Roundup: Historians' Take

Nancy F. Koehn: For Obama, Where has Lincoln Gone?

Nancy F. Koehn is a historian at the Harvard Business School and author of The Story of American Business: From the Pages of the New York Times.The 2012 presidential race was not only the most expensive in history, it was also one of the most closely contested elections the country has known. President Barack Obama inherits the very serious challenge of trying to reunite a divided nation in which political paralysis has seemingly become the frustrating and often destructive new normal. It’s a tall order, but history tells us this problem is not insurmountable.

Heather Cox Richardson: When Republicans Deliberately Sowed a Financial Crisis

Heather Cox Richardson is a professor of history at Boston College and the president of the Historical Society.This week, President Barack Obama won re-election in a victory that so surprised many of his ideological opponents that they have spent the hours since wailing that the country is going to wrack and ruin.With a divided and polarized government, and a battle looming over a “fiscal cliff” of more than $600 billion in tax increases and spending cuts scheduled for next year, Obama faces a rocky term ahead -- even assuming his Republican opponents negotiate in good faith.But good faith fiscal negotiation isn’t something a president can always count on. In 1892, a dramatic Democratic victory prompted Republicans to sabotage the economy in order to ruin the incoming administration.

Gil Troy: Bibi and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University and a Shalom Hartman Intstitute Engaging Israel Research Fellow in Jerusalem. His next book, “Moynihan’s Moment: America's Fight against Zionism as Racism,” will be published by Oxford University Press this fall.The Ynet/Yediot Achranot main web page says it all. Underneath a picture of an exuberant Michelle Obama, a beaming Barack Obama, a delighted Joe Biden and a happily waving Jill Biden, comes the sobering headline: “Netanyahu Belachatz: Darash MeHasarim V’HaCh’Kim Lo Ledaber Al Obama,” which translates as “Netanyahu Stressed: Ordered His Ministers and MKs Not to Talk About Obama.”

James Grossman: Obama and His Historians: A Suggestion

James Grossman is executive director of the American Historical Association.As a historian, not to mention as the executive director of the AHA, I was pleased to read in the New York Times yesterday that President Obama listens to historians and discusses history but is “no history buff.” He appears to be serious in thinking about the past and how he can learn from it, rather than being merely satisfied with a handful of anecdotes. Moreover, he certainly included distinguished and thoughtful scholars in the sessions described in this article.

David M. Kennedy: Obama’s Second Chance to Be Historic

David M. Kennedy, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in history, is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History Emeritus and director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University. Barack Obama made history in 2008. It may now be his fate merely to mark time.Obama’s election as the first black president closed a chapter -- though surely not the book -- in America’s long, vexed racial history, just as John F. Kennedy’s election as the first Roman Catholic president in 1960 amounted to a major cadence in the nation’s turbulent religious history. Kennedy proved to be both the first and last Catholic president, in the sense that Catholicism has never since defined political identities the way it did for most of the Republic’s first two centuries (think Al Smith’s crushing defeat in 1928).And as predicted in this space four years ago, Obama has already proved to be both the first black president and the last black president. He has shattered a historic barrier that can’t be put back together again.

Jon Wiener: The Bad News About White People: Romney Won the White Vote Almost Everywhere

Jon Wiener teaches US history at UC Irvine. His most recent book is How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey across America.If only white people had voted on Tuesday, Mitt Romney would have carried every state except for Massachusetts, Iowa, Connecticut and New Hampshire, according to the news media’s exit polls. Nationally, Romney won 59 percent of the white vote, a towering twenty-point margin over Obama. (Exit polls were canceled in nineteen states by the consortium of news media that run them.)The pattern is not limited to the South, with its history of racism and segregation. Even in the deepest blue states, white voters went for Romney: 53 percent in California, 52 percent in New York, 55 percent in Pennsylvania....Could it be that they resent their loss of power in a country that is becoming more racially diverse every minute?  The rest of America wants to know.Related Links

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: U.S. Election Day in China Offers a Chance to Participate, Vicariously

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is author of China in the 21st Century (2010) and co-editor of Chinese Characters: Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Land (2012). He is an Asia Society Associate Fellow.I was in Shanghai, eating lunch with friends at a wonderful alleyway restaurant called Mi Xiang Yuan, when I got the welcome news of Obama's re-election. One member of our party, a local food writer who had earlier told me of doing her bit to help the President stay in office by casting an absentee ballot for him, had kept checking her phone for updates from the time we began our meal. She figured — correctly, as it turned out — that the election was likely to be called a little after noon Chinese time November 7, which was late night November 6 in the United State. I let out a sigh of relief when her face lit up and she told all of us at the table that she'd just started getting texts from people she knew saying CNN had called the race for the incumbent.

Tim Stanley: Nate Silver was Right About 2012

Dr. Tim Stanley is a historian of the United States. His biography of Pat Buchanan is out now. His personal website is www.timothystanley.co.uk and you can follow him on Twitter @timothy_stanley.The two worst sins in the Christian canon are pride and despair. Let me shoot down pride, first.

Timothy Garton Ash: China's Next Hurdle

Timothy Garton Ash, a contributing writer to Opinion, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and professor of European studies at Oxford University. He is the author, most recently, of "Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name."

Michael Lind: The Final Defeat of Backlash Politics

Michael Lind is the author of Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States and co-founder of the New America Foundation.Despite its reinforcement of the status quo and the lack of debate about large issues during the campaign, the election of 2012 will go down in history as the end of the backlash against mid-20th century liberalism.  A new, increasingly liberal electorate has ratified the results of the New Deal and the Civil Rights Revolution.  Republican conservatives will still be able to win victories, but their hopes of overturning the outcomes of the 1930s and the 1960s have been doomed by cultural and demographic change.

Ron Radosh: Why Obama Won — and What Conservatives Must Do

Ron Radosh is a PJ Media columnist and Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute.There are no ways to get around the facts. For Republicans and conservatives and independents who wanted a new direction for our country, the victory of President Obama is sad — and for many of us, unexpected. Those conservatives who assured us with statistics, theories, and arguments about Romney winning the White House, even in a landslide, should be eating their hats.In the past week, conservatives who usually disagree with each other about many things, including Fred Barnes, Peggy Noonan, Dick Morris, my PJM colleague Roger Kimball, George F. Will,  Karl Rove, and Michael Barone, among others, provided analysis and arguments, all of which led to predictions of an inevitable Romney victory. Instead of the outcome they all looked forward to and assumed would be inevitable given Obama’s failures and the state of the economy, they found that their theories collapsed as the returns poured in. Instead of a long night, by 11:30 p.m. even Fox News had called the election for the president. Yes, Karl Rove thought their statistics desk called it too early, but 15 minutes later he too agreed that Ohio had gone for the president.

Victor Davis Hanson: Groundhog Day in America

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The End of Sparta. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.Barack Obama won a moderately close victory over Mitt Romney on Tuesday. But oddly, nothing much has changed. The country is still split nearly 50/50. There is still a Democratic president, and an almost identically Democratic Senate at war with an almost identically Republican House, in a Groundhog Day America.Obama’s win did not really reflect affirmation of his first term, given that the president made only halfhearted efforts to defend Obamacare, the stimulus, huge Keynesian deficits, and his attempts to implement cap-and-trade. So if there is a second-term agenda, even Obama supporters don’t quite know what it will be.Unlike the hope-and-change campaign of 2008, Obama’s theme this time around was that George W. Bush had been awful and Mitt Romney would be far worse. The Obama campaign spent almost $1 billion to brand the latter as a veritable felon who callously let people suffer without health insurance....

Vincent J. Cannato: Two Visions of the Electorate

Vincent J. Cannato is a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and the author of The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York.What happened with this election? Many conservatives predicted that Romney would win the election, with some even predicting a landslide. Many liberals were equally confident that Obama would win, even if they thought the results would be relatively close. This election was more than just a race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, more than just a battle between liberalism and conservatism. It was a race between two different visions of what the American electorate looks like. Democrats saw the race through the lens of the “emerging Democratic majority.” Rising numbers of minority voters — and a corresponding declining white vote — meant that Democrats were playing with the wind at their backs. Add to that young voters, upscale professionals, and single women, and you have a pretty durable coalition that could push President Obama across the finish line despite the stagnant economy.

Jonathan Zimmerman: As a Region Battered by Sandy Braces for the Nor'easter, I Think of Grandma

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).What’s going to happen to Grandma?That was my first worry, when I heard that hurricane Sandy was coming. Then I remembered: Grandma’s not here anymore. It’s easy to forget, because she was with us for so long; she passed last December at the age of 104. And I stayed at her Greenwich Village apartment two nights a week for 16 years, while commuting from my Philadelphia home to my job in New York.So when the rains began, and the lights went out, I found myself lying in the dark and remembering Grandma – and the New York we had shared.

Kevin M. Kruse: The Real Loser: Truth

Kevin M. Kruse, a professor of history at Princeton, is the co-editor, most recently, of “Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement.”THE director Steven Spielberg, whose “Lincoln” biopic opens Friday, recently said he hoped the film would have a “soothing or even healing effect” on a nation exhausted after yet another bitter and polarizing election.But there’s one line attributed to Lincoln that Daniel Day-Lewis, who plays the president, doesn’t utter in the film: “You may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all the time.”

Mary L. Dudziak: How War Disappeared from American Campaign Rhetoric

Mary L. Dudziak is the Asa Griggs Candler professor of law at the Emory University School of Law. She is the author of War · Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences.The 2012 election has certainly not felt like a contest carried out in a nation at war. Though 68,000 U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan and the 2,000th American was recently killed in the decade-long conflict, President Barack Obama has largely relegated his promises of winding down the war to an afterthought in his stump speech. His rival, Mitt Romney, barely mentions the war at all. The U.S military pulled out of Iraq at the end of 2011, but that has gotten far less play in the campaign than the killing of Osama bin Laden. And neither candidate discusses how or when the open-ended U.S. war on terror might finally come to an end.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Why I'm Not Voting Today

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University and lives in Narberth. He is the author of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory" (Yale University Press). That's because I voted several weeks ago. So have millions of other Americans, via absentee ballot and early voting. They're turning a formerly public act into a private one, which should worry all of us, no matter where we vote.Across the United States, absentee ballots now account for almost 20 percent of votes. Two states, Oregon and Washington, conduct their elections entirely by mail. And in seven others, more than half the votes in the last presidential election were cast before Election Day.Why is that a problem? One reason is the potential for fraud. Despite the recent spate of voter-ID laws in Pennsylvania and other states, a recent Carnegie-Knight study found just 10 purported cases of voter impersonation at the polls nationwide since 2000; by contrast, there were nearly 500 allegations of absentee-ballot fraud. Here in Philadelphia, a federal judge overturned the results of a 1993 state Senate election because of forged absentee ballots....

Aaron B. O’Connell: The Permanent Militarization of America

Aaron B. O’Connell, an assistant professor of history at the United States Naval Academy and a Marine reserve officer, is the author of “Underdogs: The Making of the Modern Marine Corps.”IN 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower left office warning of the growing power of the military-industrial complex in American life. Most people know the term the president popularized, but few remember his argument.In his farewell address, Eisenhower called for a better equilibrium between military and domestic affairs in our economy, politics and culture. He worried that the defense industry’s search for profits would warp foreign policy and, conversely, that too much state control of the private sector would cause economic stagnation. He warned that unending preparations for war were incongruous with the nation’s history. He cautioned that war and warmaking took up too large a proportion of national life, with grave ramifications for our spiritual health.

Erik M. Conway and Naomi Oreskes: Why Conservatives Turned Against Science

Erik M. Conway is a historian of science and technology. Naomi Oreskes is a professor of history and science studies at the University of California at San Diego. They are the authors of Merchants of Doubt (Bloomsbury, 201­0).A prediction: When all the votes have been counted and the reams of polling data have been crunched, analyzed, and spun, this will be clear: Few scientists will have voted for Republican candidates, particularly for national office. Survey data taken from 1974 through 2010 and analyzed by Gordon Gauchat in the American Sociological Review confirm that most American scientists are not conservatives. A 2009 study by the Pew Research Center found that only 9 percent of scientists self-identified as conservative, while 52 percent called themselves liberals. Only 6 percent of American scientists self-identified as Republicans. This state of affairs is bad for the nation, and bad for science.

Alan Brinkley: On Newsweek's Historical Legacy

A professor of history at Columbia University, Alan Brinkley is the author of The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century.Magazines come and go, but some are more important than others. Newsweek is one of the important ones. Much of the attention since news broke that the magazine would cease publishing a print version has focused on the career of editor Tina Brown. But the title’s possible demise is also an appropriate moment to remember how significant the magazine itself is.