Roundup: Historians' Take

Tad Daley: The Case for a World Republic

Tad Daley is the author of Apocalypse Never: Forging the Path to a Nuclear Weapon-Free World (Rutgers University Press), soon in paperback. He is currently working on a new book about the history and future of the ancient idea that something like a world republic could serve as the solution to the problem of war.A reflection on:Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement Lawrence Wittner 272 pages, $21.95In 2011, people across the planet reached out to Japan in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami. Millions watched as one nation after another rose in mass revolutions across the Arab world. The Occupy movement blossomed, as citizens in cities around the globe expressed rage over the excesses of capitalism and corporate power. And Time magazine named "The Protester" its annual Person of the Year.

Andrew Meyer: The Myth of the "Anti-Israel" Obama

Andrew Seth Meyer is associate professor of history at Brooklyn College and the translator for "The Dao of the Military: Liu An's Art of War." Enter DAOME on Columbia University Press's website for a 30 percent discount on the book.

Jim Sleeper: Fareed Zakaria's Plagiarism: Even Worse Than It Looks

Jim Sleeper lectures in political science at Yale and posts frequently at TPM. He has been a New York newspaper columnist and is the author of The Closest of Strangers and Liberal Racism.A few hours ago Fareed Zakaria apologized publicly for passing off New Yorker writer Jill Lepore's work as his own in an essay he wrote for Time magazine. Not to put too fine a point on it, Zakaria committed egregious plagiarism, as Alexander Abad-Santos of the Atlantic Wire reported.But the offense does not end there. Zakaria is a trustee of Yale, which takes a very dim view of plagiarism and suspends or expels students who commit anything like what he has committed here. If the Yale Corporation were to apply to itself the standards it expects its faculty and students to meet, Zakaria would have to take a leave or resign.Worse still: Lepore, whom Zakaria wronged by misappropriating her work, is herself a Yale PhD. If anyone knows what it means to steal another scholar's work, it's Zakaria, who holds a PhD from Harvard.

Lewis L. Gould: From the House to the White House

Lewis L. Gould is professor emeritus of American history at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of “Grand Old Party: A History of the Republicans.”In all the media excitement over Mitt Romney’s selection of Representative Paul D. Ryan as his running mate on the Republican ticket, little attention has been focused on the rarity of an incumbent member of the House of Representatives holding second place on a national ticket. Each party has done it twice since 1900, with one success and one failure for both Republicans and Democrats so far.The Republicans led off in 1908 with the selection of James S. Sherman to run with William H. Taft. A representative from upstate New York, Sherman was chosen to balance the “Western” choice of Taft, from Ohio. After the election, Sherman (known as “Sunny Jim”) played almost no role in the Taft presidency. He presided over the Senate and played golf. After Taft defeated Theodore Roosevelt in the bitter 1912 Republican national convention, Sherman was re-nominated by default. He died of a heart condition shortly before the November voting and is now generally and deservedly forgotten.

Lawrence B. Glickman: Ryan Revives Old National Fixation on ‘Free Enterprise’

Lawrence B. Glickman is professor of history at the University of South Carolina. He is the author most recently of “Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America.” The opinions expressed are his own.Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, regularly invokes free enterprise, which he has called “one of the greatest forces for good this world has ever known.”Representative Paul Ryan, Romney’s recently announced running mate, uses the phrase even more frequently. In his very first speech as Romney’s selection, he called for a return to the founding principles of “liberty, freedom, free enterprise.”...In using this language, the two are part of a long tradition, one that helps explain how Americans have frequently mythologized the role of the “free market” and downplayed that of government in our dynamic economic system.

Lewis Gould: From the House to the White House

 

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: Pay No Attention to the Party Behind the Curtain

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is co-editor, with Angilee Shah, of Chinese Characters: Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Lands, which will be published next month by the University of California Press. He will join other contributors to the volume, including Dissent author Megan Shank, for a book launch event at New York’s Asia Society on September 17 (details here).As Britain basks in the glow of its successful Olympics, the thought that comes to this China specialist’s mind is, what a difference four years makes. There is a striking contrast indeed, where China is concerned, between the largely positive international chatter about that country in mid-2008, as the Beijing Games concluded, and the largely negative buzz about it now.The change in China’s fortunes has little to do with medal counts or world records. Still, a look back to the Beijing Games helps place then-and-now contrasts into sharp relief.

Victor Davis Hanson: There Is No California

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....How to explain the seemingly inexplicable? “California” is a misnomer. There is no such state. Instead there are two radically different cultures and landscapes with little in common, the two equally dysfunctional in quite different ways. Apart they are unworldly; together, a disaster.A postmodern narrow coastal corridor runs from San Diego to Berkeley; there the weather is ideal, the gentrified affluent make good money, and values are green and left-wing. This Shangri-La is juxtaposed to a vast impoverished interior, from the southern desert to the northern Central Valley, where life is becoming premodern.

Joseph Loconte: With Olympics, We Yearn To Be Like Gods

Joseph Loconte, Ph.D., is an associate professor of history at the King’s College in New York City and the author of The Searchers: A Quest for Faith in the Valley of Doubt.(CNN) The ancient Greeks, especially the frugal Spartans, would probably balk at the commercialism that saturates our modern Olympic Games. And it’s doubtful that either badminton or beach volleyball would satisfy their appetite for blood-and-guts competition.Yet we share something with the Greeks every time we assemble for this great athletic contest: a desire to transcend the politics of the moment and reach beyond the ordinary limits of human achievement. That desire has been on full display during the London Summer Games.Begun in 776 BC, the Olympic Games soon became so important to Greek life that conflicts between participating Greek city-states, which were constantly squabbling with one another, would be suspended until after the games. The great historian Thucydides described one such scene in his classic history of the Peloponnesian War....

Julian Zelizer: How Ryan Could Help 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."(CNN) -- Mitt Romney has taken many people by surprise by announcing that his vice presidential running mate will be Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan. The decision excites many conservatives who have been calling on Romney to go big. They believe Ryan will inject some juice into a campaign they feel has been lackluster and put the focus on the policy differences between Romney and President Obama.The primary risk with Ryan, from what we currently know about him, is that his controversial budget plan and tough line on Medicare could energize liberals and alienate elderly voters in key states like Florida. He also lacks foreign policy expertise and has spent most of his career in the city that conservatives hate, Washington. In recent decades, the record of vice presidential running mates who have come right out of the House is not very good.

Charles K. Armstrong: The View From Pyongyang

Charles K. Armstrong, a professor of history and the director of the Center for Korean Research at Columbia University, is the author of a forthcoming book on North Korea in the cold war era.LIKE Havana, only more so, the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, is bereft of commercial billboards but covered with propaganda posters. In recent years, however, one company has been allowed to advertise its products: Pyonghwa Motors, a joint venture between the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s South Korea-based Unification Church and North Korea’s state-run Ryonbong General Corporation. A few signs promoting the company’s Whistle sedan can be seen in Pyongyang and surrounding areas. Essentially a Hyundai, the Whistle is an increasingly common sight on Pyongyang streets, along with a growing number of BMW, Lexus, Mercedes, Nissan and other luxury and nonluxury vehicles, many privately owned.

Jennifer Burns: Ayn Rand's Long Journey to the Heart of American Politics

Jennifer Burns is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University and the author of Goddess of Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. In the heyday of her celebrity, it often seemed that the only appropriate public response to Ayn Rand was dismissal. In 1961, Newsweek magazine sent a reporter to investigate the growing circle of devotees clustered around the right wing novelist. Visiting the New York City headquarters of Rand’s Objectivist movement, the reporter declared the Russian-born Rand an "apparition" with a "glare that would wilt a cactus." After a similar pilgrimage, a writer for Life magazine forthrightly concluded that Rand was the leader of a cult. A review of Rand’s essay collection Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal in The New Republic simply referred to Rand as "Top Bee in the communal bonnet, buzzing the loudest and zaniest throughout this all but incredible book." And yet, some fifty years later, Rand is the avowed intellectual inspiration of presumptive GOP Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan. Ryan offers no apologies for interest in Rand’s philosophy and makes little effort to hide his allegiances. Just how did Rand travel from the fringes of a 1960s subculture to the heart of American politics? It clearly wasn’t via the traditional institutions of mainstream conservatism.

Robert Zaretsky: Looking at an Old Syllabus With New Eyes

Robert Zaretsky is a professor of history in the Honors College at the University of Houston.The distant but growing sigh rising across the nation is the sound of humanities professors writing—or tweaking—their syllabi for fall classes. Like Labor Day, the writing of the syllabus has become an empty ritual of late summer—a thoughtless activity that has overtaken (or shunted aside) the practice it is meant to sustain.Strictly speaking, a syllabus is a course outline that tells the student what books to read and when to read them, what papers to write and when to hand them in, and what subjects will be discussed and when students need to be ready to discuss them. In a word, it is a checklist. It is also the dark side of teaching—or, more accurately, of the telling of the past.

Jennifer Burns: Atlas Spurned

Jennifer Burns, an assistant professor of history at Stanford, is the author of “Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right.”EARLY in his Congressional career, Paul D. Ryan, the Wisconsin representative and presumptive Republican vice-presidential nominee, would give out copies of Ayn Rand’s book “Atlas Shrugged” as Christmas presents. He described the novelist of heroic capitalism as “the reason I got into public service.” But what would Rand think of Mr. Ryan?While Rand, an atheist, did enjoy a good Christmas celebration for its cheerful commercialism, she would have scoffed at the idea of public service. And though Mr. Ryan’s advocacy of steep cuts in government spending would have pleased her, she would have vehemently opposed his social conservatism and hawkish foreign policy. She would have denounced Mr. Ryan as she denounced Ronald Reagan, for trying “to take us back to the Middle Ages, via the unconstitutional union of religion and politics.”

Walter Russell Mead: 2012 ... Suddenly, A Historic Election?

Walter Russell Mead is professor of foreign affairs and the humanities at Bard College and editor-at-large of The American Interest. With Governor Romney’s selection of Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate, the vague contours of the presidential race have suddenly become sharper. Up until now, partly because Romney’s image has been so fuzzy, we were looking at a referendum on President Obama rather than a clear-cut contest between political philosophies. Now, given Ryan’s prominence as a budget hawk and entitlement reformer, the public has a choice to make. On the one hand, President Obama and Vice President Biden stand foursquare for the growth of what I’ve been calling the blue social model. In terms of government policy, they want to continue to grow the mix of interventions, guarantees, entitlements and programs that FDR launched in the New Deal, that Lyndon Johnson extended in the Great Society, and that various presidents (of both parties — think of Nixon and the EPA and W and the prescription drug benefit) have extended since. This is a bolder stance than the Clinton approach. Bill "the era of big government is over" Clinton was a small ‘c’ conservative: he aimed to conserve the bulk of the entitlement state by trimming a few of its less popular features like welfare payments not linked to work.

Steve Harmon: Mosque Burning Only Fuels Fear and Hatred

Steve Harmon is a professor at Pittsburg State University in Pittsburg, Kan.The fire at the mosque of the Joplin Islamic Society, located in Carl Junction, in the wee hours of Aug. 6 has been called “suspicious” by local investigating authorities. Destroying a mosque is not only a crime, it’s a hate crime. We, as Americans or as Christians, have no quarrel with Muslims. There is no war between the West and Islam or between the United States and Muslims. The war is within Islam. It is a war between violent, extremist Muslims, who comprise a tiny minority of Islam, and peaceful, moderate Muslims, who comprise the vast majority. It is a battle for the soul of Islam and for the future of the Middle East. The United States and its Western allies have been caught in the crossfire. What we, as Americans, need to do is to support moderate Muslims in their struggles against the extremists....

Lien-Hang Nguyen: Exploding the Myths About Vietnam

Lien-Hang Nguyen is an associate professor of history at the University of Kentucky and the author of “Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam.”AS the war in Afghanistan drags on with no definitive victory in sight for the United States and American troops begin to withdraw, comparisons to the Vietnam War are once again in the air, 50 years after both Washington and Hanoi decided to beef up their forces in South Vietnam. “Just take a run through the essential Vietnam War checklist,” wrote Tom Engelhardt in Mother Jones magazine, noting “there’s ‘quagmire’ ” and “the idea of winning ‘hearts and minds’ ” as well as “bomb-able, or in our era drone-able, ‘sanctuaries’ across the border” and even “a one-man version of My Lai.” Although these analogies are particularly attractive to critics — who see America’s battle in Afghanistan as even more futile than Vietnam and advocate a quick exit — they are deeply flawed.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Shootings in Sikh Temple and Arizona: Which Crime is Worse?

Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of 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).Last Sunday, Wade Michael Page killed six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin before being wounded by a police officer and taking his own life. Two days later, Jared Lee Loughner pleaded guilty to killing exactly the same number of people at an Arizona shopping mall last year.

Peter Dreier: My Five Minutes With Bill O'Reilly

Peter Dreier is E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, Occidental College.Bill O'Reilly invited me on his Fox News show Wednesday night because he was upset that I called him a "right wing buffoon" in my Huffington Post article about Pete Seeger's appearance on the Colbert Report. If I'd called him a "conservative pundit," I doubt he would have asked me on the O'Reilly Factor.The reference to O'Reilly in my Huffington Post article was an after-thought. I was praising Stephen Colbert for inviting Seeger on his show and I suggested that Colbert lead a campaign to get Pete nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. I wrote that: "Colbert's show -- including his faux campaign for president, his Super PAC, and his nightly send-up of Bill O'Reilly's right-wing buffoonery -- brilliantly satirizes the absurdities of America's corporate-dominated political culture. By heading a campaign to get Pete Seeger the Nobel Peace Prize, Colbert would actually demonstrate that the forces of social conscience can triumph, against the odds."

Kristen Loveland: Germany's Circumcision Ban: Physical Integrity and Individual Dignity

Kristen Loveland is a PhD candidate at Harvard University, studying the ethical debates surrounding new reproductive technologies in Germany.It was easy to miss, but “the worst attack on Jewish life since the Holocaust” took place in Germany at the end of June, according to Pinchas Goldschmidt, one of Europe’s leading rabbis. Goldschmidt was referring to the judgment of a regional German court that the circumcision of boys is a criminal act. The practical effect of the ruling is still to be determined, and German lawmakers are currently debating the need for new legislation. It has nonetheless struck many as bizarre that Germany, after decades spent memorializing the Holocaust, would consider banning a critical Jewish rite.We should hesitate, however, to read the decision through the lens of anti-Semitism. For one, the case concerned the circumcision of a young Muslim boy. If religious prejudice was involved, it was more likely anti-Islamic than anti-Semitic. More profoundly, the ruling actually emerged from Germany’s sincere efforts to learn the lessons of the Holocaust and vow “never again.” Strange as it may seem, the court based its decision on principles of individual freedom and physical integrity that make sense only as products of Germany’s particular reckoning with its past, from the Nuremberg trials to the present.