Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations.”WASHINGTON — The trial of Bo Xilai, the fallen Chinese Communist Party official and former member of the ruling Politburo, is attracting the world’s attention with its tales of corruption, sex, murder and political intrigue. But while such details are riveting, they divert attention from the real meaning of the case.

Mark Lawrence Schrad: Boycotting Vodka Won’t Help Russia’s Gays

Mark Lawrence Schrad, an assistant professor of political science at Villanova University, is the author of the forthcoming book “Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State.”

Christian Donath: Egypt -- Making Sense of the Senseless

After weeks of pro-Morsi demonstrations, the Egyptian military has now chosen to use force to end the sit-ins. With fatigue and anger toward the demonstrators high in Cairo, General al-Sisi and his allies believe that they have another 'popular mandate' to reassert control. Appalling and unnecessary violence has been the predictable result.

Lincoln Mullen: How to Make Prudent Choices About Your Digital Tools

Abraham Lincoln (almost certainly never) said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I’ll spend the first four sharpening my ax.” Whoever came up with it, that bit of folksy wisdom neatly captures an ambiguity about work. You’d be a fool to work with a dull ax, but being shrewd about your preparations can quickly turn into being lazy about actually doing your work.

Stephen Mihm: New York Had a Hyperloop First, Elon Musk

Stephen Mihm, an associate professor of history at the University of Georgia, is a contributor to the Ticker. Follow him on TwitterAh, the “hyperloop.” Elon Musk, whose track record as a technological visionary is unimpeachable, has released details of his plan for a futuristic system of transport. The basic idea is to use air pressure to shoot people-carrying pods through tubes at speeds of up to 760 miles per hour.With all due respect to Mr. Musk, the idea isn’t new. This has been pointed out by some commentators, who have noted that in 1972 Rand Corporation researcher R. M. Salter released a proposal to ferry passengers from New York to Los Angles in a mere 21 minutes, or 14 minutes less than the hyperloop would take to send them from Los Angeles to San Francisco. But at its heart, Musk’s project is even more old school: It owes most of its inspiration to ideas that have been around for two hundred years.

Louis René Beres: Core Roots of Palestinian Terrorism

Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971), and publishes widely on world politics, terrorism, and international law.Jerusalem will soon have to confirm its final Road Map decisions on "peace." Then, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will need to determine whether the still-fractionated Palestinian side is willing and able to overcome some of its deepest cultural roots. Without such a determination, any formal agreement could be perilous.Here, insight requires memory. Before a resurgent medievalism took hold in the Islamic Middle East, the fraternity of Palestinian terrorist groups had contained many disparate bedfellows. Virtually every Arab enemy of Israel was more-or-less welcome to join in a battle for "national self- determination" against the "Zionists." Today, the fight has changed from a preeminently secular and tactical one, to a struggle that draws heavily upon still-underlying commitments to religious sacrifice.

Victor Davis Hanson: Our Postmodern Angst

NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is The Savior Generals, published this spring by Bloomsbury Books.In the globally connected and affluent world of the 21st century, we thankfully have evolved a long way from the elemental poverty, hunger, and ethnic, religious, and racial hatred that were mostly the norm of the world until the last century.Yet who would know of such progress — and the great sacrifices made to achieve it — from the howls of our postmodern oppressed? In fact, the better life has become, the more victimized modern affluent Westerners seem to act.

Elizabeth Castelli: Reza Aslan—Historian?

Elizabeth Castelli is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Religion at Barnard College.The “most embarrassing interview Fox News has ever done,” in which anchor Lauren Green challenged the legitimacy of author Reza Aslan for writing Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, seemed to be popping up everywhere on social media last week. The absurdity of the spectacle was multifold: Why—why?!—would a Muslim want to write about Jesus, Green kept asking, as though a nefarious plot to undermine Christianity were somehow afoot. Meanwhile, Aslan made a show of insisting that he possesses not only the academic credentials and but also the professional duty to do so (“My job as a scholar of religions with a PhD in the subject is to write about religions”). The story was quickly framed as a battle between the right-wing Islamophobes of Fox News and Aslan, the defender of intellectual life and scholarship....

Joseph Margulies: Invoking God in America

Joseph Margulies is a professor at Northwestern University Law School and the author of "What Changed When Everything Changed: 9/11 and the Making of National Identity."In one recent week, time took two heroes. So far as I know, the legendary civil rights lawyer Julius Chambers and the esteemed public intellectual Robert Bellah never met. They lived on opposite ends of the country and traveled in different circles. But they were connected in an important, symbolic way, and their passing within a few days of each other provides the occasion to reflect on their common lesson for modern American life.

Paul Kennedy: The Great Powers, Then and Now

Paul Kennedy is Dilworth Professor of History and director of International Security Studies at Yale University. His books include “The Rise and Fall of The Great Powers,” and, most recently, “Engineers of Victory.”So President Obama won’t have a one-on-one conference with his Russian equivalent, Vladimir Putin, at the time of the G-20 meeting in Moscow, partly because of a nondescript “leaker,” Edward Snowden — that is not good. So Chinese public opinion (however that is cooked up) seems to be ever more nationalistic these days, while Japan launches its first aircraft carrier since the Pacific War — surely also not good.So America’s National Security Agency looks as if it is spying on everyone, domestic and foreign, producing bouts of outrage — that is a bad business. So the European Union is as divided, confused, angry and leaderless as, say, the former Holy Roman Empire — this is surely not good. There’s more: Argentina is huffing and puffing about the Falklands, and Spain is huffing and puffing about Gibraltar. Not good at all.

Catherine O’Donnell: History is Useful Tool, Not Answer to Every Problem

Catherine O’Donnell is an associate history professor at Arizona State University.I am an historian with a secret. I don’t think studying the past tells us what to do in the present.I should qualify that: If you are considering whether to invade Russia in winter, history provides the answer.But I object when voices from across the political spectrum claim history tells us the answer to more complex questions: what our tax policy should be, why a specific crime happened and, most disturbingly, which political views prove us to be good citizens and which reveal us to be bad ones....

L. Maren Wood: ‘The Afternoon I Decided to Leave Academe’–and What Happened Next

L. Maren Wood earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the founder and lead researcher of Lilli Research Group, a small education-consulting firm in the Washington, D.C., metro area. She will be blogging regularly for the Ph.D. Placement Project about nonacademic career issues for Ph.D.’s.Many Ph.D.’s who write about leaving academe knew it was not for them. I envy those people. I enjoyed being an academic, and I loved teaching. As a kid growing up, all I wanted to be was a teacher, and when I entered university, my career goal shifted to being a professor. When I decided to end my quest for a tenure-track job, I told a friend that, some day, I hoped I would enjoy whatever I ended up doing as much as I enjoyed teaching and being a historian.I will never forget the afternoon I decided to leave academe. I had just learned that I was second in line for a visiting assistant professorship, with a three-year contract and a 3-3 teaching load. We were well into the summer, and this was my last hope of a job for the following year. The pay was less than $40,000 a year; the hiring committee admitted to me that the salary was probably not enough to cover living expenses in the area.

Jonathan Zimmerman: After A-Rod Doping Penalty, Don't Expect Meritocracy in Baseball

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches 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).So here’s a quick quiz for all of the baseball fans out there: Which of the following players have taken performance-enhancing drugs? a. Barry Bonds b. Alex Rodriguez c. Henry AaronThe answer might surprise you: all of them. You surely guessed Mr. Bonds, who used steroids during his pursuit of Aaron’s home-run record. And everyone knows about Mr. Rodriguez, who has admitted that he took steroids earlier in his career. Rodriguez was suspended on Monday for the rest of this season – and all of the next one – for  allegedly taking PEDs again. Rodriguez appealed the suspension, which will allow him to play until an arbitrator rules on his case.

Julian Zelizer: Crunch Time for Immigration, Budget Fights

Julian Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of "Jimmy Carter" and "Governing America." (CNN) -- August is going to be a crucial month for President Barack Obama.As the 113th Congress takes its recess, legislators will be returning to their states and districts to hear from constituents.The stakes are particularly high for Obama and Democrats, who have one last chance to sway the House Republicans before two hugely important issues are resolved: the immigration bill and the budget.As politicians in both parties begin to prepare for the 2014 midterms and think about the 2016 elections, this fall might be the last real opportunity for the president to win congressional support for these big measures....

Natalie Zemon Davis: How the FBI Turned Me On to Rare Books

Natalie Zemon Davis is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton and Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the author most recently of Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds. (May 2008)My passion for history has been life-long: an unending fascination with the past and its meanings for us in our own time. Within that frame, I’ve had several turnings as I tried to give voice to people often ignored in the great historical narratives. Let me take as an example an event that seemed at first like a downturn.

Conrad Black: Tears and Nixon

Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, A Matter of Principle, and the recently published Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership. He can be reached at cbletters@gmail.com.

Rick Perlstein: ALEC's Illegal Past?

Rick Perlstein is the author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, winner of the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history, and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008), a New York Times bestseller picked as one of the best nonfiction books of the year by over a dozen publications.

Larry Schweikart and Burton Folsom: Obama's False History of Public Investment

Mr. Schweikart, a history professor at the University of Dayton, is the co-author, with Dave Dougherty, of "A Patriot's History of the Modern World" (Sentinel, 2012). Mr. Folsom, a history professor at Hillsdale College, is the co-author, with his wife, Anita, of "FDR Goes to War" (Threshold, 2011).For almost five years now, President Obama has been making the argument that government "investments" in infrastructure are crucial to economic recovery. "Now we used to have the best infrastructure in the world here in America," the president lamented in 2011. "So how can we now sit back and let China build the best railroads? And let Europe build the best highways? And have Singapore build a nicer airport?"In his recent economic speeches in Illinois, Missouri, Florida and Tennessee, the president again made a pitch for government spending for transportation and "putting people back to work rebuilding America's infrastructure." Create the infrastructure, in other words, and the jobs will come.

Louis René Beres: Peaceful Civil Disobedience in Israel

Louis René Beres (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) lectures and publishes widely on Middle East security matters.  His writings on Israel, military strategy, and jurisprudence appear regularly in many major newspapers and magazines, and also in more than a dozen major law journals.Sometimes, tragedy and irony may arrive together. Now that it is reportedly back “on track,” the so-called Middle East Peace Process threatens Israel with additional dismemberment, and eventual disappearance.Aware of these intolerable prospects, thousands of Israelis who are opposed to any further existential surrenders may soon prepare for an appropriate response to “Palestine.” Whatever its particular shape and expression, this "post-peace" response to a new Arab state, one that would be carved out of Israel's own still-living body, may take some recognizable form of civil disobedience.To be sure, the Netanyahu Government, inexplicably confident in Palestinian compliance with pre-state agreements on “demilitarization,” will object strongly to any such tactics. Nonetheless, civil disobedience has a long and distinguished tradition in jurisprudence and democratic theory.  In part, as the following argument will make clear, certain roots of this tradition actually lie in Jewish Law.

Stephen Mihm: A Century of International Potash Intrigue

Stephen Mihm is an associate professor of history at the University of Georgia and the author, with Nouriel Roubini, of "Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance," and of "A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men and the Making of the United States."In case you didn’t notice, the world’s potash markets went haywire last week, after the announcement that Russia's OAO Uralkali, the world’s largest producer of this crucial ingredient in fertilizer, suspended its participation in an alleged cartel with its long-time Belarus partner Belaruskali. Their joint marketing venture, the Belarusian Potash Co., produced at its peak 40 percent of the world’s potash, with much of the balance coming from Canpotex Ltd., another syndicate based in North America. Together these two set production quotas and divided global markets, ensuring stable prices and steady profits.