Roundup: Historians' Take

Cindy Hahamovitch: The Lessons of Belle Glade

Cindy Hahamovitch is a history professor at the College of William & Mary and the author of “No Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor .”WILLIAMSBURG, Va. — IN 1965, the secretary of labor, Willard Wirtz, stood under a porch light in Belle Glade, Fla., facing a crowd of guest workers from the Caribbean. Mr. Wirtz could smell sweat and burned sugar cane on their clothes but couldn’t see them, which was how the workers wanted it. Guest workers were often deported and blacklisted for striking or simply questioning whether they had been paid what they were owed.“I would hear their voices — they would ask questions,” Mr. Wirtz recalled, but “they weren’t going to be identified.”

The Pipe Dream of Easy War

by H.R. McMaster

 “A GREAT deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep,” the novelist Saul Bellow once wrote. We should keep that in mind when we consider the lessons from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — lessons of supreme importance as we plan the military of the future.

Sidney Blumenthal: Romanticizing the Villains of the Civil War

Sidney Blumenthal is a former assistant and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, a former senior adviser to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the author of the forthcoming book The Man Who Became Abraham Lincoln.When Gone with the Wind had its premiere in Atlanta in 1939, the governor of Georgia declared a state holiday. One million people turned out to watch the arrival of Clark Gable, Olivia DeHaviland and Vivien Leigh. The night before, a costume ball of leading citizens dressed in the finery of the Old South was serenaded by a "negro boys' choir" dressed as slaves standing against the newly constructed backdrop of a plantation mansion. One of its singers was six year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. Hattie McDaniel, who acted as Mammy, was prohibited from joining the other stars inside the theater. It was segregated just as movie houses and other public facilities were throughout the South. Angry about McDaniel's exclusion, Gable threatened to boycott, but she persuaded him to attend. She would go on to win an Academy Award.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: A Reformist Chinese Leader? Stop Fooling Yourself

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is the author of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, an updated edition of which has just been published by Oxford University Press.For those of us who have tracked Chinese political trends since the late 1970s when Deng Xiaoping came to power, reading the news about China these days can prove strangely disorienting. One week, we’ll be struck by a slew of stories, on everything from fast trains to record growth rates, which underscore how different China is than it was when Deng first launched his reforms. The next week, though, we’ll be struck just as powerfully by a sense of eerie familiarity. Headline after headline — about the intractability of corruption, the death of a watermelon vendor or a petitioner’s desperate attempt to draw attention to this plight by detonating an explosive device at a Beijing airport — seem just like those we came across a few years or even a couple of decades ago.

Louis René Beres: What Does It Mean to Kill for a Cause?

Louis René Beres is a professor of political science at Purdue University and the author of multiple books.Before any country can fashion an effective counter-terrorism policy, it needs a clear and purposeful understanding of "the enemy." For the United States, especially after discovering so-many behavioral contradictions in the Boston Marathon bombers, an underlying task must be to look more closely and explicitly at issues of normalcy. On the cover of yesterday's Rolling Stone, for instance (which was the source of widespread outcry) Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is both "glamorously" posed and called a "monster."Is it correct to assume that all or most of this country's terrorist foes are "abnormal"? Or does such a position ultimately hinder our urgent national security efforts? Would such an assumption represent little more than a ritualized political obligation -- a purely self-serving and ideologically obligatory policy stance -- or might it still be the considered outcome of rock solid and objective psychological science?

Robert Zaretsky: Why the French Love a Parade

Robert Zaretsky is a professor of French history at the University of Houston Honors College, in Texas....[Bastille Day] was the Age of Reason’s Woodstock — even with the presence of the National Guard, the citizen militia born in the creative chaos of 1789. Sporting their blue, white and red cockades, Guard detachments from across France came to affirm their region’s attachment to the Revolution. For the French nation in 1790, the Guard was no less the authentic representative of the popular will than, say, Jimi Hendrix (wearing red, white and blue) riffing on the Star-Spangled Banner was the authentic expression of Woodstock Nation.While the Guard’s role in the festival partly explains the military’s presence in today’s parade, there’s another source. With the advent of Napoleonic and Restoration France, July 14 became the date whose historical significance dared not be spoken. It was the fledging Third Republic, born in the rubble of defeat left by the Franco-Prussian War, which resurrected the parade in 1880.

Jonathan Zimmerman: In Defense of Sex Scandals

Forgive me, Lord, for I have sinned: I cheated on my wife. I brought shame and dishonor to her, and to my children. But I have asked them to forgive me.And now I’m asking voters to forgive me, too.Welcome to our political culture of sexual confession. Pioneered by Bill Clinton, who groveled on TV after his affair with Monica Lewinsky was exposed, confession has become an invaluable weapon for leaders who are caught with their proverbial pants down.Witness the fates of Clinton’s fellow Southerners David Vitter and Mark Sanford. Vitter won re-election to his Louisiana Senate seat in 2010 after admitting a “serious sin” involving prostitutes. Earlier this year, former South Carolina Gov. Sanford captured a House seat after acknowledging an extramarital affair.

Peter Wood: Why Mitch Daniels Was Right About Howard Zinn

Peter Wood is the president of the National Association of Scholars.The Associated Press broke a story on July 16 that Mitch Daniels, the president of Purdue University, wrote e-mails while the governor of Indiana attacking the use of Howard Zinn’s book, A People’s History of the United States, as “a truly execrable, anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates American history on every page.”My first response: good for Mr. Daniels. His comment, made on February 9, 2010—according to the date stamp on his e-mail—shows that he has a pretty clear grasp of both American history and Mr. Zinn’s book.But the Associated Press wasn’t interested in Daniels’s intellectual acumen.  Its story was headlined, “Mitch Daniels Looked to Censor Opponents,” and it was based on a Freedom of Information Act request.  If the four brief e-mails he sent to political allies over the course of 51 minutes in February 2010 are all the AP came up with, or an additional e-mail sent on April 11, 2009, we can best conclude that the governor was a busy man with little patience for academic bunkum....

Alexander C. Kafka: When Hollywood Held Hands With Hitler

Alexander C. Kafka is deputy managing editor of The Chronicle Review.A debate is raging over Hollywood's alleged collusion with the Nazis. At stake: the moral culpability of Jewish studio heads during cinema's golden age.The catalyst is a forthcoming book from Harvard University Press, The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact With Hitler, by the 35-year-old historian Ben Urwand. The book is still several months from publication, but emotions are running high after an early review in the online magazine Tablet, followed by an exchange of rhetorical fire in The New York Times between Urwand and Thomas Doherty, a professor of American studies at Brandeis University who this spring published his own account of the era, Hollywood and Hitler: 1933-1939 (Columbia University Press). The clash comes during a period of heightened scholarly attention to Nazi infiltration and counterinfiltration in Depression-era Los Angeles, complicating the story of Hollywood's stance toward fascism.

Mark LeVine: Flamenco, Car Bombs and a 'Happy' Future for Iraq

Mark LeVine is professor of Middle Eastern history at UC Irvine, and distinguished visiting professor at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden and the author of the forthcoming book about the revolutions in the Arab world, The Five Year Old Who Toppled a Pharaoh.I don't remember if it was my second or third hospital visit of the day. But the scene will remain etched in my memory. Before me was an Iraqi political activist, roughly my age, lying in what passed for an intensive care ward (less than half the beds have sheets, doctors have to rely on adult-sized IV tubes for children, and hardly any patients receive proper pain or antibiotic medications). He was in tremendous pain from several gunshot wounds, and yet he couldn't stop repeating to me that I shouldn't interpret his shooting as an act of sectarian violence. This is despite the fact that he was Shi'a and his shooter was Sunni, and that the morgue downstairs was overflowing with less fortunate victims of the same kind of violence.

Peniel E. Joseph: Trayvon, Race and American Democracy

Peniel E. Joseph is founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy and a professor of history at Tufts University. He is also the Caperton Fellow for the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. He is the author of Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America and Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama. His biography of Stokely Carmichael will be published next year by Basic Books. He can be reached online at penielejoseph.com. Follow him on Twitter.

Louis Rene Beres: Israel’s Release of Palestinian Terrorists Would Violate International Law

Louis Rene Beres is a professor of political science and international law at Purdue University.What sort of people and government would agree to free the murderers of its own children and do it in the name of a presumed "good will" toward irreconcilable enemies? What might this people and government be thinking, especially when its hoped-for quid pro quo is an obvious delusion?Inconceivably, in Jerusalem, there is evidence that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may soon oblige Washington and go along with at least a partial release of Palestinians serving time for perpetrating unspeakable violence against Israelis. Leaving aside that any such release would be unreciprocated, and that both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas would remain committed to Israel's eradication, this contemplated freeing of terrorists would also be inherently illegal.All countries coexist under a binding law of nations. A core element of this international law is the rule of nullum crimen sine poena, or "no crime without a punishment." An unchanging principle, drawn from the law of ancient Israel, it was reaffirmed for all nations at the historic Nuremberg Trials (1945-46)....

Marketus Presswood: On Being Black in China

Marketus Presswood is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in Modern Chinese History with an emphasis on both the Republican Era (1912-1949) and the post-1949 era.In the 1996 China edition of the Lonely Planet's Guidebook, a text box aside comment from a street interview provided some interesting conversation fodder, "... there is no racism in China because there are no black people," a Chinese woman was reported to have said. This became a little running joke in my small study abroad circle, since I was the only black student in my program of fifty students. It was 1997, and I was in Beijing studying Chinese. "There is no way you could be experiencing any racism in China," one classmate sardonically told me, "because you are the only black person here." We all laughed.

Anthea Butler: The Zimmerman Acquittal -- America’s Racist God

Anthea Butler is a Contributing Editor to Religion Dispatches. Her forthcoming book, "The Gospel According To Sarah: How Sarah Palin and her Tea Party Angels are Galvanizing the Religious Right" will be out in 2012.The not guilty verdict in the George Zimmerman case has me thinking a lot about a book I first encountered in seminary, Is God a White Racist?, by the Rev. Dr. Bill Jones. As a budding seminary student, it took me by surprise. Now, as a wiser, older professor looking at the needless death of Trayvon Martin, I have to say: I get it.God ain’t good all of the time. In fact, sometimes, God is not for us. As a black woman in a nation that has taken too many pains to remind me that I am not a white man, and am not capable of taking care of my reproductive rights, or my voting rights, I know that this American god ain’t my god. As a matter of fact, I think he’s a white racist god with a problem. More importantly, he is carrying a gun and stalking young black men.

Murray Polner: “Where Were You Last Night at 7? Speak Up!”

Murray Polner is a regular book reviewer for the History News Network. His column “Keeping Score” appears here fairly regularly.I always loved that great New Yorker cartoon, which has a President ordering his assistant, “Leak to the press that my Administration won’t stand for any more leaks.”How relevant. As our Big Media endlessly reports on the sheriff and his posse’s relentless pursuit of Edward Snowden, and while Pfc. Bradley Manning sits in a military court awaiting a probable guilty verdict, he and Snowden may, sadly, prove to be small fry in the long run, forgotten as the years pass as they languish in a federal prison.Now, with no thanks to Big Media and TV’s sycophantic network news programs, the Obama Administration has something new and more odious to offer—its Insider Threat Program, which the President signed into law in October 2011 and, I believe, was first revealed in depth last June by the McClatchy Newspapers’ Marisa Taylor and the intrepid Jonathan Landay’s “Obama’s Plan to Crack Down on Whistleblowers Leaked.” Widely overlooked except by the leftist Nation, Truth-out and a handful of bloggers, what Taylor and Landay reported was, to put it conservatively, potentially “game changing.”

Jonathan Zimmerman: For Obama, Bush, Reagan, No Vacation from Politics

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University and taught this summer at NYU's study-abroad site in Accra, Ghana. He is the author of “Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory” (Yale University Press).When William Howard Taft was president in the early 1900s, a cartoon showed a senator stuffing a bill into the mouth of a GOP elephant while a happily unaware Taft played golf. Mr. Dooley, the imaginary Irish-American bartender created by cartoonist Finley Peter Dunne, quoted Taft as saying, “Golf is th’ thing I like best next to leavin’ Washington.”Taft actually combined these passions, taking frequent golf vacations out of town, as Paul F. Boller, Jr. recounts in his book "Presidential Diversions: Presidents at Play from George Washington to George W. Bush." Taft's trips sparked mirth in the national press, which reported that the famously corpulent president could not bend over to tee up his own ball. But they also drew accusations that Taft was neglecting his official duties, and for a rich man’s sport at that.

Lisa Levenstein: Public Deserves To Be Heard On Abortion Bill

Lisa Levenstein is an associate professor of U.S. women’s history at UNCG.Proposed new regulations on abortion providers have nothing to do with protecting women’s health. Nothing demonstrates this quite like the tactics Republican leaders have used to try to ram the legislation through the N.C. General Assembly.At first, draconian abortion restrictions were placed into an anti-Sharia law bill. After public scrutiny began to gather momentum, the new regulations were put into — of all things — a motorcycle safety bill. If advocates are so convinced these new measures are justified, why all the secrecy? Why all the back-room tactics? Why the rush?GOP leaders argued that the legislation formerly known as House Bill 695, the “Family, Faith, and Freedom Protection Act,” would actually protect women by imposing strict new regulations on abortion providers....

Abdullah Al-Arian: Frankenstein's Constitution in Egypt

Abdullah Al-Arian received his PhD from Georgetown University and is currently an Assistant Professor of history at Wayne State University, where he specialises in the modern Middle East.If the vacuous civilian leadership and the military’s recent brutality were not enough to demonstrate the shortsighted nature of the “people’s coup” in Egypt, the constitutional declaration issued by army-backed interim president Adly Mansour certainly does. From the moment the Egyptian military deposed Mohamed Morsi and announced its roadmap for yet another transition, major questions emerged concerning the imposition of a new political process and how inclusive that process would be.The resulting declaration incorporates a patchwork of various elements of the previous transition, including some of the most troubling aspects of the Morsi presidency that prompted the mass protest movement that led to his removal in the first place. With the Egyptian opposition’s disparate parts already voicing strong objections to its content, the declaration also promises to be as divisive as any decree issued over the last thirty months.

Humayun Ansari: Islamophobia Rises in British Society

Humayun Ansari is a Professor of History of Islam and Culture in the Department of History at Royal Holloway, University of London. On the 8th anniversary of the 7/7 London bombings, and in the aftermath of the killing of British army soldier Lee Rigby, it is timely to assess how Islamophobia within Britain’s political landscape has evolved since that tragic day in July 2005. Much evidence suggests that Islamophobia has moved beyond small fringe far-right groups to being far more widespread across broad sections of the population.

Max Boot: What the Snowden Acolytes Won't Tell You

Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of "Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present" (Liveright, 2013).'The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe."That quip from Tom Wolfe is worth savoring as the U.S. prepares to celebrate the Fourth of July—and as overheated rhetoric emanates from fans of Edward Snowden, the proud thief of American secrets. Even supporters, like Sen. Rand Paul, who express discomfort with how he fled to China and Russia, nevertheless applaud Mr. Snowden for alerting Americans to a supposedly dangerous infringement of liberty from the government's monitoring of electronic communications. Mr. Snowden's more extreme acolytes credit him with stopping the rise of a new tyranny in Washington.