Roundup: Historians' Take

Michael Seeley: What Are Wars Good For Anymore? Not for Plunder, At Least.

Michael Seeley is a senior at Augustana College in South Dakota and was co-recipient of a Peace Prize Forum scholarship in 2011.Nearly two centuries ago, on October 23, 1812, France momentarily fell into the hands of a lunatic, General Claude François de Malet. Ironically, madman Malet’s plans for France were more attuned to the emerging economic realities of the day than were those of the emperor that he hoped to depose, Napoleon Bonaparte.

Roger Peace: A Rotten Cop on the Beat

Roger Peace, an adjunct professor of history at Tallahassee Community College, is the author of A Call to Conscience: The Anti-Contra War Campaign (University of Massachusetts Press, 2012). Distributed via OtherWords (OtherWords.org)In mid-July, relatives of three U.S. citizens killed by drone strikes in Yemen filed a wrongful death lawsuit against top security officials. Their complaint charges that the lethal strikes "violated fundamental rights afforded to all U.S. citizens, including the right not to be deprived of life without due process of law."This raises an important question: When one country polices the world, who polices the police?In the aftermath of World War II, America's leaders forged an internationalist foreign policy in defiance of popular pressure to return to "isolationism," or conventional national defense. This internationalism had two tracks. One was rooted in U.S. expansionist and interventionist history and took the form of a "world policeman" role against communism. The other was based on the principle of collective security associated with the recently established United Nations.

Nick Turse: Washington Puts Its Money on Proxy War

Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com. An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and regularly at TomDispatch. He is the author/editor of several books, including the recently published Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 (with Tom Engelhardt).

Colin Read: History of Algorithmic Trading Shows Promise and Perils

Colin Read is chairman of the finance department at the State University of New York, Plattsburgh. He is the author of the “Great Minds in Finance” series and other finance titles published by Palgrave MacMillan.When machines replace seasoned traders and market makers, mistakes can occur at dizzying speed.It happened with the notorious “flash crash” on May 6, 2010, and again on Aug. 1 this year, when software at Knight Capital Group Inc. (KCG) malfunctioned, triggering unintended trades and leading to a $440 million loss for the company.Ironically, Knight Capital Group was originally known as a market maker, with trading specialists who oversaw trades on each side of a security to ensure the market functioned in an orderly and efficient manner. The company’s troubles once again show the extent to which Wall Street now relies on algorithmic programs to execute its trades, for better or worse.Although many in the financial world have expressed concerns that a new era of automated finance is destabilizing the markets, algorithmic trading isn’t new -- it’s almost as old as computers themselves....

Harvey J. Kaye: Congressman Issa Goes After the Greatest Generation -- He Just Couldn't Hold It In

Harvey J. Kaye is the Ben and Joyce Rosenberg Professor of Democracy and Justice Studies and Director of the Center for History and Social Change at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.Republicans are masters in the art of denying or suppressing the truth. And yet every so often one of them blurts it out -- often in a perverse fashion, but dangerously so, nonetheless. Last week, GOP Congressman Darrell Issa of California, apparently incapable of holding it in, did just that.According to the Federal Times Issa told a conference of the Association of Government Accountants in San Diego that:"The Greatest Generation created many of what the private sector would call Ponzi schemes. They created Social Security, they created Medicare on their watch, [they] created Medicaid ... All of that without resources or funding." Indeed, he continued, "A generation that was doing many things right -- coming out of World War II -- also planted the seeds for all the problems we have today."

Andrew Roberts: It's August ... Prepare for Cataclysm

Mr. Roberts, a historian, is author most recently of The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War (Harper, 2011). What is it about the month of August? Why should we still persist in regarding it as a quiet time—with Congress in recess, business slowed down, and people on holiday—when so many world-historical events take place in this month? You can ignore the Ides of March, but history shows that it's in the dog days of August that great events take place. Ever since the Roman Senate proclaimed in A.D. 8 that the eighth month of every year be named after the Emperor Augustus (63 B.C.-A.D. 14), nephew and adopted heir of Julius Caesar, the month has seen a disproportionate share of cataclysmic events. In the last century alone, World War I broke out on Aug. 4, 1914, and Adolf Hitler ordered the invasion of Poland on the night of Aug. 31, 1939. World War II was only won with the dropping of two atomic bombs in August 1945. Other 20th-century conflicts sparked in August: the Vietnam War, with the Gulf of Tonkin incident of August 1964; the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968; and the Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990...

Niall Ferguson: Blackout Just the Beginning in India

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. The British—slightly less than a thousand of them—used to govern India. Without air-conditioning. Conan O’Brien was not the only one who watched the London Olympic opening ceremonies with amazement. "Hard to believe my ancestors were conquered by theirs," he tweeted. Every Indian watching must have been thinking the very same. Until their TVs went dark. The recent power outage in India interested me more than the Olympics. (I had a very British reaction to the opening ceremonies: I found them excruciatingly embarrassing.) The Indian blackout was surely the biggest electricity failure in history, affecting a staggering 640 million people.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Voting 'Reform' Across the Ages

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).Once upon a time, American elections were rife with corruption. Party bosses bought votes with strong drink and cold cash, or stuffed ballot boxes with bogus names. Then along came the good-government reformers who cleaned up our democracy with new election laws and regulations.That's the story we all learned in high school. And it's true, up to a point. But it leaves out a crucial fact: Those measures also sought to bar certain people from the polls. The goal of election reform wasn't simply a clean vote; it was also to keep out the "wrong" kind of voter.Pennsylvania's voter-ID law, which is being challenged in state court, follows this pattern. On its face, it seems neutral and unimpeachable: Who could object to safeguards against fraud? But in practice, as opponents told the court last week, it would make it harder for poor people and minorities to vote....

Linda Heywood and John Thornton: Obama Slave-Ancestry Report Misses Mark

Linda Heywood, Ph.D., and John Thornton, Ph.D., are professors of history and African-American studies at Boston University.(The Root) -- Monday's New York Times article on President Obama's roots in Southern slavery through his mother has reopened the contention that the first Africans brought to Virginia were indentured servants and not slaves. While some observers, such as writer Alondra Nelson, may contend that genealogy studies prove little beyond how closely all members of the human family are related, they are invaluable for understanding the greater past.Yesterday's news was also about real historical events and the ability to bring the past alive. There was a real John Punch, real laws that defined his status in a racializing America and real descendants who made certain decisions in the evolving marketplace of American race relations. These past decisions have major implications about the way that contemporary Americans view themselves and fellow Americans.

Jared Diamond: Romney Hasn’t Done His Homework

Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, is the author of the forthcoming book “The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?”MITT ROMNEY’S latest controversial remark, about the role of culture in explaining why some countries are rich and powerful while others are poor and weak, has attracted much comment. I was especially interested in his remark because he misrepresented my views and, in contrasting them with another scholar’s arguments, oversimplified the issue.It is not true that my book “Guns, Germs and Steel,” as Mr. Romney described it in a speech in Jerusalem, “basically says the physical characteristics of the land account for the differences in the success of the people that live there. There is iron ore on the land and so forth.”

Ruth Rosen: Who said “We could have it all?”

#next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; } For over thirty years, the American media have repeatedly pronounced the death of the women’s movement and blamed feminism for women’s failure  to “have it all.“  But none of this is true. The movement has spread around the globe and early radical feminists wanted to change the world, not just seek individual self-fulfillment.

Fouad Ajami: Islam, Democracy and the Long View of History

Mr. Ajami is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the author most recently of The Syrian Rebellion, just out by Hoover Press.

Daniel Martin Varisco: Romney up against the wall

The gaffes of Republican nominee Mitt Romney have put him up against the wall several times, including the Wall Street Journal op-ed pages. But his latest “stump” in Israel, with the obligatory picture of Romney at the Wailing Wall, has even brought out a critique from the New York Times editorial page. Romney is visiting Israel and veering hard to the right, even outdoing the neocons that fueled our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Here is what the editorial says, followed by my own comments. Mr. Romney Stumps in Israel Mitt Romney made a point of insisting that he would adhere to an unwritten rule and often violated rule about candidates not criticizing each other or contradicting American foreign policy on foreign soil. About the only effort he made to keep that promise during his stop in Israel was to avoid mentioning President Obama by name.

Victor Davis Hanson: Iraqi Irony ... History Takes Times To Write

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author most recently of The End of Sparta.

Timothy Messer-Kruse: A Haymarket Revisionary

Timothy Messer-Kruse, who is a professor and chair of the ethnic studies department at Ohio’s Bowling Green State University, says he has “always been politically active and very close to progressive causes.” But his recent work has raised serious doubts about one of the Left’s most precious myths. Last year, he published The Trial of the Haymarket Anarchists: Terrorism and Justice in the Gilded Age, which he had been working on for 10 years, and his newest book, The Haymarket Conspiracy: Transatlantic Anarchist Networks, comes out in August. Together, the two books offer a radically different interpretation of the Haymarket anarchists who were charged in the May 4, 1886, bombing of a demonstration, which resulted in the deaths of at least seven police and four civilians. For decades historians have portrayed the eight convicted anarchists, four of whom were hanged by the state of Illinois, as innocent martyrs, unjustly tried.Messer-Kruse disagrees. He maintains that the available evidence indicates the anarchists were responsible for the bombing. His work raises fascinating questions about the way the past is romanticized, the radicalizing nature of Gilded Age poverty and why the United States hasn’t provided fertile ground to revolutionary vanguardism.

Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse: U.S. Africa Command Debates TomDispatch

Tom Engelhardt created and runs the Tomdispatch.com website, a project of The Nation Institute where he is a Fellow. Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com and the winner of a 2009 Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction as well as a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. On July 12th, TomDispatch posted the latest piece in Nick Turse’s “changing face of empire" series: “Obama’s Scramble for Africa.” It laid out in some detail the way in which the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) has, in recent years, spread its influence across that continent, establishing bases and outposts, sending in special operations forces and drones, funding proxy forces on the continent, and so on. As last week ended, TomDispatch received a “letter to the editor” from Colonel Tom Davis, director of the U.S. Africa Command Office of Public Affairs, disputing in some detail a number of Turse’s points. (Colonel Davis also sent a copy of the letter to the Nation Institute, which supports this website.)

Andrew Seth Meyer: Syria is *Not* Iraq

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.In yesterday's New York Times, Thomas Friedman offered a column entitled "Syria is Iraq." In it, he notes that "Syria is Iraq’s twin — a multisectarian, minority-ruled dictatorship that was held together by an iron fist under Baathist ideology." He therefore predicts that a "decent outcome" is unlikely in Syria in the absence of "a well-armed external midwife, whom everyone on the ground both fears and trusts to manage the transition." In other words, Syria is doomed to perpetual anarchy and civil war, because unlike Iraq, Syria will not enjoy the benefits of being invaded by the United States.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Olympics Have No Excuse for Ignoring the Munich Massacre

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).In 2002, during the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Mitt Romney watched proudly as Americans hoisted a tattered U.S. flag salvaged from the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. And nobody accused Romney or his Olympic committee of "politicizing" the games.I thought of Salt Lake City when I read about the campaign to commemorate the 11 Israeli athletes murdered by terrorists at the Games in Munich 40 years ago. A petition demanding a moment of silence at this summer's Olympics in London, authored by a widow of one of the slain athletes, has garnered more than 100,000 signatures. Meanwhile, Israeli officials and Jewish organizations around the world have stepped up pressure on the International Olympic Committee for such recognition at the Games, which open Friday.But the IOC says that would be too "political." One member said a moment of silence for Israeli victims "may harm the unity of the Olympics" and "could cause some countries to boycott the games."...

Peter Dreier: The Radical Dissent of Helen Keller

The bronze statue of Helen Keller that sits in the U.S. Capitol shows the blind girl standing at a water pump. It depicts the moment in 1887 when her teacher, Anne Sullivan, spelled “W-A-T-E-R” into one of her 7-year-old pupil's hands while water streamed into the other. This was Keller’s awakening, when she made the connection between the word Sullivan spelled and the tangible substance splashing from the pump, whispering “wah-wah,”—her way of saying “water.” This scene, made famous in the play and film “The Miracle Worker,” has long defined Keller in the public mind as a symbol of courage in the face of overwhelming odds.   Less well known (but no less inspiring) is the fact that Keller, who was born in 1880 and died in 1968, was a lifelong radical who participated in the great movements for social justice of her time. In her investigations into the causes of blindness, she discovered that poor people were more likely than the rich to be blind, and soon connected the mistreatment of the blind to the oppression of workers, women, and other groups, leading her to embrace socialism, feminism, and pacifism....Women's Suffrage, Civil Rights, and War

Elizabeth Gritter: Black Voting Power Rose Up in Memphis

Elizabeth Gritter, Ph.D., teaches U.S. history at Middle Tennessee State University, and her scholarship focuses on civil rights and black political efforts in Memphis.Fifty-three years ago, four black men in Memphis ran for public office in a campaign that would have a transformative effect on the city and the state. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at a rally on their behalf, and their bid attracted local, state and national media attention, including from The Tennessean.The men ran on the “Volunteer Ticket,” so named because of Tennessee’s nickname as the “Volunteer State.” Benjamin L. Hooks, who later became executive secretary of the NAACP, ran for juvenile court judge, and Russell B. Sugarmon Jr., who later became a judge, ran for public works commissioner. Two ministers ran for the school board.Unlike most black Southerners, black Memphians could vote, and local leader Maxine Smith spearheaded voter registration efforts on behalf of the city’s NAACP branch in the late 1950s. In Memphis, no African-American had been elected to public office in modern times. Local black women and men saw the Volunteer Ticket as not only a political campaign but a civil-rights effort. Undeterred by white opposition, they mobilized for the office seekers through neighborhood organizations, rallies and get-out-the-vote campaigns....