Roundup: Historians' Take

Julian Zelizer: Can Obama Split the GOP?

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) -- When President Obama had his back to the wall after a month of bad economic news, he tried to change the national conversation by shifting attention toward the issue of immigration. Through a directive issued by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to stop deporting some young undocumented immigrants, the administration made one of its boldest moves in four years in this area of policy.In doing so, President Obama is clearly hoping to exploit the deep division that has existed within the GOP for decades on immigration reform.One faction of the party, with strong support from the business community, has pushed for Congress to liberalize immigration policy on the basis that this will bring great economic benefit as well as positive electoral rewards for the party in states such as Texas.The other faction, less hospitable to reform, has a strong nativist tilt and seeks much more stringent laws to crack down on illegal immigration and even curb the flow of legal newcomers....

Jonathan Zimmerman: 'Elite' Supreme Court Sides with Science and Juveniles

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches 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).Did the Supreme Court embrace an “elite vision” on Monday when it struck down state laws mandating life imprisonment for juvenile murderers?That’s what Justice Samuel Alito said, in an angry dissent from the bench. By invalidating such laws, Mr. Alito fumed, the court’s 5-4 majority assumed that it knew better than the 28 state legislatures that have authorized mandatory life sentences without the possibility of parole for killers younger than 18.But the court’s majority really does know better. And there’s a simple reason for that: It relied on science – in particular, the science of adolescent brain development....

Sean Wilentz: Why Lyndon Johnson Should Matter, Not Least to Barack Obama.

Sean Wilentz is a contributing editor at The New Republic, and the author of Bob Dylan in America (Doubleday). This excerpt is drawn from a longer review of Robert Caro's Passage to Power....BARACK OBAMA came to the presidency with enormous gifts but only four years of indifferent government experience in Washington, which partly accounted for his perception of recent political history and the crisis he faced, above all his notion of the Republican Party. Since the departure of Ronald Reagan, the Republicans on Capitol Hill, and especially the House, had lurched fitfully further to the right, their caucus centered in the white conservative South that Johnson and the Democrats had abandoned when they fought for civil rights and which Goldwater first gathered up for the GOP. Like the conservative counter-revolution of 1938 and after, this had been the overriding reality of congressional politics after 1994.

Fouad Ajami: What to Expect From the Muslim Brotherhood

Fouad Ajami is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the author most recently of The Syrian Rebellion, just published by Hoover Press. With the triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood's candidate in the presidential election, Egyptian history can be said to have closed a circle. This "Second Republic" marks a return to that tumultuous time, six decades ago, when the military officers overthrew the monarchy in 1952 and announced the birth of a new order. Two forces inherited the wreckage of the Egyptian monarchy: the officer corps and the Muslim Brotherhood. For a fleeting moment, the Brothers thought the men in uniform were their allies. They dubbed the military seizure "the blessed movement." But the coup makers had a different script in mind. The Muslim Brotherhood would come in for decades of repression. Mohammed Morsi, the president-elect set to be handed the reins of power on June 30, has done time in prison and is now poised to be his country's first civilian president. Ever since its founding in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood yearned for power as it ran afoul of the authoritarian state.

Martin Kramer: Worst-Case Scenario Comes True

Martin Kramer is Senior Fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, and President-designate of Shalem College (in formation). He is also the Wexler-Fromer Fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.Did I predict the “Arab Spring”?The short answer is “no.” I didn’t foresee that the self-immolation of a Tunisian fruit vendor would set off a wave of popular unrest that would bring down the rulers of Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, plunge Syria deep into civil conflict, and roil Bahrain.The long answer is a bit more interesting....

Elliott Young: Unrealized Dreams for Immigrants

Elliott Young teaches history at Lewis & Clark CollegeWhen President Obama announced that he would stop enforcing deportation proceedings for a select class of young immigrants, pro-immigration advocates cheered. While this is welcome news to the about one million immigrants whom the executive order affects, it is also a Faustian bargain that serves to authorize the continued harassment and deportation of ten million other immigrants who do not qualify for special treatment.      This is not the first time that a president has sought through executive decree to soften the harshness of immigration restrictions. In 1905, in the wake of a boycott on American goods started by Chinese merchants in Shanghai, President Theodore Roosevelt also ordered immigration authorities to relax their enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Roosevelt directed immigration officers not to subject merchants and students, who were exempt from Chinese exclusion, to humiliating interrogations and invasive inspections that required measuring of their body parts. Furthermore, he ordered officers not to arrest Chinese in the interior of the country who were suspected of coming in illegally.

Timothy Stanley: Why Should the Press Be Polite to Presidents?

(CNN) -- The comedian Rodney Dangerfield used to complain, "I don't get no respect." Sometimes, it feels like those words ought to be printed on the presidential seal.Last week, Barack Obama was interrupted by Daily Caller journalist Neil Munro while making a statement on immigration. Munro shouted questions at him until the president was forced to stop and demand silence. Many media outlets, particularly those with a liberal bent, were outraged....

Stephanie Coontz: Why is 'Having It All' Just a Women's Issue?

Stephanie Coontz teaches history and family studies at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and co-chairs the Council on Contemporary Families. Her most recent book is "A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s."(CNN) -- The July/August cover story of the Atlantic, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All" by Anne-Marie Slaughter, has ignited a firestorm....Slaughter's article contains a powerful critique of the insanely rigid workplace culture that produces higher levels of career-family conflict among Americans -- among men and women -- than among any of our Western European counterparts, without measurably increasing our productivity or gross national product. And she makes sensible suggestions about how to reorganize workplaces and individual career paths to lessen that conflict....

Colin Woodard: Running for President on a Divided Continent

Colin Woodard is a longtime Chronicle correspondent and a state- and national-affairs writer at the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram, in Portland. His most recent book is American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (Viking).During the recent presidential primaries, we heard a great deal, as we do every election year, about the founding fathers, and how their ideals, intents, and religious views were allegedly reflected in the policies and life stories of various candidates and opposed by their dastardly, un-American rivals. In a politically polarized America, it was—and still is—argued, we must consult the founders' writings, probe their biographies, contact them with our Ouija boards if need be to determine what they would have done if confronted with, say, a defense-allocation bill or a proposal to regulate traders of derivatives. If we only did so, we would find our lost sense of common purpose, restore our civic virtue, and return the union to unity.But those arguments are frustrated by the simple fact that the men who came together to confront a common enemy in 1775 and to craft an enduring alliance in the late 1780s were not our country's founders, but rather the founders' great- or great-great-, or great-great-great-great-grandchildren.

Maurice Jackson: Pricing the Soul Out of Washington, D.C.

Maurice Jackson is an associate professor of history and African-American studies at Georgetown University and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars. He is working on a book about African-Americans and Washington, D.C.Washington, D.C., the marble city begun by slave labor in the 1790s, is again in the news. As charges of campaign violations swirl around Mayor Vincent Gray, and the chairman of the city council and another member resign after admitting financial misdeeds, it is often forgotten that Washington once stood as a "city on a hill" to the nation's African-Americans. Just as the Puritan John Winthrop held the biblical image up as the ideal for Boston, so the District has long served as a beacon to blacks seeking freedom—from slavery, Jim Crow, and racism.But for generations of blacks born and raised in D.C. and others who migrated to the city, the hill has become steeper to climb and easier to fall off. Corruption, crime, unemployment, the lack of affordable housing, and similar urban woes are just part of the problem. How we deal with them is another matter. Will Washington lose its identity in the process?

Frank H. Wu: Why Vincent Chin Matters

Frank H. Wu, chancellor and dean of the Hastings College of the Law, University of California, is the author of “Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White.” He is writing a book on the Vincent Chin case.ON June 23, 1982, in Detroit, a young man named Vincent Chin died. Four nights earlier, he had been enjoying his bachelor party with friends at a local bar when they were accosted by two white men, who blamed them for the success of Japan’s auto industry. “It’s because of you we’re out of work,” they were said to have shouted, adding a word that can’t be printed here. The men bludgeoned Mr. Chin, 27, with a baseball bat until his head cracked open.The men — a Chrysler plant supervisor named Ronald Ebens and his stepson, Michael Nitz — never denied the acts, but they insisted that the matter was simply a bar brawl that had ended badly for one of the parties. In an agreement with prosecutors, they pleaded to manslaughter (down from second-degree murder) and were sentenced to three years of probation and fined $3,000.

Mark N. Katz: Why Russia Won’t Play Ball on Iran

Mark N. Katz is a professor of government and politics at George Mason University, and is the author of Leaving without Losing: The War on Terror after Iraq and Afghanistan (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).The Obama Administration has sought to enlist Moscow in the effort to increase pressure on Iran to cooperate with the international community and verifiably renounce any ambitions it might have to acquire nuclear weapons. But while Russia would undoubtedly prefer a non-nuclear to a nuclear Iran, joining the U.S. and its allies in more forcefully sanctioning Iran for not cooperating on this matter involves risks for Moscow that it doesn’t wish to incur. 

Kelly J. Baker: A Kinder, Gentler Ku Klux Klan?

Kelly J. Baker is a lecturer in religious studies at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and the author of the book Gospel According to the Klan. She blogs at www.kellyjbaker.com.Last week, a local chapter of the International Keystone Knights of Ku Klux Klan proposed adopting one-mile stretch of highway in north Georgia. The possibility of Klan members picking up roadside litter and getting credit on a highway sign provoked as much confusion as outrage. One reporter asked, "Is the latest effort to adopt a highway an introduction of a new era of a kinder, gentler Klan or merely an effort to gain attention?"...

David M. Halperin: Style and the Meaning of Gay Culture

David M. Halperin, a professor of the history and theory of sexuality at the University of Michigan, is the author of the forthcoming book “How to Be Gay.”IT’S gay pride month again, and that means it’s time for the straight media to deliver its annual state-of-the-gay report....Back in the Bad Old Days, or so the story goes, there was such a thing as an edgy, subversive gay male culture. But it was an artifact of homophobia. Older gay men may still thrill to torch songs, show tunes, classic Hollywood melodramas and Lalique; they may still spend hours arranging the furniture just so.But all that foofy stuff looks irrelevant to modern gay men, who don’t see themselves as belonging to a separate culture, let alone such a queeny one. For today’s gay men, life is composed of PTA meetings, church socials and Nascar races.

Victor Davis Hanson: Greece Alone and Broke — Again

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author most recently of The End of Sparta. The indecisive Greek elections could be summed up in two general themes: Greeks want to stay in, and expect help from, the euro zone. But they still do not want to take the medicine necessary to stop borrowing billions of euros from northern Europeans, who want a radical reform of the Greek tax code, deregulation of the labor market, fiscal discipline, massive cuts in bureaucracy, and greater transparency — all unlikely given Greece’s history and contemporary culture. So what lies in the future for Greece as it is slowly eased out of the euro zone and its civilization goes into reverse? In theory, with the ability to devalue the drachma and be freed of enormous debts, the Greeks could return to business as it was practiced in the 1970s. In those sleepy days before the massive transfers of northern European money, I lived in a Greece that was a Balkan backwater without advanced surgery, autobahns, suspension bridges, sleek subways, or a modern airport.

Mark N. Katz: Why Putin Can't Be Forced to Deal

Mark N. Katz is a professor of government and politics at George Mason University. He is the author of "Leaving Without Losing: The War on Terror After Iraq and Afghanistan" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). Follow his blog.(CNN) -- At the Group of 20 summit in Mexico, President Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin had their first face-to-face meeting since Putin resumed the Russian presidency in May. The joint statement they issued afterward indicated several issues (including Iran and Syria) that the two sides would seek to cooperate on, but it did not announce any significant agreements to do so.More telling were the visual images when the two presidents were together; Obama appeared to be doing his best to project an image of warmth and friendliness, while Putin was stiff and reserved, as he usually is with other world leaders. It appeared that Obama was earnestly seeking to befriend Putin, but Putin was not reciprocating.

Niall Ferguson: China Should Intervene in Syria, Not America

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 Arab Spring has plunged Syria into a bloody civil war. Now, with allegations flying that the Russians are supplying helicopters to the odious regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, a familiar debate is underway. Should we intervene? There can be no morally credible argument against intervention—by someone. Leaving Syria to descend into the kind of sectarian violence that devastated neighboring Lebanon in the 1980s would condemn hundreds of thousands to premature, violent death. Syria is five times the size of Lebanon. The risks of leaving it to degenerate into a failed state are surely higher than the risks of intervention. But why should it be the United States that once again attempts to play the part of global cop? Since the early 1970s, the Middle East has absorbed a disproportionate share of American resources. Particularly since 9/11, it has consumed the time of presidents like no other region of the world.

Victor Davis Hanson: Students are the New American Helots

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.Ancient Sparta turned its conquered neighbors into indentured serfs — half free, half slave. The resulting Helot underclass produced the food of the Spartan state, freeing Sparta’s elite males to train for war and the duties of citizenship.Over the last few decades, we’ve created our modern version of these Helots — millions of indebted young Americans with little prospect of finding permanent well-paying work, servicing their enormous college debts, or reaping commensurate financial returns on their costly educations.

Neve Gordon: South Africa: What's in a Label?

Neve Gordon is the author of Israel's Occupation and can be reached through his website.Be'er-Sheva, Israel - South Africa's recent demand that products originating in Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and Golan Heights remove the label "Made in Israel" is extremely significant - much more so than the European Union's decision to deny these products preferential status and subject them to customs duty.Indeed, in 2001, the European Commission decided to implement the rules of origin clause in its Association Agreement with Israel, noting that "places brought under Israeli administration since 1967... are not entitled to benefit from the preferential treatment under the Agreements". The EU decision aimed to correct an alleged case of massive fraud involving the regulations on rules of origin, which appear in the trade agreement. Consequently, only goods produced inside the internationally recognised borders of Israel would be eligible for a reduced tariff rate, while those produced outside would pay customs' duty as required by law....

Robert Mann: Is the Washington Post Whitewashing Criticism of Its Watergate Coverage?

Robert Mann holds the Manship Chair at the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University and is director of the school’s Reilly Center for Media & Public AffairsWhen it comes to the Watergate scandal, the Washington Post has some explaining to do.Why is the paper ignoring some very serious questions about the reporting methods of its two most famous former reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (W/B)?As you may have read, the 40th anniversary of the Watergate break-in is this Sunday, June 17, and there is already much in the press about the scandal and its meaning for American politics and journalism.At LSU, the Manship School of Mass Communication and the Reilly Center for Media & Public Affairs got ahead of the curve on Watergate. We sponsored one of the first retrospectives on the scandal on April 23.