Roundup: Historians' Take

Source: Published in a Hungarian newspaper and republished by Juan Cole at his blog, Informed Comment
2-15-08

Andrew Arato: A Victory of the Better America?

[Andrew Arato, Dorothy Hart Hirshon Professor of Political and Social Theory, The New School for Social Research, New York.] Is it possible? At least we have found a likely leader. The Battle of the Potomac is over. Despite the name that resembles the bloody exchanges of the Civil War, the mini civil war of the U.S. Democrats will hopefully not last very long. I am watching Obama’s victory speech from Madison, Wisconsin, a famous left wing university town. It is his best yet, combin

Source: New Republic
2-14-08

Eric Rauchway: George Milhous Bush

[Eric Rauchway is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, and the author, most recently, of Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America and Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America. He also blogs for The Edge of the American West.] Last week the Bush administration reached its Nixonian climax, as CIA director Michael Hayden confirmed that the government had nearly drowned some people on purpose using techniques that American militar

Source: Special to HNN
2-13-08

Randall Woods: Which of the JFK/LBJ Domestic Programs Do Conservatives Wish Had Never Seen the Light of Day?

Mr. Woods, a professor of history at the University of Arkansas, is the author of LBJ: Architect of American Ambition (paperback, 2007). Last week the conservative political cartoonist, Michael Ramirez, ran a two panel caricature of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson respectively. Under the JFK rendering was the inscription “Obama’s rhetoric” and under LBJ’s “Obama’s policies.” Given Ramirez’ political leanings, I gather this was meant as an indictment.

Source: Jerusalem Post
2-13-08

Daniel Pipes: Britain's Encounter with Islamic Law

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] Beneath the deceptively placid surface of everyday life, the British population is engaged in a momentous encounter with Islam. Three developments of the past week, each of them culminating years' long trends – and not just some odd occurrence – exemplify changes now underwa

Source: AlterNet
2-11-08

Scott Kurashige: California's Multiracial Challenge to America

[Scott Kurashige is an associate professor of history at the University of Michigan and author of The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton University Press, 2008).] The results from the CA Dem primary show that no serious candidate for the presidency can ignore the potential of multiracial voting coalition. Sixty years ago, Carey McWilliams, the well-traveled writer/activist and soon to be editor of The Nat

Source: Sightings, the newsletter of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
2-11-08

Martin E. Marty: Mormons and Idiosyncracy

[Martin E. Marty's biography, current projects, upcoming events, publications, and contact information can be found at www.illuminos.com.] Now that Governor Romney is off the campaign trail—we don't do any Sightings of candidates on the trail—we can, without commenting on him or the part his church and faith played in his demise, do a retrospective on the Mormon-hate that blighted air waves, the internet, and some printed quotations while he wa

Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
2-11-08

Seth Perry: Romney's Religious Dilemma

[Seth Perry is a Ph.D. student in the history of Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School.] Gordon B. Hinckley, president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who passed away January 27, spent a lot of his unusually long life trying to get non-Mormons to stop seeing people of his faith as strange. As he told Mike Wallace in 1996, "We're not a weird people." Hinckley spent an equal amount of time, though, getting his flock to remain "peculiar." Like the author of 1 Peter, whose words he often cited, Hinckley believed that Christ's chosen would stand out from the world, and that "peculiarity" would only grow as society declined. Hinckley was relentless in pursuing those two seemingly opposed goals. If Mitt Romney's campaign accomplished anything, it was to remind us that political speech is a blunt instrument, incapable of registering distinctions like that between weird and peculiar: He worked so hard to avoid the stigma of weirdness that he lost any shot at the benefits of peculiarity. ***

Source: Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI)
2-4-07

George Weigel: Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism

[George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington and author of Faith, Reason and the War Against Jihadism: A Call to Action (2007). Other books by Mr. Weigel include Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II (1999); The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God (2005); and God’s Choice: Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church (2005). This essay is based on an FPRI BookTalk he gave in Philadelphia

Source: Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center
2-11-08

Barry Rubin: The Middle East shell game

[Barry Rubin is Director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, Interdisciplinary Center university. His latest book, The Truth about Syria was published by Palgrave-Macmillan in May 2007.] Step right up! Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen! It's easy, fun, and everybody's a winner! Just guess which shell the nut is under. After studying and living with the Middle East for a few decades one sees certain patterns endlessly repeated, though alw

Source: TomDispatch.com (This is the introduction to an article by Michael Schwartz, "Iraq's Tidal Wave of Misery: The First History of the Planet's Worst Refugee Crisis." Click here to read Schwartz's article.)
2-10-08

Tom Engelhardt: Iraq's Deplorable Refugee Crisis

[Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has just been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.] I'm an innumerate, but the figures on this

Source: Foreign Policy in Focus
2-4-08

Stephen Zunes: Behind Obama and Clinton

[Stephen Zunes, a Foreign Policy In Focus analyst, is a professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco.] Voters on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party are rightly disappointed by the similarity of the foreign policy positions of the two remaining Democratic Party presidential candidates, Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama. However, there are still some real discernable differences to be taken into account. Indeed, given the

Source: LAT
2-10-08

Rick Perlstein: Mitt Romney ... Not in His Father's Footsteps

[Rick Perlstein is the author of the forthcoming "Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America."] Mitt Romney, who dropped out of the Republican presidential race last week, will go down as the most robotic big-ticket presidential candidate in history -- "the Platonic ideal of inauthe

Source: China Beat
2-1-08

Susan Brownell: Beijing Olympics FAQ #2: Would a boycott succeed?

[Susan Brownell is the author of Training the Body for China, which is widely recognized as the single best work by a scholar on Chinese sports.] I can say with some certainty that in the current geopolitical climate, calls for an Olympic boycott will be unsuccessful - though I suppose they make for good headlines. The advocacy groups who are calling for boycotts have no direct control over the organization of the Olympic Games. In order for a boycott to succeed, the organizations t

Source: Vanity Fair
12-1-07

Joseph Stiglitz: The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush

When we look back someday at the catastrophe that was the Bush administration, we will think of many things: the tragedy of the Iraq war, the shame of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the erosion of civil liberties. The damage done to the American economy does not make front-page headlines every day, but the repercussions will be felt beyond the lifetime of anyone reading this page. I can hear an irritated counterthrust already. The president has not driven the United States into a recess

Source: Christian Science Monitor
2-7-08

Jonathan Zimmerman: At Africa Cup of Nations, lingering bias against blacks

[Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of history and education at New York University, is teaching this semester at NYU's study-abroad program in Accra, Ghana. He is the author of "Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century."] Accra, Ghana Last Sunday, my family and I watched host Ghana squeak by arch rival Nigeria to advance to the semifinals of the Africa Cup of Nations tournament. Then we saw a post-game press conference with Ghana's coach, whose look

Source: Jerusalem Post
2-7-08

Daniel Pipes: How to Turn Gaza Over to Egypt

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his blog.] "Listen to me carefully," President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt instructed an interviewer on Jan. 30."Gaza is not part of Egypt, nor will i

Source: TomDispatch.com
2-5-08

Tom Engelhardt: The Spectacle of Campaign 2008

[Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.] "Drawing from the best resources on national and

Source: Deborah Lipstadt at her blog
2-6-08

Deborah Lipstadt: Stanley Fish nails it ... "Hillary hatred" is just like antisemitism

I have, by and large, kept this blog free of political matters. [I did blog about Ron Paul's antisemitism and racism.] The past few weeks I have been marveling [depressingly so] about the attacks on Hillary Clinton. They ranged from comments about her dress, ankles, laugh, and singing ability. She's too liberal. She's too much of a hawk. She cries in public. She doesn't show emotions. Even the noted and well-respected [deservedly so] commentator, David Gergen, spent ti

Source: Altercation (blog)
2-6-08

Eric Alterman: What Super Tuesday Means

1) Having spent $1.16 million per delegate, Mitt Romney is now toast. His conversion to conservatism was unconvincing -- except perhaps to the men and women of easy virtue at National Review -- and a significant proportion of evangelical Christians will refuse to vote for a Mormon. So Mitt was wasting his money from the start. I kept saying that, but at the time, nobody else, save Thompson, was plausible either. 2) Nobody really knows who is in a better position to win the Democrati

Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
2-8-08

Ilan Stavans: Latin America has a history of prejudice that is little known and increasingly worrisome

[Ilan Stavans is a professor of Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College. One of the stories in his collection The Disappearance (Northwestern University Press, 2006) has been made into the movie My Mexican Shivah, produced by John Sayles. Yale University Press has recently published his book, with Verónica Albin, Love and Language.] ... The Hispanic world, constituted by Spain, what I'll call Latin America (Mexico and South and Central America), the Spanish-speaking Car