Roundup: Historians' Take

David Greenberg: White House Christmas Cards: Signed, Sealed, Secular

David Greenberg is associate professor of history and of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University and the author of several works of political history, including "Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image."

Zaheer Ali: What About Poor White Kids?

Zaheer Ali is a doctoral student in history at Columbia University, researching 20th-century African-American history and religion.Recent discussions of poverty have revealed themselves to be, in fact, coded conversations about race. When Newt Gingrich talks about poor kids having no work ethic and Donald Trump agrees, they discuss poor kids interchangeably with black or inner-city youths. For years politicians, policy wonks and others have used "disadvantaged," "underprivileged," "inner-city," "urban" and "poor" as code words for black and brown people.This is not just a polite effort to avoid explicit mentions of race; it is an attempt to link African Americans to these characteristics, constructing a pathological view of black America. Poverty is, according to this view, a problem confined to the black community, the result of cultural pathologies. This view reached its ultimate expression last week with Gene Marks' much refuted "advice column" for poor black kids that was published in Forbes.

Louis Hyman: How Did World War II End the Great Depression?

Louis Hyman is an assistant professor of history at Cornell University and the author of "Debtor Nation: A History of America in Red Ink." It is commonly opined, in high school history classes and backyard barbeques, that government spending in the run-up to World War II "got us out of the Depression." This narrative conveys the sense that the end of the Great Depression was both accidental and necessarily belligerent.But exactly how World War II got us out of the Depression is generally ignored -- even though it provides a lesson at odds with the accepted interpretation.The war did provide a unique demand for entirely new industries. While airplanes had only been incidentally important in World War I, it was believed that they would be decisive in the 1940s. The problem, for the U.S. military, was that it had only a few planes, and fewer resources to construct them with. The government couldn't simply go to the market and buy some planes; it had to create the market. And it did.

Samuel J. Redman: The Right Way to Put Kids to Work

Samuel J. Redman is a historian in the Regional Oral History Office of the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.Library

Philip F. Rubio: Who Will Deliver the U.S. Postal Service from Destruction?

Philip F. Rubio is a retired postal worker and an assistant professor of history at North Carolina A&T State University. His second book, There's Always Work at the Post Office: African American Postal Workers and the Fight for Jobs, Justice and Equality (2010), won the 2011 Rita Lloyd Moroney Award for scholarship on the history of the American postal system.The unthinkable now threatens the US Postal Service: bankruptcy. With no relief forthcoming from Congress, the USPS hopes to save itself by planning the closing of about 3,700 post offices next year, along with 252 mail processing centers.Around 120,000 postal workers will lose their jobs with another 100,000 positions going unfilled. Saturday delivery will be gone, and first-class letter delivery will be slowed. Some historic postal buildings, including those with New Deal-era murals, have already been sold off.How could this venerable institution founded in 1775, which ran deficits for most of its existence as the "US Post Office Department", face a possible shutdown?

Kirk W. Johnson: In Iraq, Abandoning Our Friends

Kirk W. Johnson, a former reconstruction coordinator in Iraq, founded the List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies.ON the morning of May 6, 1783, Guy Carleton, the British commander charged with winding down the occupation of America, boarded the Perseverance and sailed up the Hudson River to meet George Washington and discuss the British withdrawal. Washington was furious to learn that Carleton had sent ships to Canada filled with Americans, including freed slaves, who had sided with Britain during the revolution.Britain knew these loyalists were seen as traitors and had no future in America. A Patriot using the pen name “Brutus” had warned in local papers: “Flee then while it is in your power” or face “the just vengeance of the collected citizens.” And so Britain honored its moral obligation to rescue them by sending hundreds of ships to the harbors of New York, Charleston and Savannah. As the historian Maya Jasanoff has recounted, approximately 30,000 were evacuated from New York to Canada within months.

Benny Morris: Israel's Endangered Left

Benny Morris is a professor of history in the Middle East Studies Department of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His most recent book is One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict (Yale University Press, 2009).According to many liberals and left wingers, Israel's democracy is under attack and under threat, with politicians currently promoting a series of laws that will curtail press freedom, left-wing NGO activities and the independence of the Supreme Court. One commentator, while agreeing that Israel is still a liberal democracy, defined what the right-wing coalition government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, is doing as "nibbling away" at the foundations of Israeli democracy.

Harold James: The British 'Non'

Harold James is Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University and Professor of History at the European University Institute, Florence. He is the author of The Creation and Destruction of Value: The Globalization Cycle.

Tony Fels: 'Occupy' Movement Must Move Toward the Center

Tony Fels is an associate professor of history at the University of San Francisco.The Occupy Wall Street movement has reached a tactical dead end. This much has been apparent for weeks. Remarkably, its fundamental message of seeking a more equitable distribution of wealth in America has not been lost, despite the extremism and eccentricity of the protests.The message clearly resonates with a majority of Americans, as many polls have indicated. The problem is not that the movement needs a sharper focus or a more detailed list of demands. Social movements do not have to make policy, much less write legislation. They simply need to articulate the strength of feeling in the population for a change of course.The more all-embracing its message, the better. But how can the latent sentiments that so many Americans feel today for a return to the principles of fairness and equality of opportunity be expressed in all their fullness?

Kevin M. Levin: Not Your Grandfather's Civil War Commemoration

Kevin M. Levin is a Civil War historian and history educator based in Boston.  He is the author of the forthcoming book, Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War as Murder and can be found online at Civil War Memory. Americans were exuberant in 1961 at the prospect of the upcoming Civil War centennial celebrations. For southerners, it was a chance to unfurl Confederate battle flags and ponder the character and heroism of such iconic figures as Robert E. Lee and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson. Families could watch as reenactors brought to life memorable battles such as First Manassas and Gettysburg, where lessons could be taught about the common bonds of bravery and patriotism that animated the men on both sides. There would be no enemies on the battlefields of the 1960s.

Scott Farris: It’s Almost-Presidents’ Day!

Scott Farris is the author of  “Almost President: The Men Who Lost the Race But Changed the Nation.”Eleven years ago today, Al Gore, for one important moment, was the most powerful man in our republic. The day before, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 vote, halted the partial recount of presidential ballots in Florida that Gore had requested. But that did not mean the 2000 presidential election was over. George W. Bush could not declare victory until Gore conceded defeat.This is our protocol in every presidential election, whether the results are clear on election night or weeks later. Our democratic political system works only when the losers give their consent to be governed by the winners. The first signal that this consent is granted comes with the losing candidate’s concession. At this moment, following a hard-fought election where passions have run high, the concession begins the process of reuniting an intensely divided country. Yet this vital service to the nation provided by losing presidential candidates is seldom appreciated....

Max Boot: Re: Gingrich and the “Invented People”

Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He received his M.A. in history from Yale University.Newt Gingrich has created a lot of waves by saying [the Palestinians are an invented people.]

Robert A. Slayton: When a Catholic Terrified the Heartland

Robert A. Slayton is a professor of history at Chapman University and the author of “Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith.” WITH Mitt Romney, a member of the Mormon church, quite possibly heading toward the Republican nomination, Americans may be faced with a presidential aspirant whose faith many find strange and troublesome. It would not be the first time that has happened, and during a previous campaign the response was pretty nasty.By any measure, Alfred E. Smith, the Democratic candidate against Herbert C. Hoover in 1928, had a formidable record. Growing up poor, Al (as everyone except The New York Times called him) left school at age 12 to go to work, at jobs that included a stint in the Fulton Fish Market.An outgoing lad with a fine speaking voice, he gravitated to street corner politics and on to Tammany Hall. Smith started as an unknown member of the New York State Assembly and rose to become speaker. In 1911, he led the investigation of the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire and sponsored the subsequent reform legislation that influenced fire codes nationwide.

David Wise: China’s Spies Are Catching Up

David Wise is a writer and historian of intelligence and espionage. His most recent book is “Tiger Trap: America’s Secret Spy War with China.”IN 1995, a middle-aged Chinese man walked into a C.I.A. station in Southeast Asia and offered up a trove of secret Chinese documents. Among them was a file containing the top-secret design of the American W-88 nuclear warhead that sits atop the missiles carried by Trident submarines.He told a story to the C.I.A. that was so bizarre it might just be true. He said that he worked in China’s nuclear program and had access to the archive where classified documents were stored. He went there after hours one night, scooped up hundreds of documents and stuffed them into a duffel bag, which he then tossed out a second-story window to evade security guards. Unfortunately, the bag broke and the papers scattered.Outside, he collected the files and stuffed them back into the torn bag. Although many of the documents were of interest for their intelligence content, it was the one about the W-88 that roiled American counterintelligence most because it contained highly classified details about a cutting-edge warhead design.

John Nichols: Bizarro History: The Rough Rider as Socialist Stooge

John Nichols is the author of The S Word: A Short History of an American Tradition: Socialism (Verso). The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author. What was Fox News to do when Barack Obama went to Kansas and delivered a speech that echoed the "New Nationalism" address Teddy Roosevelt used to renew and redefine his political prospects? Obama's oratory was not quite as radical as that of the former Republican president, but it was close enough is spirit and content to create concerns on the part of Fox commentators that the current president might be tapping into the rich vein of American progressive populism that actually moves the masses.So the network of economic royalism did the only thing it could.

Niall Ferguson: Great Britain Saves Itself by Rejecting the EU

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.To listen to some conservative commentary in London on Friday, you would think the British Prime Minister David Cameron just morphed into Winston Churchill, valiantly upholding England’s ancient liberties against German aggression. In fact, what happened in Europe this week was nothing so grandiose.David Cameron’s refusal to back a Franco-German plan to revise the European Union treaty was the culmination of a consistent Conservative policy, dating back to Margaret Thatcher and continued under John Major. That policy has been to resist any steps taken in the name of European integration that would in practice lead to Britain’s becoming a member of a federal Europe.

Niall Ferguson: Putin's Russia on Its Way to Global Irrelevance

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.Remember when we used to care about Russia? Twenty years ago, we held our breath as Communist hardliners sought to reassert their grip on the Soviet Union in a coup that failed. Today? Ach, just another messed-up petro-kleptocracy.The news last week was the poor showing of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party in the elections to the Russian Parliament, the Duma. Despite widespread electoral irregularities, the governing party won less than half the vote. State television, notoriously the propaganda arm of United Russia, showed results in which the total percentage of votes cast exceeded 128 percent. Russians used to excel at math. No longer.

Andrew Meyer: The Invention of Newt Gingrich

Andrew Meyer is associate professor of history at Brooklyn College.

Arthur Herman: A New Pearl Harbor?

Arthur Herman is an American Enterprise Institute visiting scholar.The US strategic position in the Pacific is starting to look a lot like it did 70 years ago — on the eve of Pearl Harbor.Back in 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt was determined to make an aggressive Asian rival behave — imperial Japan. But he was doing so after a catastrophic reduction in US military strength and readiness.That rundown began right after World War I. Then as now, the American public was tired of wars and complicated commitments in faraway places, and the military became a prime object of a cost-conscious Congress...

Walter Russell Mead: Another One Bites The Dust

Walter Russell Mead is professor of foreign affairs and the humanities at Bard College and editor-at-large of The American Interest.The news that Herman Cain is suspending his presidential campaign was no surprise by the time it was made; it had been clear for sometime that his presidential bid had been hit below the waterline.  One hopes that he and his family will have some peace and quiet in which to come to terms with the events of the last few weeks, and Via Meadia wishes them the best.The restlessness in the Republican electorate has been remarkable this cycle.  One after another, the voters have looked at some flashy political figures, toyed with them, and set them back down on the shelf.  It is just as well; the American primary process is too expensive, too long, too full of malarky — but it does allow voters to size up the candidates, and their verdicts seem generally sound.  Donald Trump and Sarah Palin tested the waters and decided not to jump in; Rick Perry, Michelle Bachman and Herman Cain all intrigued voters for a while, but none of them strike Via Meadia as ready for the big job.  In Donald Trump’s case, it is difficult to think what job he is ready for, but de mortuis nil nisi bonum, and politically at least Mr. Trump has passed on.