Roundup: Historians' Take

Julian Zelizer: When Foreign Policy Becomes Campaign Focus, Who Wins?

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."(CNN) -- Politics has returned to the water's edge. In the past week, we've seen how international events can suddenly dominate a political campaign, at least for a few days.The uproar in the Middle East over a YouTube video that featured anti-Islamic messages triggered widespread protests. An attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya left four people dead, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens. Protests in Egypt were equally intense as some people in a crowd of more than 2,000 scaled the walls of the U.S. Embassy. Protests spread to 20 other countries in the Middle East and beyond. In Tunis, protesters destroyed a school run by Americans while in Afghanistan protesters lit with a torch an effigy of Obama, the U.S. leader once hailed as the president who would repair America's image in the world, and watched it burn up.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: One Country, Many Voices

Jeff Wasserstrom is the author of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, co-editor of Chinese Characters: Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Land, Asia editor, Los Angeles Review of Books; Chancellor's Professor and Chair, history Department, University of California at Irvine; and editor, Journal of Asian Studies. He can be reached at @jwassersIRVINE: Four years ago, when the Beijing Olympic slogan was “One World, One Dream,” global audiences were wowed by a Chinese spectacle that began with a quote from Confucius describing the pleasure of welcoming friends from afar. Now, the sounds coming from China and grabbing our attention are not spirited drumming but angry chanting about settling scores. It’s worth comparing the recent street actions in China, triggered by an ongoing dispute over control of specks of land known as the Diaoyu Islands in Chinese, the Senkaku Islands in Japanese, with the mesmerizing gala of the Beijing Games. The two spectacles offer a striking study in contrasts – and intriguing parallels.Let’s start with contrasts. 

Michael D. Gordin: Separating the Pseudo From Science

Michael D. Gordin is a professor of history at Princeton University. He is the author of The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe, due out in October from the University of Chicago Press.The term "pseudoscience" gets thrown around quite a bit these days, most notably in debates about the dominant consensus on anthropogenic climate change. Say "pseudoscience," and immediately a bunch of doctrines leap to mind: astrology, phrenology, eugenics, ufology, and so on. Do they have anything in common? Some posit unknown forces of nature, others don't. Some are advocated by outsiders to the scientific community, while others have been backed by the elite. And the status of each can fluctuate over time. (Astrology, for example, was considered an exemplary field of natural knowledge from antiquity through the Renaissance.)

Diane Ravitch: Two Visions for Chicago’s Schools

Diane Ravitch won the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences in 2011 for her “careful use of social science research for the public good.”
 (July 2012)According to most news reports, the teachers in Chicago are striking because they are lazy and greedy. Or they are striking because of a personality clash between Mayor Rahm Emanuel and union president Karen Lewis. Or because this is the last gasp of a dying union movement. Or because Emanuel wants a longer school day, and the teachers oppose it.None of this is true. All reports agree that the two sides are close to agreement on compensation issues—it is not money that drove them apart. Last spring the union and the school board agreed to a longer school day, so that is not the issue either. The strike is a clash of two very different visions about what is needed to transform the schools of Chicago—and the nation.

Thomas V. DiBacco: Presidential Debates ... Shake Hands and Come Out Acting

Thomas V. DiBacco is a historian and professor emeritus at American University in Washington. Wednesday marks the 52nd anniversary of the first televised presidential candidate debate, between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon. It's a dubious distinction. Although there's every indication that debates matter in voter selection of a candidate, such rhetorical confrontations are poor indicators of future leadership. By any reasonable standard, debates are won on form and rarely on substance. In the pre-microphone age of American politics, he who had the booming voice had the decided edge, as evidenced in the 1858 U.S. Senate race debates in Illinois between Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had a "shrill, piping, squeaking and unpleasant" voice, according to his law partner.

Simon Sebag Montefiore: Please Hold for Mr. Putin

Simon Sebag Montefiore is the author of “Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar” and “Jerusalem: The Biography.”MASHA GESSEN, a Russian journalist, was recently fired for refusing to cover President Vladimir V. Putin’s hang-glider flight with migrating cranes, an exploit that was much mocked. Last week, she received an unexpected phone call, which she recounted in a blog post for The International Herald Tribune, this newspaper’s global edition. “My phone rang. ... I listened to silence for two minutes.” Finally: “Don’t hang up. I will connect you.” Frustrated, she shouted: “Do you want to introduce yourself?” A famous voice replied: “Putin, Vladimir Vladimirovich. I heard you were fired and that I unwittingly served as the reason for it.” He invited her to meet....

Pankaj Mishra: America’s Inevitable Retreat From the Middle East

Pankaj Mishra is the author of “From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia.”THE murder of four Americans in Libya and mob assaults on the United States’ embassies across the Muslim world this month have reminded many of 1979, when radical Islamists seized the American mission in Tehran. There, too, extremists running wild after the fall of a pro-American tyrant had found a cheap way of empowering themselves.But the obsession with radical Islam misses a more meaningful analogy for the current state of siege in the Middle East and Afghanistan: the helicopters hovering above the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon in 1975 as North Vietnamese tanks rolled into the city.That hasty departure ended America’s long and costly involvement in Indochina, which, like the Middle East today, the United States had inherited from defunct European empires. Of course, Southeast Asia had no natural resources to tempt the United States and no ally like Israel to defend. But it appeared to be at the front line of the worldwide battle against Communism, and American policy makers had unsuccessfully tried both proxy despots and military firepower to make the locals advance their strategic interests....

Eliza Griswold: How ‘Silent Spring’ Ignited the Environmental Movement

Eliza Griswold is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship.On June 4, 1963, less than a year after the controversial environmental classic “Silent Spring” was published, its author, Rachel Carson, testified before a Senate subcommittee on pesticides. She was 56 and dying of breast cancer. She told almost no one. She’d already survived a radical mastectomy. Her pelvis was so riddled with fractures that it was nearly impossible for her to walk to her seat at the wooden table before the Congressional panel. To hide her baldness, she wore a dark brown wig.“Every once in a while in the history of mankind, a book has appeared which has substantially altered the course of history,” Senator Ernest Gruen­ing, a Democrat from Alaska, told Carson at the time.

Jeff Biggers: Did Romney Lie About His Family's Flight to Mexico in His Memoir? Does Accuracy Matter?

Based in Tucson, Arizona and Illinois, Jeff Biggers is the David Brower Award/American Book Award-winning author of Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland, The United States of Appalachia, and In the Sierra Madre. His forthcoming book, State Out of the Union: Arizona and the Final Showdown Over the American Dream (Nation Books) will be released in September, 2012. His website is: www.jeffbiggers.comWhile presidential contender Mitt Romney attempted to sway Latino voters at a Univision Forum in Florida last night, the fallout over his taped quips at a Republican fundraiser also include a joke about his Mexican-born father, George Romney. If he had been "born of Mexican parents," Romney said, as opposed to his Mormon transplanted ones, "I'd have a better shot at winning this."

Melissa Harris-Perry: Casualties in the Education Reform Wars

Melissa Harris-Perry is professor of political science at Tulane University, where she is founding director of the Project on Gender, Race, and Politics in the South. She is author of Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America. She is also a contributor to MSNBC.Rolisa is a married mom with four kids. Two of them are successful graduates of Chicago’s public schools—her eldest graduated from college in 2011, and the second is a college junior. Her younger kids are in the fourth and sixth grades at a small public school on the South Side. The class sizes are at the city average, and the test scores are above the state average. Her kids are pretty happy there. Or at least they were, until the standoff between the Chicago Teachers Union and Mayor Rahm Emanuel transformed them into students of Rolisa’s makeshift kitchen table school.

Christopher C. Sellers: How Green Was My Lawn

Christopher C. Sellers is an associate professor of history at Stony Brook University and the author of “Crabgrass Crucible: Suburban Nature and the Rise of Environmentalism in Twentieth-Century America.”FIFTY years ago this month Rachel Carson, already a best-selling writer, published “Silent Spring,” the book many credit with inspiring the modern environmental movement. Nowadays, when environmental causes are often under political siege, it bears remembering that they were once extraordinarily popular, especially where both the book and the movement were born: in the suburbs.As modern environmentalists like to remind us, the issue is a global one: climate change, pollution and nuclear radiation know no boundaries, and Public Enemy No. 1 is often the car-centric suburban lifestyle. But anyone trying to bring new energy to the movement could learn a lesson from how activists of the 1950s and ’60s picked up on, and played off of, concerns about pollution and preservation that pervaded suburban lives and neighborhoods....

Bill Moyers and Bernard A. Weisberger: The 1 Percent Court

Bill Moyers is a journalist and president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy. Bernard A. Weisberger is a distinguished teacher and author of American history.Why a special issue of The Nation devoted to the Supreme Court? Because with partisan gridlock paralyzing the president and Congress, the Court has more than ever become “the decider”—the most powerful branch of government, and one at the center of a controversy whose outcome may shape the course of democracy for generations to come.By a paradox both historical and constitutional, the political appointees on the Roberts Court will never have to answer for their decisions to voters like you and me. Nor to the president or Congress: once they are confirmed, the Supreme Court’s justices, like all federal judges, serve for life or “good Behaviour.”The Constitution’s framers meant to secure the Court against political pressure from the electorate and arbitrary dismissal of its members from on high by presidents dissatisfied with their decisions. As the third branch of a new national government—one whose powers were to be divided to block overreach by any one of them—the Court would be equal to the executive and legislative arms, even though the president appointed its members with the concurrence of the Senate.

Richard R. John: When a Plutocratic Dinner Doomed a Presidential Campaign

Richard R. John is a historian who teaches in the doctoral program at Columbia Journalism School.Media debacles are a recurrent nightmare for presidential candidates. Yet few have ever confronted a more devastating publicity firestorm than the Republican candidate James G. Blaine did on a fateful day in October 1884.Not even Mitt Romney -- who is now facing the blowback from some arrogant remarks that he made in private at a fundraiser with high-rolling supporters -- has had a day quite as damaging as the one “the Plumed Knight” (as Blaine was known in the press) suffered in the final days of his presidential campaign....Running neck-and-neck with Democrat Grover Cleveland, Blaine had to win [New York] state. To help fill his campaign coffers, Blaine agreed to attend a sumptuous fundraising dinner, organized by 200 prominent Republican supporters, on Oct. 29. The venue was the ballroom at Delmonico’s, a swank restaurant in the financial district. Among the guests were several of the richest, best-known and most politically connected businessmen in the country, including the Navy contractor John Roach and the financier Jay Gould....

Niall Ferguson: Obama's Mideast Meltdown

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.

Jason Pack and Andrea Khalil: Amid Chants of 'Free Libya, Terrorists Out,' a Nation at a Crossroads

Mr. Pack is a researcher of Middle Eastern History at the University of Cambridge. He is president of Libya-Analysis.com. Mrs. Khalil is an associate professor at CUNY. She is currently traveling in Libya while on a Fulbright Scholarship to Tunisia.Sept. 11 is now a date that signifies a national tragedy for Libya as well as the United States. The attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, has upset the delicate political transition from dictatorship to democracy that was unfolding here. It also has obscured parliament's prudent selection Wednesday of Mustafa Abushagour—a moderate Islamist and respected technocrat—as prime minister. Yet spontaneous street demonstrations throughout the week denouncing the attack and seeking to pressure the government to act against its perpetrators suggest that Libyans are determined to build an inclusive society, free from fear....

Molly Worthen: The Power of Political Communion

Molly Worthen is an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.AS the 2012 presidential race enters the homestretch, both parties vow that this election is not just a choice between different policies. It is a cosmic decision between “two different visions, two different value sets,” as Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. told delegates at the Democratic National Convention. Behind the competing catchphrases lurks another contest, one that illuminates this war of worldviews. It is a tale of two Catholicisms.

Seth Anziska: A Preventable Massacre

Seth Anziska is a doctoral candidate in international history at Columbia University.ON the night of Sept. 16, 1982, the Israeli military allowed a right-wing Lebanese militia to enter two Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut. In the ensuing three-day rampage, the militia, linked to the Maronite Christian Phalange Party, raped, killed and dismembered at least 800 civilians, while Israeli flares illuminated the camps’ narrow and darkened alleyways. Nearly all of the dead were women, children and elderly men.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Harvard Cheating Scandal? It Could be Bad Teaching.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and chairs the humanities and social services department at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. He is the author of “Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory” (Yale University Press).In 1998, a self-described con-man named Bob Corbett published an irreverent, tongue-in-cheek manifesto called “The Cheater’s Handbook: The Naughty Student’s Bible.” Boasting that he had paid someone to take his high school Advanced Placement tests, Mr. Corbett provided helpful and often hilarious hints for producing crib sheets, digging up old exams, and much more.But he dedicated his book to his 11th grade English teacher, who “did such a wonderfully engaging job that he destroyed any shred of desire I may ever have had to cheat in English thereafter,” Corbett wrote. “If all teachers brought such passionate energy to their classrooms,” he added, “perhaps this book would become obsolete.”

Gil Troy: History's Handcuffs: The Iraq and Lebanon Wars Feed Skepticism About Attacking Iran

Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University and a Shalom Hartman Research Fellow in Jerusalem. His next book, “Moynihan’s Moment: America’s Fight Against Zionism as Racism,” will be published this fall by Oxford University Press.As the debate rages over Iran’s nuclear intentions – and Israel’s options, both military and otherwise – we need to acknowledge three recent moments that are making many people doubt the wisdom of an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.  Both Israeli and American policymakers need to be aware of the dark, nearly blinding, shadow of recent history, because in our 24/7 media world, responding to those fears is an essential part of telling the right story. And getting it right is not just spin. It is of strategic value in democracies like the United States and Israel.

Julian Zelizer: Three Hurdles for Obama, Romney

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."Princeton, New Jersey (CNN) -- With the party conventions over, the third chapter of the presidential contest begins. First there were the primaries, then there were the conventions, and now comes the fall campaign. During the next two months, there will be multiple hurdles for the candidates to overcome.Given how close this race is, and the handful of states that will determine the outcome, each of these three challenges has the capacity to produce a significant swing in November:1.) The advertising wars: The campaigns and independent organizations have amassed huge war chests. Whether voters like it or not, the truth is that much of the fall revolves around character assassination on television and radio, and now the Internet. Both parties will continue their efforts to define their opponents in the most negative light possible.