Roundup: Historians' Take

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Make Way for Han Han

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chair of the History Department at UC Irvine, the author of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (OUP 2010), and a co-editor of Chinese Characters: Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Land (UC Press, 2012). His reviews and commentaries have appeared in venues such as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the TLS, Time, the Atlantic, and Dissent. Q: When a foreigner comes over and gives you a slap in the face, you take it lying down and don’t fight back. Are you just trying to show how cool you are? A: No foreigner has come over and given me a slap. Q: Han Han, a foreigner rapes your mother, and you still won’t put up a protest. A: No foreigner has raped my mom. Q: The motherland—that’s your mother. A: The motherland is the motherland, my mother is my mother. —From “Q & A with Chinese nationalists,” an April 23 2008 blog post

Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg: Victory for Strangers, Heathens, Wastrels!

Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg are professors of History at LSU and coauthors of "Madison and Jefferson" (Random House),Before we get to the persistence of class warfare in our politics, let’s talk about Skinch Painter. In 1900, when the San Francisco Examiner tracked him down, he was 78, “hale, hearty, and contented.” He hadn’t inherited a penny, but neither had he worked a day in his life. “He has never borrowed a dollar, nor stolen one,” the column read. “He has never been a tramp nor a beggar. He has never done a day’s work in exchange for money … Yet he has lived.”One day, when he was in his teens, he said to himself, “Look here, Skinch Painter, this old world owes you a living, and all you’ve got to do is collect it.” Wandering the Ozarks of Missouri, he inhabited a cave and relied on nature for his food and clothing. He hunted, fished and gathered nuts and berries, wearing only animal skins and going barefoot.“Labor is a useless sin,” said Skinch. “The time a man spends working is just so much time lost from living.”

Karen L. Cox: A New Southern Strategy

Karen L. Cox is professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte and the author of “Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture.”Charlotte, N.C.IT’S tough being a Southern liberal. In the postelection analysis of the past two weeks, pundits have made hay of the fact that while Barack Obama won the election, Mitt Romney won the Confederacy. Or as Jon Stewart put it, “most of the Confederacy.”After Mr. Romney carried the lion’s share of the region’s electoral votes, people were quick to pounce. One person on Twitter wrote, “I always knew the Zombie Apocalypse would start in the Southern States.” On Facebook, in a widely shared image comparing the 2012 electoral map with the map of former slave states, the individual who posted it wrote, “Sometimes change is really hard, especially when people don’t want to change.”

Stephanie Coontz: Blame Affairs on Evolution of Sex Roles

Stephanie Coontz is Director of Research at the Council on Contemporary Families and teaches history at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Her most recent book is "A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s."...President Thomas Jefferson fathered a child by his mistress. So did Warren G. Harding, who also carried on an affair with the wife of a family friend. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower had a long-term relationship with the woman who was his driver in England during World War II. CIA Director Allen Dulles, according to his own sister, had "at least a hundred" affairs, including one with the queen of Greece. President John F. Kennedy's affairs and one-night stands may have numbered even more.

Max Boot: Petraeus ... A Necessary Man

Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a contributing editor to Opinion, and author of Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare From Ancient Times to the Present. 'The graveyards are full of indispensable men," it's often said, meaning that few are genuinely indispensable. David H. Petraeus was one of the few, which is why his loss for the U.S. government, after his admission of adultery, is so tragic. This is not to imply that there are not other capable generals or intelligence leaders. But Petraeus was highly unusual, perhaps unique, for the grasp he displayed of modern warfare in all of its bewildering complexity. This was a task for which he had been preparing since his days as a West Point cadet in the 1970s, when he showed an early fascination with the Vietnam War, which was just then ending.

Conrad Black: America’s Prospects After the Election Debacle

Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, and, just released, A Matter of Principle. He can be reached at cbletters@gmail.com.

Jon Meacham: Why Obama’s Second Term Isn’t Doomed

Meacham, an executive editor at Random House, is the author of the forthcoming Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, to be published in November 2012. The views expressed are solely his own.Conventional wisdom holds that second presidential terms tend to be somehow fatally cursed—Eisenhower and the U-2; Nixon and Watergate; Reagan and Iran-contra; Clinton and impeachment; George W. Bush and Iraq and the financial collapse. The implication is clear for a newly re-elected president like Barack Obama: be careful what you wish for.As usual, though, the conventional wisdom obscures as much as it captures. Second terms are perilous, but so are first terms: politics are always perilous. Looking ahead (itself perilous!) it’s likely that Obama, if he is like his predecessors, will find himself able to do one or two big things domestically and freer than he has been to operate globally as he wishes....

Dominic Sandbrook: Echoes of the 30s Across Europe

Dominic Sandbrook is a British historian and author. After a week dominated by the terrible effects of Superstorm Sandy, the increasingly bitter struggle between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney and the continuing fallout from the Jimmy Savile scandal, it was easy to overlook a little story about an obscure Greek journalist called Kostas Vaxevanis. In its way, though, the ordeal of Mr Vaxevanis, the editor of an Athens magazine, who narrowly escaped prison for publishing the names of suspected tax evaders, is the biggest story of all. Its themes — the freedom of the Press, the corruption of the establishment, the arrogance of the elite and the terrifying storm engulfing the economies of Europe — go to the heart of a crisis that threatens to tear the Continent apart. But the Vaxevanis scandal is merely the tip of the iceberg. From the Leveson Inquiry in London to the attempted comeback of former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, and from the salons of Paris to the committee rooms of Brussels, there are disturbing signs of a backlash against democracy, free speech and the will of the people — a counter-revolution that could sweep away many of the liberties we take for granted. For more than half a century after World War II, most of us assumed that life in Europe would always get better.

Harvey J. Kaye: Time to March on Washington Again for Jobs and Freedom

Harvey J. Kaye is Professor of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and a member of the National Writers Union (UAW Local 1981) and the American Federation of Teachers. The author of "Thomas Paine and the Promise of America," Kaye is currently completing "Fighting for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Great." Follow him: @HarveyJKaye Dear Brother Trumka:

Chauncey DeVega: Dear Angry White Conservatives: Chill Out

Chauncey DeVega is editor and founder of the blog We Are Respectable Negroes, which has been featured by the NY Times, the Utne Reader, and The Atlantic Monthly. Writing under a pseudonym, Chauncey DeVega's essays on race, popular culture, and politics have appeared in various books, as well as on such sites as the Washington Post's The Root and PopMatters. Dear angry white conservatives who are mourning Mitt Romney’s loss,If Fox News is any indication, many of you are dismayed, upset, and befuddled by Mitt Romney’s loss to President Obama. Some of these feelings are normal. Politics is tribal. When your team loses, a bit of sadness is expected.

Kate Masur: In Spielberg’s ‘Lincoln,’ Passive Black Characters

Kate Masur, an associate professor of history at Northwestern, is the author of “An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle Over Equality in Washington, D.C.”THE latest film by Steven Spielberg, “Lincoln,” which opens nationwide on Friday, has the makings of an Oscar shoo-in, particularly for Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance in the title role. The first scene is arresting: Two black soldiers speak with the president about their experiences in combat. One, a corporal, raises the problem of unequal promotions and pay in the Union Army. Two white soldiers join them, and the scene concludes as the corporal walks away, movingly reciting the final lines of the Gettysburg Address.Unfortunately it is all downhill from there, at least as far as black characters are concerned. As a historian who watched the film on Saturday night in Chicago, I was not surprised to find that Mr. Spielberg took liberties with the historical record. As in “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan,” his purpose is more to entertain and inspire than to educate.

Julian Zelizer: How Progress is Possible in Obama's Second Term

Julian Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of "Jimmy Carter" and of the new book "Governing America."When Washington gets back to work, the situation will be difficult. President Obama won a sound re-election victory, doing very well in the Electoral College and winning the popular vote by more than 3 million votes. He trounced Mitt Romney in almost all the battleground states and he will return with a larger and more energized Senate majority.Yet President Obama likely understands that elections don't remake the political system. The parties remain as polarized as ever, and the political process will be as difficult as it has been since the first day he took office. Republicans retained control of the House, where they can make it hard for the president to move his agenda forward and can place immense pressure on him to curtail spending.

Willy Lam: Why China's Reforms Have Hit a Brick Wall

Willy Lam is Adjunct Professor of History at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Senior Fellow with the Jamestown Foundation in Washington D.C. He is also a regular contributor for CNN on Chinese affairs.There is only one thing that Chinese and foreign observers of China are looking for at the 18th Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Congress: signs of reform, especially political liberalization.The chances of meaningful political changes, or those that dovetail with global norms, however, are getting increasingly slim.The reason may be simple. Until around about the time of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, to reform or not to reform belonged in the realm of ideology.Even before the birth of the People's Republic in 1949, factions within the party had fought over the future direction of the country.When Mao Zedong was running the show, there was the celebrated "struggle between two lines." This referred to the fierce competition between the Maoists -- who claimed to uphold unadulterated Marxism -- and the "capitalist roaders," led by then-president Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping....

Garry Wills: What Romney Lost

Garry Wills is Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern. His most recent book is Font of Life: Ambrose, Augustine, and the Mystery of Baptism.What happens to those who lose a presidential campaign? Some can do it with heads rightly held high, and go on to give valuable service to the nation. We were reminded of this just two weeks before the recent election, when George McGovern died. Though he underwent a humiliating defeat by Richard Nixon forty years before, he was a man of integrity, some of whose ideas were continued by people who worked in his 1972 campaign, like Bill and Hillary Clinton, veterans of his Texas office that year. McGovern was re-elected to the Senate after his presidential loss, where he performed important services, like defying the cattle, egg, and sugar lobbies to set up national dietary standards. This was a long-time commitment of his. Even before he went into the Senate, he had served as President Kennedy’s point man in the Food for Peace Program. In 1998, President Clinton appointed him his ambassador to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, where he worked effectively to curb world hunger. Above all, though he was a heroic flyer in World War II, he was a principled opponent of useless militarism.

Victor Davis Hanson: The Latino-Vote Obsession

NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom....[W]hy do Republicans think their conservative message is a natural one for the majority of contemporary Latinos/Hispanics — rubrics that strangely now include everyone from Cubans and upscale Argentinians to Oaxacan indigenous peoples and Hondurans? In truth, the vast majority of Latinos who vote overwhelmingly Democratic is made up of poorer immigrants from Central America and Mexico rather than Marco Rubio–like second-generation Cuban-Americans. De facto amnesty, generous entitlements, vast increases in public expenditures and hiring, and more taxes on the wealthy are understandably widely supported by both the Latino leadership and rank-and-file. Public employment is increasingly more attractive and more subject to affirmative action than the private sector, and, quite logically, its expansion is seen by poorer Latinos as a natural pathway into the middle class.

Kenneth Mack: Tackling Myths about Two-Term Presidents

Kenneth Mack is a professor of law at Harvard University.When President Obama beat Mitt Romney on Tuesday to win a second term in the White House, he joined the elite club of rehired commanders in chief that includes Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. But also part of this club are less-well-regarded presidents such as Ulysses S. Grant, Calvin Coolidge and George W. Bush. Let’s examine some popular misconceptions about two-term presidents to learn what a second chance has meant for their places in history.1. Election to a second term is a mandate.Reelection is usually a validation of a president’s popularity and political skill, as well as a rejection of what was proposed by the losing candidate. Reading it as an endorsement of an ambitious political agenda is a trickier proposition.

Thomas K. McCraw: Mr. Hamilton’s Growth Strategy

Thomas K. McCraw was a professor emeritus at Harvard Business School and the author, most recently, of “The Founders and Finance: How Hamilton, Gallatin, and Other Immigrants Forged a New Economy.” Mr. McCraw died on Nov. 3.THE staggering deficit. The possibility of impending tax hikes and significant budget cuts by the end of the year. Has the United States ever faced such a daunting financial crisis?Yes — though not, as many might guess, during the Great Depression. Rather, it was shortly after the nation’s birth. It’s an experience worth examining, because the way the new country put its house in order under Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton holds several lessons for today.The Revolutionary War left America immersed in debt. Ratification of the Constitution in 1788 finally gave the federal government the authority to tax, but almost all federal tax revenues came from duties on imported goods.

Steven Hahn: Political Racism in the Age of Obama

Steven Hahn is a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration.”THE white students at Ole Miss who greeted President Obama’s decisive re-election with racial slurs and nasty disruptions on Tuesday night show that the long shadows of race still hang eerily over us. Four years ago, when Mr. Obama became our first African-American president by putting together an impressive coalition of white, black and Latino voters, it might have appeared otherwise. Some observers even insisted that we had entered a “post-racial” era.

Ginger Strand: Hitchhiking’s Time Has Come Again

Ginger Strand is the author of “Killer on the Road: Violence and the American Interstate.”ONE of the more dramatic measures to keep New Yorkers moving after Hurricane Sandy’s transit meltdown was mandatory car-pooling on bridges into Manhattan. Commuters griped about gridlock at checkpoints, and drivers were shocked by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s suggestion that they pick up strangers. Potential passengers, too, were reluctant to get in cars with people they didn’t know. Some drivers were scrambling to find riders to meet the quota. Everyone was relieved when the car-pooling “nightmare” came to an end.

Beverly Gage: How Close Was This Election? Very Close.

Beverly Gage, a Yale history professor, is the author of The Day Wall Street Exploded.There seems to be some confusion about whether or not the United States just witnessed a close election. Perhaps some historical perspective can help: Yes, this was a close election.Here’s why:  If we include Florida, Obama appears to have won 332 electoral votes to Romney’s 206. In the popular vote, the latest numbers suggest an Obama victory of 50.4 percent to Romney’s 48.1. This is not recount territory. Measured by the standards of the 20th century, though, it reflects a genuinely tight race....Related LinksHNN Hot Topics: Election 2012