Roundup: Historians' Take

Victor Davis Hanson: Eating America’s Seed Corn

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.

Robert S. McElvaine: Has Obama Made the Job Situation Worse?

Robert S. McElvaine is a professor of history at Millsaps College. His most recent book is the 25th anniversary edition of “The Great Depression.”“Without a doubt President Obama inherited a difficult situation. Here’s the problem. He made it worse,” Paul Ryan, the Republican vice presidential candidate, has been saying in his stump speech.Ryan’s statement consists of two parts; the first is gross understatement, the second gross misstatement. It is the misstatement that is the essence of the case Republicans are putting before American voters: That President Obama has made the economy worse. Getting voters to believe that assertion is probably the Republicans’ only hope of winning the election. In the latest poll (a Wall Street Journal and NBC News survey released on Tuesday), respondents favor President Obama over Gov. Romney — generally by wide margins — in almost every category other than improving the economy. On “caring about average people,” for example, Obama is favored by an extraordinary margin to 52 percent to 30 percent....

Pat Buchanan: Who Lost Nixon’s “New Majority”?

Patrick J. Buchanan is a founding editor of TAC and the author of Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?Looking back all the way to America’s Civil War, there have been three dominant presidential coalitions. The first was Abraham Lincoln’s. With his war to restore the Union and his martyrdom, Lincoln inaugurated an era of Republican dominance that lasted more than seven decades and saw only two Democratic presidents: Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson. The second coalition was FDR’s, where he and his vice president Harry Truman won five consecutive presidential elections. Only Gen. Eisenhower could break that streak. The third was Richard Nixon’s New Majority, cobbled together after his narrow 1968 victory, where he annexed the Northern Catholic ethnics and Southern Christian conservatives of FDR’s coalition to win 49 states in 1972. Ronald Reagan would follow up with 44- and 49-state landslides and see his vice president win 40 states in 1988. That New Majority is now history. In the five elections since 1992, Republicans have won the popular vote once — in 2004. And while Mitt Romney is slightly ahead in polls today, reaching 270 electoral votes will be no easy task. The electoral map is becoming problematic...

Estelle B. Freedman: Women’s Long Battle to Define Rape

Estelle B. Freedman , the Edgar E. Robinson professor in U.S. history at Stanford University, is the author of “No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women” and a co-author of “Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America.”When U.S. Senate candidate Todd Akin of Missouri used the phrase “legitimate rape” to defend his opposition to abortion in cases of rape and incest, President Obama fired back, saying that we should not “be parsing and qualifying and slicing” types of rape. Yet for most of our history, that is precisely what Americans have been doing. Our legal definition of rape has evolved over centuries, and clearly, we’re not done fighting over it.Who ‘owns’ a woman’s body?

Arthur Herman: Neil Armstrong’s America

Arthur Herman is a former professor of history at Georgetown and George Mason Universities.

Robert O. Self: The Antisocial Contract

Robert O. Self is an associate professor of history at Brown and the author of the forthcoming book “All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s.”WHEN the Republican Party meets in Tampa, Fla., this week, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey will deliver the keynote address. He promises “hard truths.” Twenty years ago, the Democrat-turned-Republican Phil Gramm had that job. Warning to Governor Christie: no one remembers anything Mr. Gramm said. What we do remember from the 1992 convention in Houston is the jeremiad delivered by Patrick J. Buchanan, the former speechwriter for Richard M. Nixon who won nearly a quarter of Republican primary votes that year. With his invocation of a “cultural war” for the “soul of America,” Mr. Buchanan brought down the house.His fulminations against abortion, homosexuality and other hot-button “cultural” issues exceeded tolerable political rhetoric and likely hurt President George Bush in the general election. But Mr. Buchanan nonetheless set the tone for the Clinton years, and “culture war” became shorthand for the battle between Red and Blue in the 1990s.

Elizabeth Gritter: Church Family Led Racial Advances

Elizabeth Gritter teaches U.S. history at Middle Tennessee State University, and her book-in-progress examines Robert R. Church Jr. and black political mobilization in Memphis. She also is working on a documentary film, titled “River of Hope,” on this topic.This year marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Robert R. Church Sr., reportedly America’s first black millionaire, and the national political start of his son Robert R. Church Jr., who became the country’s most prominent black Republican in the 1920s. These black Tennesseans, based in Memphis, made great strides for racial advancement.Born in Mississippi to a white slaveholder and his Malay slave, Church Sr. worked as a steward on his father’s steamboats on the Mississippi River from Memphis to New Orleans. During the Battle of Memphis on June 6, 1862, a Federal fleet captured the steamboat Victoria, but Church escaped and stayed in Union-occupied Memphis.After the war, Church Sr. opened a saloon along Beale Street. Along with the profits from his first wife, Louisa, who ran a hair salon, he amassed a business fortune that made him a millionaire....

Jennifer Tucker: The Medieval Roots of Todd Akin’s Theories

Jennifer Tucker, an associate professor of history and science in society at Wesleyan University, is the author of “Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science.”THE now infamous beliefs about pregnancy that are held by Representative Todd Akin — the Republican nominee in a hotly contested Senate race in Missouri, who remarked earlier this week that the female body will try to “shut that whole thing down” in the case of “legitimate rape” — are obviously at odds with modern science. They are, however, in step with medieval science, even if Mr. Akin doesn’t seem quite aware of the similarities.In the Middle Ages, as the historian Thomas Laqueur has written, there were two different views of reproduction. According to the Hippocratic model, both parents made seeds from materials throughout their bodies, a process called pangenesis. Both male and female seeds were needed to make a new person.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Thoroughly Conventional

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).The convention season is upon us! Starting with the Republican National Convention next week, followed by the Democrats' the week after, Americans will watch with bated breath as the parties decide their nominations for president.Actually, those decisions were made months ago. The real mystery is why anyone watches the conventions - and why we need them at all.The standard answer is that the conventions allow the parties and their nominees to define themselves on the national stage. In addition, conventions supposedly produce a "bounce" of popularity that can catapult candidates into the White House.But in this era of nonstop news, haven't the candidates already had ample opportunity to define themselves? It's hard to see why they deserve four more days of round-the-clock coverage, or why taxpayers should be shelling out $136 million to fund two marathons of cocktail mixers, buffet lines, and canned speeches....

Patrick J. Buchanan: New World Disorder ... The World's New Powers Discover the Old Ethnonationalisms

Patrick J. Buchanan is a founding editor of TAC and the author of Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? After his great victory in Desert Storm, George H.W. Bush went before the United Nations to declare the coming of a New World Order. The Cold War was yesterday. Communism was in its death throes. The Soviet Empire had crumbled. The Soviet Union was disintegrating. Francis Fukuyama was writing of The End of History. Savants trilled about the inevitable triumph of democratic capitalism. Yet, in 2012, sectarianism, tribalism and nationalism are all resurgent, reshaping a world where U.S. power and influence are visibly receding...

William Doyle: The Demise of the Toff

William Doyle is Emeritus Professor of History and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol. A Fellow of the British Academy, he has written extensively on eighteenth century European History, and taught in universities on both sides of the Atlantic – including courses over many years on the history of aristocracies. He has written two titles for the VSI series: Aristocracy: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2010) and The French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2001).

Julian Zelizer: In Republican and Democratic National Conventions, Speeches Make History

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) -- Now the party is really starting. Democrats and Republicans are preparing to gather to hold their conventions, each using this precious time to tell the nation what its presidential candidate is all about.Republicans are hoping that Gov. Chris Christie can tear down the Democrats, New Jersey style, in his keynote address, and that Condoleezza Rice can add some foreign policy heft to a ticket remarkably thin on international affairs. Democrats are depending on former President Bill Clinton to tap into the rhetoric he used against Republicans in the budget battles of 1995 to cut into Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan's vision for Medicare. They hope that San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro, the keynote speaker, can send a message to Latinos about which party is on their side.

Michael Kazin: Fight the System, but Know How to Make It Work

Michael Kazin is a professor of history at Georgetown, a co-editor of Dissent and the author of “American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation.”The Great Recession and its frustrating aftermath spawned the Tea Party and the Occupy movement – bands of dedicated activists who agree about nothing but the need to transform the political system. Both movements grew quickly, aided by their own creative tactics and the news media’s rapt attention. Each one forced office-holders and aspiring candidates to address their concerns and adopt some of their rhetoric – whether “protect the Constitution” or “We are the 99 percent.”So why, less than three months before the election, do only the Tea Partiers wield a major influence on American politics?A big reason is that the main purpose of these conservative activists was always to elect right-wing stalwarts who could thwart President Obama’s “socialist” programs. And, from the first, they could draw on wealthy contributors like the Koch brothers and experienced advisers like Richard Armey....

Richard Rothstein and Mark Santow: The Cost of Living Apart

Richard Rothstein is a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute and senior fellow at the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at U.C. Berkeley. Mark Santow is an associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.

Kiff Hamp: Why We Still Need Affirmative Action

Kiff Hamp is a graduate student at the University of Michigan Law School and the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy....In debating the constitutionality of rights given to, and taken from, African Americans throughout the history of our country, lawyers, legal scholars and historians have debated the concept of a "colorblind Constitution." Most Americans know the term from Justice John Marshall Harlan's famous one-man dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, in which he stated: "Our Constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens." In fact, the term was used in a similar way in the decades before the Civil War by abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass and Sen. Charles Sumner.

Thomas A. Foster: Rep. Todd Akin's Ideas About Rape Hark Back to the Colonial Era

Thomas A. Foster is an associate professor and chairman of the history department at DePaul University. He is the editor of "Documenting Intimate Matters: Primary Sources for a History of Sexuality in America."Rep. Todd Akin, the GOP's candidate for U.S. Senate in Missouri, caused a huge stir the other day with his comments about how women who are true rape victims rarely get pregnant."If it's a legitimate rape," he said, "the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."In a piece that was typical of the widespread outrage the remarks stirred, the Atlantic magazine called them the "contemporary equivalent of the early American belief that only witches float."The writer was onto something important. Akin's ideas truly do date back to the colonial era.In those days, prior to modern medical understanding of conception, women were considered to be "more amorous" than men, and it was believed that both partners needed to have orgasms in order for conception to occur....

Niall Ferguson: Obama’s Gotta Go

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.I was a good loser four years ago. “In the grand scheme of history,” I wrote the day after Barack Obama’s election as president, “four decades is not an especially long time. Yet in that brief period America has gone from the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. to the apotheosis of Barack Obama. You would not be human if you failed to acknowledge this as a cause for great rejoicing.”...

Nicholas B. Dirks: Scholars, Spies, and Global Studies

Nicholas B. Dirks is a professor of history and anthropology at Columbia University, where he is also executive vice president for the arts and sciences and dean of the faculty.No one doubts that globalization is one of the most important trends of our day. Nor does anyone question that it affects what we study, how we teach, and whom we seek to reach. Beyond that, however, there is little consensus.As American universities expand their global footprint with branch campuses in Singapore, Abu Dhabi, and elsewhere, many faculty are concerned about oppressive governance, human-rights violations, and lack of academic freedom abroad. Meanwhile administrators grapple with how these new ventures—and globalization in general—will change teaching and research in the United States. As higher education seeks new audiences, will it be able to maintain the significance and character of the liberal arts, which have played such a crucial role in the educational mission of the American university?Similarly educators increasingly agree that all undergraduates ought to pursue some study abroad. But should it involve language study and full cultural immersion? Or short-term travel and networking through internships and other kinds of programs?

Juan Cole: Anonymous Billionaires are Stealing Your Election with Attack Ads

Juan Cole is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History at the University of Michigan.It would be bad enough, as I reported last week, that 47 billionaires were responsible for the lion’s share of individual Super PAC contributions. It turns out that the Super PACs aren’t even the biggest players.The biggest players are the dark money PACs, which do not have to reveal the sources of their funding.If we just look at the television ads bankrolled by the top six sources of funding, we make a startling discovery, which Kim Barker reported on in these pages last week.

Vanessa Heggie: 'Legitimate Rape' – A Medieval Medical Concept

Vanessa Heggie is a historian of science at the University of Cambridge...."[A]bsolute rape" is not quite the same as Akin's "legitimate rape". Akin seems to be suggesting that the body suppresses conception or causes a miscarriage, while the earlier [medieval] idea ... relates specifically to the importance of orgasm. Through the medieval and early modern period it was widely thought, by lay people as well as doctors, that women could only conceive if they had an orgasm.The biological basis for this idea is what the historian Thomas Laqueur has termed the "one sex system". The one sex system suggests that women's reproductive organs are fundamentally based on men's reproductive organs, so the vagina is represented as an inverted penis, the ovaries are testes and so on. Women had "cooler" constitutions, and therefore lacked the heat or force to drive the gonads out of the body, to convert ovaries to testes.