Roundup: Historians' Take

David Greenberg: Obama: He’s Just Like Hoover (But in a Good Way)

David Greenberg is a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers. He is a contributing editor for The New Republic. Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s endorsement of Barack Obama for president Thursday is the latest piece of evidence to suggest that, at the least, the president’s performance during Hurricane Sandy won’t hurt his reelection prospects. But if the President wants a model for boosting his election prospects on the basis of such heroics, he should consider the example set by Herbert Hoover. More than anyone, it was Hoover who established the precedent of treating natural disasters as a proving ground for the presidency, and a measure of executive compassion and competence....[President] Coolidge’s belief in a hands-off presidency was tested when the Mississippi River overflowed its banks in April 1927, creating the worst natural disaster in American history until Hurricane Katrina. The floods killed hundreds, displaced hundreds of thousands, and left damages in the hundreds of millions of dollars. To spearhead a rescue, relief, and reconstruction effort, Coolidge named Hoover. He was the obvious choice for the job, having built a reputation as a hypercompetent humanitarian in World War I by delivering needed food first to the Belgians who had been overrun by Germany and then, after the war, to vast swaths of ravaged Europe....

Anne Applebaum: After Tyrants, the People Must Act

Anne Applebaum is a columnist for The Washington Post and the author of “Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956.”AFTER the shooting stopped in 1945, thousands of children and teenagers in Berlin’s ruins were left to their own devices. One in five schoolchildren had lost a parent. Despair gripped the adults in the capital, all of which was still under Soviet control.In the western district of Neukölln, a group of young people decided to take matters into their own hands. Announcing on the day before the Allied victory that they would help rebuild the city, they formed a civic group and called it “anti-fascist.” Two weeks later, they had 600 members, had cleared the rubble from two sports stadiums and had organized five orphanages.Inspired by their example, other young Germans began organizing similar anti-fascist groups in Berlin, but they didn’t last long. On July 31, the Soviet Military Administration banned all unregistered organizations. After that, many groups, clubs and associations were denied permission to exist....

David Kaiser: I Didn’t Write That

David Kaiser is a professor of the history of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of “How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival.”THERE must be an election coming up. I know this because of the number of times I have been getting a certain e-mail, one that begins, “Take the three minutes to read this. Maybe he is wrong, but what if he’s right?” I first received the e-mail — which includes an essay railing against President Obama and the Federal Reserve — back in March 2009, just weeks after the president’s inauguration. Since then, 267 people have e-mailed me about it; about two dozen more have called my office to talk about it. A vast majority of them agree with the essay’s sentiments and want to compliment me for my work.

Erwin Chemerinsky: What Nov. 6 Means for the Supreme Court

Erwin Chemerinsky is dean and professor of law at the UC Irvine School of Law.The future of the Supreme Court is the forgotten issue in this year's presidential election. This is surprising and disturbing because a president's picks for the federal judiciary are one of the most long-lasting legacies of any presidency. There is a sharp contrast between the types of individuals that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney would place on the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts, yet neither is saying much about it.

Walter Russell Mead: Nature and Nature’s God

Walter Russell Mead is the Henry Kissinger senior fellow for US foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. He also writes a blog for the American Interest.While the lights went out across Manhattan tonight, and the city that calls itself the capital of the world was cut off from the mainland as flood waters thundered through its streets, many people around the world watched the spectacle and were reminded just how fragile the busy world we humans build around us really is.Manhattan is one of those places where nature seems mostly held at bay. Except for the parks, oases of carefully preserved nature deliberately shaped by the hand of man, every inch of the city’s surface has been covered by something manmade. The valleys have been exalted, the mountains laid low and the rough places plain.

Colin Shindler: The European Left and Its Trouble With Jews

Colin Shindler is an emeritus professor at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and the author of “Israel and the European Left: Between Solidarity and Delegitimization.”LAST week, Twitter shut down a popular account for posting anti-Semitic messages in France. This came soon after the firing of blanks at a synagogue near Paris, the discovery of a network of radical Islamists who had thrown a hand grenade into a kosher restaurant, and the killing of a teacher and young pupils at a Jewish school in Toulouse earlier this year. The attacks were part of an escalating campaign of violence against Jews in France.Today, a sizable section of the European left has been reluctant to take a clear stand when anti-Zionism spills over into anti-Semitism. Beginning in the 1990s, many on the European left began to view the growing Muslim minorities in their countries as a new proletariat and the Palestinian cause as a recruiting mechanism. The issue of Palestine was particularly seductive for the children of immigrants, marooned between identities.

Victor Davis Hanson: The Uncool President

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of the  recently released The End of Sparta. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com. ...The greatest problem facing Obama, however, is not just his mediocre record of governance, but the growing public perception that he is as uncool in 2012 as he was cool in 2008. Voters no longer feel they’re square for voting against Obama. Instead, it’s becoming the “in” thing to shrug that enough is enough.A common theme of classic American tales such as The Rainmaker, Elmer Gantry, The Music Man, and The Wizard of Oz is popular anger unleashed at Pied Piper–like messiahs who once hypnotized the masses with promises of grandeur.

William Davis: Who Really Wrote the Book of Mormon?

William Davis is a PhD student at UCLA. He was raised in Utah in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. He is working on a book about the origins of the Book of Mormon.WHO WROTE THE BOOK OF MORMON? For nearly two centuries, faithful members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) have claimed that Joseph Smith translated the text from the writings of ancient prophets, while critics have endlessly recycled inadequate theories of plagiarism or co-authorship. What has rarely been addressed is that for much of his language and narrative structure, Smith turned to the most read and memorized author of the late seventeenth century, John Bunyan. He did so in such imaginative ways that the resulting work transcends any easy charge of plagiarism and calls upon us to reimagine the rich oral traditions of early America.

Robert S. McElvaine: Obama vs. Hoover

Robert S. McElvaine is a historian at Millsaps College.  His most recent book is a 25th anniversary edition of “The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941.” He is currently completing a book manuscript, “Oh, Freedom! – The Young Sixties.”The question Americans should be asking ourselves isn’t whether we’re better off than we were four years ago. It’s whether we’re better off than we were 80 years ago....[T]he most appropriate presidential term to use as a benchmark is Herbert Hoover’s. He was the last president to face an economic crisis on a scale similar to the one that confronted Obama when he took office.

Matthew Algeo: Grover Cleveland’s Hurricane

Matthew Algeo is the author of “The President Is a Sick Man: Wherein the Supposedly Virtuous Grover Cleveland Survives a Secret Surgery at Sea and Vilifies the Courageous Newspaperman Who Dared Expose the Truth.”A DEVASTATING storm slams into New York City; within days, another hits the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina. The president refuses to allow the federal government to coordinate relief efforts. No, it’s not a glimpse into a future without the Federal Emergency Management Agency under a Romney administration. It’s what happened in August 1893, and the consequences of the government’s inaction offer valuable lessons today....In the wake of these twin tragedies ... President Grover Cleveland did nothing.

Carl Zimring: How Hurricane Sandy Affected One Historian (i.e. Me)

Carl Zimring is Associate Professor in the Department of Social Science & Cultural Studies at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.This was going to be my busiest week in 2012. My original plan for this week was to have a series of meetings at the Pratt Institute Monday through Wednesday, then go directly from the Wednesday meeting to LaGuardia Airport so I could arrive in Vancouver in time to present as part of an urban environmental history panel at the Social Science History Association meeting Thursday morning. All this comes on the heels of the Urban History Association meeting here in New York last week.The first sign that my schedule would not go according to plan was when the chair of one of my committees at Pratt emailed Friday afternoon to say that if the weather mandated, we would reschedule our Monday afternoon meeting. Being preoccupied with the UHA, I had not tracked the severity of Hurricane Sandy’s progress until I read that message late Friday night.

Niall Ferguson: Obama’s Possible Mideast Surprise

by Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard University. He is also a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford University, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His Latest book, Civilization: The West and the Rest, has just been published by Penguin Press. Everyone knows there could be a surprise before Nov. 6—a news story that finally makes up the minds of those undecided voters in the swing states and settles the presidential election. Right now, Barack Obama certainly needs one. Well, it is not going to come from the economy (unless you want to factor in the risk of a 1987-style stock-market plunge, which would hardly help the president). And it is not going to come from Donald Trump. And even if the Democrats dig up two more barking-mad Republican candidates for the Senate, both of whom believe that rapes are part of God’s plan to make babies, no one is going to be very surprised.

Ira Chernus: Who Lost the World? The Curious Case of How Libya Became an Election Issue

Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, a TomDispatch regular, and author of “Mythic America: Essays.” He blogs at MythicAmerica.us. Who lost Libya? Indeed, who lost the entire Middle East? Those are the questions lurking behind the endless stream of headlines about “Benghazi-gate.” Here’s the question we should really ask, though: How did a tragic but isolated incident at a U.S. consulate, in a place few Americans had ever heard of, get blown up into a pivotal issue in a too-close-to-call presidential contest?My short answer: the enduring power of a foreign policy myth that will not die, the decades-old idea that America has an inalienable right to “own” the world and control every place in it. I mean, you can’t lose what you never had.

Jonathan Zimmerman: The Aftermath of Superstorm Sandy and the Land of Opportunity

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).

Sean Wilentz: Romney is Captive to the Far Right

Sean Wilentz is a professor of history at Princeton University.The 2012 presidential campaign may seem like it’s all about the economy, but it’s really being driven by the chief political development of the last 30 years: the Republican Party’s movement further to the ideological right.Mitt Romney’s attempts to win over his party’s increasingly hard-line base forced him to tack far to the right to win the nomination — which, after his campaign nosedived in September, required him to tack back and present drastically contrasting stances on a wide range of issues.Compare the Republican Party’s current positions with those of its hero, RonaldReagan. Myths of Reagan’s rigid conservatism abound now, but in the end, what made him a success was precisely that he was not wedded to a hawkish view of the Cold War and how to wage it.After the Iran-Contra scandal nearly wrecked his administration, Reagan dismissed the neoconservatives involved, embraced reforming Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev and forged an agreement on arms control that hastened the Cold War’s conclusion....Related Links

Joseph M. Adelman: The “Wisdom” of the Founders and Our Political Pundits

Joseph M. Adelman is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Framingham State University.It’s October of a presidential election year, which means the political pundit class is alive with speculation of the likelihood of different results in the popular vote and the Electoral College or – and this one has really gotten people going, thanks to some speculation and number crunching by Five Thirty Eight blogger Nate Silver – if the Electoral College comes out in a 269-269 tie. (Two side points: first, take a look at the first scenario he games out; the scary part is it has the air of plausibility, that is, the electoral map theoretically could happen, even if the odds are extremely low. Second, as others have pointed out, you should know you’re being trolled when you read a sentence that states that the “probability [of a tie] has roughly doubled from a few weeks ago, when the chances had been hovering at about 0.3 percent instead.”)

Rick Perlstein: George McGovern, 1922-2012: Is Decency in Politics Always Doomed?

Rick Perlstein is the author of "Nixonland."To understand how deeply the moment of George McGovern's efflorescence differs from our own, pick up the biography McGovern authorized a young Time magazine staffer to write as he began his 1972 presidential campaign. The author, Robert Sam Anson, had been taken prisoner in 1970 by Communists guerrillas in Cambodia who put a gun to his head and made him dig his own grave. Anson dedicated the book to these guards! Then, in his preface, he wrote of their profound admiration for George McGovern as a reason why he should be President of the United States.The logic was a relic of the time. With the lying Richard Nixon following the lying Lyndon Johnson in the White House, the call for open, honest government associated with ascendent Baby Boomers -- and those same voters' longing for a quick end to the Vietnam War, even their suspicion we had picked the wrong side in that War -- seemed to suggest a candidate like McGovern, who had overseen the process of opening the Democratic Party's ossified boss-ridden nominating system, and pledged as president to remove all American forces from Southeast Asia within sixty days, was the Democratic future....

Michael Kazin: If Obama Proves a Failure, Liberals Have No One to Blame But Themselves

Michael Kazin is co-editor of Dissent and a professor of history at Georgetown University. He is completing a history of the American left to be published in 2011 by Knopf.Liberals have an obsession with the presidency. Since Franklin D. Roosevelt strode across the political arena like a colossus (albeit a colossus in a wheelchair), liberals have tended to equate success with electing one of their own to the White House. The New Deal, the New Frontier, the Great Society—these are fondly remembered as the glorious, if brief, eras of liberal political history, times when the country seemed to leap forward to a better place, before conservative Republicans found ways to jerk it back again. It's an obsession that also expressed itself in pop culture: After George W. Bush took office, with a big assist from the Supreme Court, many liberals consoled themselves by cheering on Jed Bartlett as he outfoxed his right-wing opponents.

William Astore: America Lost Last Night's Presidential Debate

Astore writes regularly for TomDispatch.com and can be reached at wjastore@gmail.com.There were times during last night's presidential debate on foreign policy when the key question seemed to be which candidate loved Israel more. There were other times when it seemed that the key question was which candidate wanted to make our already steroidal military even more muscle-bound. President Obama appeared to win the debate on points, but Governor Romney also won in the sense that he appeared knowledgeable and steady on national defense and foreign policy, areas in which he lacks experience.The real winners in last night's debate were not the candidates, but hardliners on Israel and the U.S. military-industrial complex. The real loser in last night's debate was also very clear. It was America. You and me.And here's why. Clearly, whichever man wins the election in November, the following will continue to be true:

Janet Golden: The U.S. Children’s Bureau: Time for a Revival?

Janet Golden is a professor of history at Rutgers University who specializes in the histories of medicine, childhood and women, as well as American social history. She discussed her current project, the history of babies in America, in a short interview.On a recent episode of the HBO series Boardwalk Empire, set in Atlantic City in the Prohibition Era, the wife of the city’s boss, Enoch “Nucky” Thompson, was speaking with a physician and a nun about a women’s health clinic she founded. Reviewing the language of the materials to be distributed, the nun objects to the word menstruation.  Mrs. Thompson responds, “The Federal Children’s Bureau has already published a series on prenatal care and ‘menstruation’ is what they used.” A shout out to the show’s writers for acknowledging the work of this largely unknown agency (actually called the United States Children’s Bureau) on its 100th birthday.