Roundup: Historians' Take

Alexandra M. Lord: Writing for History Buffs

Alexandra M. Lord is a public historian for a government agency. In her spare time, she runs both Beyond Academe, a Web site to assist historians in leaving academe, and, since April, the Ultimate History Project, a Web site that promotes historical scholarship for a general audience.A few years ago, I was invited to speak at an event sponsored by a historic site. At the organizer's request, I submitted a brief biography of my accomplishments, listed in typical academic style.When I checked into the hotel, the clerk handed me a copy of the program. Once ensconced in my hotel room, I eagerly read the bios of the other speakers—and felt the blood drain from my face. My co-presenters were leading practitioners of public history. None of them had a Ph.D.—a fact I had noticed somewhat smugly when I had been asked to speak—but they had written books, curated exhibits seen by tens of thousands of visitors, and been invited by foreign governments to assist in major public-history projects.Next to their bios, my own—in which I had blithely listed fellowships, obscure prizes, and an academic monograph—looked out of touch. That night, at dinner, my co-presenters teased me about how I, a Ph.D., was obviously slumming by participating in the event. But in reality, I felt hopelessly outclassed....

Lisa Levenstein: Sorry, But Women Have Misunderstood Feminism

Lisa Levenstein is an associate professor of history at UNCG....Anne-Marie Slaughter feared that she sacrificed her feminist credentials by admitting that she left her high-ranking job at the State Department so she could spend more time with her family.The problem with this debate is that it rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of feminist history.The women’s movement never promised mothers they could “have it all.”...Rather, feminists in the 1970s demanded a range of social supports to enable women who wanted to hold full-time employment to successfully negotiate the competing demands of their jobs and families. Feminists also argued that women’s labor in the home was “real work” and deserving of respect and financial compensation....

Harvey J. Kaye: Re-Re-elect FDR! Make 2012 the New 1936!

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.It's time we elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt to a fifth term as president. Specifically, we need to re-re-elect the Roosevelt of 1936.Accepting his party's nomination that June for a second term, Franklin Roosevelt delivered the most radical speech ever given by an American president. Comparing the corporate elite of the 1930s to the royalists of 1776, he told the 100,000 people gathered at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia and the millions of Americans listening on the radio, "These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power." Which, he confessed, was exactly what he and the party he led intended to do....

William E. Forbath: Workingman’s Constitution

William E. Forbath is a professor of law and history at the University of Texas.WORK and opportunity, poverty and dependency, material security and insecurity: for generations of reformers, the constitutional importance of these subjects was self-evident. Laissez-faire government, unchecked corporate power and the deprivations and inequalities they bred weren’t just bad public policy — they were constitutional infirmities. But liberals have largely forgotten how to think, talk and fight along these lines.And they’ve done so at the wrong time. The Supreme Court is again putting up constitutional barriers against laws to redress want and inequity. While it handed liberals a victory on the Affordable Care Act, it also gave a boost to conservatives to revive the old laissez-faire Constitution in the polity and courts: new doctrine and dictums for their attack on the welfare and regulatory state.

Max Boot: America's 'Pacific Pivot' Craze

Max Boot, a contributing editor to Opinion, is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of the forthcoming Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present.Is there any organization outside of Hollywood more prey to intellectual fads than the Department of Defense? A decade ago the buzzword around the Pentagon was "transformation." Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld wanted to force radical change to take advantage of information technology. So the individual services took to justifying every program, even hulking tanks and massive aircraft carriers, as "transformational." Then, as the armed forces became more deeply embroiled in Iraq and Afghanistan, the buzzword became counterinsurgency, or "COIN." The Army and Marine Corps retooled themselves to fight insurgents. The Navy and Air Force felt left behind, so they took to rebranding everything they did as COIN-related. I remember a fatuous briefing from an Air Force general in Afghanistan who solemnly informed me that his MPs were doing COIN around their own air base, which just happened to be located in one of the most insurgent-free areas of the entire country. Now the buzzword du jour is "Pacific," as in "Pacific pivot."..

Ronald Radosh: Mitt Romney’s Big Problem — and Hence Ours

Ronald Radosh is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at The Hudson Institute, and is the author or co-author of 14 books, including The Rosenberg File (1983 and 1997);  Commies: A Journey through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left (2001) Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War (2001); Divided They Fell: The Demise of the Democratic Party (1996) and Red Star Over Hollywood:The Film Colony’s Long Romance with the Left (2006).Mitt Romney has a big problem, and it is one that he shares with many conservatives and Republicans who seem to believe that given the horrendous nature of Obama’s policies, he has to do very little to win. Unfortunately, a Romney victory in November is anything but a sure thing.The polls right now show a very close race. And as most observers have noted, the outcome will be decided by a few voters in the swing states that Romney must conquer if he is to overtake the president. The latest Real Clear Politics compendium of all the polls shows Obama with a 3.5% lead in the general election,  47.6% for Obama compared to 44.1% for Romney.

Robert G. Rabil: Syria and the Power of Sectarian Strife

Robert G. Rabil served as a chief of emergency for the Red Cross in Lebanon during the country's civil war. He is associate professor of political science and the LLS Distinguished Professor of Current Events at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of Syria, United States and The War on Terror in the Middle East and most recently Religion, National Identity and Confessional Politics in Lebanon: The Challenge of Islamism.Major world powers, meeting in Geneva over the weekend in an effort to strike a meaningful pose on the ongoing crisis in Syria, failed to do so. There was no consensus on calling for the removal of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad from power, and the ultimate agreement favoring a political transition lacked any real meaning. Russia and China, as expected, blocked the other seven nations from issuing a statement calling for Assad’s removal. Meanwhile, Syria experienced a particularly bloody spurt of violence, with more than 100 people killed.

Victor Davis Hanson: The Obama Foreign Policy

NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author most recently of The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom.The 2012 election will hinge on the economy, not on U.S. foreign policy, unless there is a major overseas crisis — an Israeli attack on Iran, an Iranian detonation of a nuclear weapon, a Middle East war, a North Korean attack, or something of that sort. That said, there is much to lament in the current administration’s foreign policy. But Mitt Romney should be careful in critiquing the status quo, given that it is full of paradoxes and contradictions.

Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein: Home-Care Workers Aren’t Just ‘Companions’

Eileen Boris, a professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Jennifer Klein, a professor of history at Yale, are the authors of “Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State.”NOT long after announcing his candidacy in 2007, Barack Obama spent a day working alongside Pauline Beck, a home health care aide in Oakland, Calif. Together, they cooked breakfast and lunch, cleaned house and did the laundry. Last December, the president mentioned his day with Ms. Beck when he proposed placing most home-care employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act, from which many of them have long been excluded.

James Grossman and Allen Mikaelian: Politifact and Historical Thinking: Disenfranchisement, Then and Now

James Grossman is executive director of the American Historical Association. Allen Mikaelian is a PhD student at American University.

Istvan Deak: Where’s Charlemagne When We Need Him?

Istvan Deak is an emeritus professor of history at Columbia and the author of “Beyond Nationalism” and “Essays on Hitler’s Europe.”WRITING some 50 years ago, Archduke Otto Hapsburg, the last pretender to the crowns of Austria and Hungary, warned that economic cooperation alone would not satisfy the peoples of Europe and that European unification could not succeed unless it was imbued with an abstract principle. Only something as mystical, he wrote, as the Holy Roman Empire could give people hope, a sense of religious renewal and combat the pernicious effects of local interest, chauvinism, xenophobia and racism.Today’s European crisis indeed shows that great political institutions cannot be constituted solely on a rational basis or through the bureaucracy and incrementalism of Brussels. The true purpose of the European Union is to bring about peace, prosperity and equality among the diverse regions and groups. Peace has indeed prevailed on most of the Continent, but in the last few years, with prosperity endangered, continued regional inequality has become even more blatant, while radical nationalism has raised its ugly head.

Pamela S. Karlan: No Respite for Liberals

Pamela S. Karlan is a professor of public interest law at Stanford and a co-author of “Keeping Faith With the Constitution.”ANTON CHEKHOV once remarked that “one must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.” In the term that ended last week, the Supreme Court reached a liberal outcome in cases involving President Obama’s health care law, Arizona’s draconian immigration statute and mandatory life sentences for juveniles. But the conservative majority also laid down a cache of weapons that future courts can use to attack many of the legislative achievements of the New Deal and the Great Society — including labor, environmental, civil rights and consumer protection laws — and to prevent new progressive legislation. Far from being a source of jubilation, the term may come back to haunt liberals....

Diane McWhorter: The Strange Career of Juan Crow

Diane McWhorter is the author of “Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution.”THE depth of my alienation from home hit me last January, when Alabama shut out Louisiana State for the college football championship. Even in the familiar afterglow of ’Bama’s second title in three years, I had to ask myself, what right did my state have to brag, about anything?The pride of the Crimson Tide fan is just the relatively fun side of the state’s reason-blind tribalism, the same hard-wiring that produced its other recent superlative, the “toughest in the nation” immigration law that made criminal suspects of an entire class of human beings — and turned those who tolerated their presence into felon accessories. Thanks to H.B. 56 (the “Beason-Hammon Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act”), passed a year ago by the state’s first Republican Legislature since Reconstruction, I am ashamed of being from Alabama.

Robert Zaretsky and John T. Scott: First Theater, Then Facebook

Robert Zaretsky, a professor of history at the Honors College, University of Houston, and John T. Scott, a professor of political science at the University of California, Davis, are the authors of “The Philosopher’s Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume and the Limits of Human Understanding.” The 300th birthday of Jean-Jacques Rousseau falls next week, and it is only proper to wish him a happy one. He had a few choice words to offer on the theme of happiness — the sort associated not with fleeting social pleasures but with “nothing external to ourselves, nothing if not ourselves and our own existence.”

Laurence Tribe: Chief Justice John Roberts’s Ruling Restores Faith in the Court’s Neutrality

Laurence Tribe is a University Professor and a Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard, has argued 35 cases in the Supreme Court, and taught constitutional law at Harvard both to President Obama and to Chief Justice Roberts....Chief Justice Roberts has done much to repair the enormous damage done to the Court’s reputation by Bush v. Gore and exacerbated by Citizens United. The Supreme Court's precedents clearly establish that the individual mandate, which doesn’t literally force anyone to purchase health insurance but simply adjusts the income-tax liability of those who don’t, can be sustained as an exercise of Congress's indisputably broad power to impose taxes. By faithfully applying those precedents—regardless of whatever personal distaste he may have had for the law he upheld—the chief justice helped restore Americans' confidence in the political neutrality of their highest court.

Gerard N. Magliocca: Chief Justice Roberts and the Rule of Law

Gerard N. Magliocca is the Samuel R. Rosen Professor at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law....Chief Justice Marshall famously found a way out of tough spot in 1803 by reading the Judiciary Act of 1789 in a peculiar way to deny William Marbury a remedy.  Following the law would have brought the Court into a terrible (and destructive) clash with President Jefferson. He lectured the President about not giving Marbury his commission, but did nothing to help....Chief Justice Roberts did something similar today. Following the law and reading the Affordable Care Act in the most natural way (failing to buy health insurance leads to a penalty, not a tax) would have forced him to strike down the individual mandate.  So he didn't do that.  Why? Because a 5-4 straight-line party decision invalidating part or all of the Act would have have brought the Court into a terrible clash with President Obama.  The Chief Justice gave a pretty speech about federalism, but ultimately he did nothing about it.  (Maybe I'm underestimating the importance of the Medicaid issue--I'm not sure.)...Related LinksHNN Hot Topics: Health Care Reform

Jill Lepore: Dred: Waiting for the Supreme Court

Jill Lepore is a staff writer for The New Yorker and is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University.The worst decision the U.S. Supreme Court ever issued was delivered on March 6, 1857, a Friday. Like the Court’s decision on the Affordable Health Care Act, the decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, regarding the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise, was anxiously anticipated—even if, by modern standards, everything about it was sluggish.

Julian Zelizer: Ten Flubs that Helped Sink Candidates

Julian Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of "Jimmy Carter" and the new book "Governing America."Princeton, New Jersey (CNN) -- Late last week, the campaigns of President Obama and Mitt Romney released Web videos highlighting the mistakes their rivals have made on the campaign trail.Obama's statement that "the private sector is doing fine" was the highlight for a Romney video, while one of the president's videos featured a remark by the former Massachusetts governor that the nation does not need more firefighters, teachers or police officers. We can expect the gaffe wars to continue, since they are a staple of presidential campaigns.Even though such statements are far from a fair indication of a candidate's record or stance on the issues, and often they are accurate statements taken out of context, they can be devastating to a campaign.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Sandusky and Sexual Abuse: From Apathy to Panic

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). He can be reached at jlzimm@aol.com.In the 1970s, I went to a summer camp whose director liked little boys. That's how we described pedophiles at the time, and all the kids figured he was one.Our parents did, too. I remember telling my folks that the director often visited our cabins at the end of swim period, because he knew we would be changing out of our bathing suits at that point. He also showed up at skinny-dips with a movie camera. True story.If you think that's astonishing, consider this: We thought it was funny. My parents laughed it off, and so did I. Later, after I became a counselor at the same camp, the director's proclivities remained a source of mirth. There was a playful, Keystone Kops aspect to it; we would station a kid on "director watch," for example, to warn everyone when he was on his way....Today, his inclination could have triggered a criminal investigation and a media blitz. The camp that we loved would almost certainly have closed down. And none of that would have been good for the kids who went there.

Gil Troy: A Short History of Presidential Politicking

Gil Troy, a professor of history at McGill University, is the editor, with Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Fred Israel, of “History of American Presidential Elections, 1789-2008,” fourth edition.In running for re-election, Barack Obama commands the most powerful democratic platform in world history and the greatest backdrop, the White House. A seemingly casual announcement in a TV interview can trigger a political earthquake, as Obama did when he endorsed gay marriage. But the president’s magnificent residence can also be what Harry Truman called the Great White Jail. Presidents are handcuffed by their power. Presidential statements can crash financial markets or start wars. The dignity of the presidency also inhibits, even in today’s brutal political environment. Obama’s campaign ad attacking Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital made some Democrats squirm as Republicans labeled the president “another gut-punching politician from Washington.”