Roundup: Historians' Take

Juan Cole: Iran Looks to China, Russia to Break Out of U.S. Sanctions

Juan Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. The four rounds of United Nations Security Council sanctions on Iran are likely about as far as Russia and China are willing to go. Even the new charges against Iran apparently contained in the forthcoming International Atomic Energy Agency report (which do not rise to the level of accusing Tehran of having an active nuclear weapons program or of having diverted uranium to it), according to Reuters, are unlikely to impress China and Russia.The problem is that sanctions on the Iranian financial and banking sector are already so extensive that the only way to go beyond them is to start a boycott of Iranian petroleum and gas.But China simply won’t go along with any such policy. In fact, China increased its petroleum imports from Iran in the first half of 2011 by 50% over the previous year. China took 650,000 barrels a day from Iran last June, making the latter the third biggest supplier, following Saudi Arabia and Angola. China also increased its naphtha imports from Iran by 280% over the previous year!

Julian Zelizer: Why We Should Elect Flip-Floppers

Julian Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of "Jimmy Carter" (Times Books) and editor of a book assessing former President George W. Bush's administration, published by Princeton University Press.American voters need to decide what they really want from Washington.On the one hand, voters are dismissive of presidential and congressional candidates who can be called "flip-floppers," people who shift positions or agree to compromise.On the other hand, voters rail against a dysfunctional Washington that seems unable to reach agreement on almost anything because politicians on the right and left don't seem willing to compromise.As a result, the approval ratings of Congress have fallen to only 9%.Voters insist they want the type of candidate who won't compromise, and thus won't be able to cut the deals that are needed to break through the partisan gridlock....



Gil Troy: Nasty, Brutish and Long: The Brilliance of the Modern Campaign



Gil Troy, 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, just released by Facts on File of Infobase Publishing.There we go again. After nonstop headlines a year before Election Day and nine debates between the Republican candidates (number 10 is scheduled to take place on Wednesday in Michigan), Americans are already grumbling that the 2012 presidential campaign is ugly and interminable. But these quadrennial complaints about campaigning miss the point.  Presidential campaigns are nasty, long and expensive because they should be. Many aspects of campaigns that Americans hate reflect democratic ideals we love.

Joyce Appleby: The Wealth Divide

Joyce Appleby is an emeritus professor of history at UCLA and the author of "The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism."We hear a great deal these days about the top 1% and the bottom 99% in the American economic pyramid. But we also need to consider the 11%. From 1776 to the present, the bottom 60% of the American population, as USC historian Carole Shammas has documented, has never had more than 11% of the country's wealth. We may embrace the American dream of broad prosperity and wealth equity, but we have never been close to achieving it. There has been an explosion of studies examining inequality in the United States recently. They have been both illuminating and, at times, confusing. Sometimes people refer to the top 1% and bottom 99% using income, and at other times the studies look at wealth. Sometimes they have focused on individuals, sometimes on households, where there might by two or three earners. Does it matter? Yes. Let's start with the difference between income and wealth. The top 1% of today's earners make more than $700,000 annually, and the top 1% in terms of wealth have assets of more than $9 million....

Jason Scott Smith: Remember the CWA, A Government Jobs Program That Worked: Echoes

Jason Scott Smith, an associate professor of history at the University of New Mexico, is the author of "A Concise History of the New Deal," forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. The opinions expressed are his own.What do you do when you've lost your job and winter is coming? That's the dilemma now facing more than 13 million Americans who are out of work. It's also the dilemma that faced more than 10 million Americans in November 1933.By then, the Great Depression was four years old, the nation's new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had been in office for seven months, and the U.S. was about to enter one of the worst winters in its history.

Professor Julio Pino’s “Death to Israel” shout: Why Israel Must Confront Its Past

by Walter L. Hixson

Shifting the focus from the professor to the organization — the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America — offers the opportunity to consider the actual issues involved in what should have been an orderly intellectual exchange on a university campus.

Brian Domitrovic: How Historians Boot the Reagan Revolution

Brian Domitrovic is chairman of the Department of History at Sam Houston State University.In 2007, writing in the wake of a slew of books that had just come out on the end of the Cold War, historian and author Steven F. Hayward noted the following: “With these works, the literature on Reagan’s foreign policy is more or less complete—until additional classified documents are released or new Soviet sources are revealed. By contrast, the story of Reagan’s domestic policy remains clouded and obscure, in part because we are still wrestling with many of the same issues today—tax cuts, trade and budget deficits, globalization, affirmative action, and the rest of the culture war.”Not much has changed. We are still waiting for our massive academic establishment to produce histories of Reagan’s domestic policy – particularly his economic policy – commensurate with its significance. What I wrote in 2009 in my own book on the history of supply-side economics, Econoclasts, is applicable today: “There does not appear to be one scholarly book or article, in the discipline of history, on the topic of supply-side economics that has called on and analyzed the relevant complement of primary sources. Not one.”

Jefferson Cowie: Beyond Ohio: Why Public Sector Unions Need to Show Solidarity for Private Sector Workers

Jefferson Cowie teaches at Cornell University and is the author of Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class.Pro-labor forces appear en route to win an important battle in Ohio on Tuesday, but the greater war they’re engaged in is very much undecided. As significant as issues like taxes, bargaining, and benefits are for the health of the country’s public sector unions, their real savior has largely gone unspoken in this most recent battle—namely, the bolstering of pay and benefits in the private sector. Progressives will no doubt be tempted to celebrate their victory—not least because it marks a setback for Governor Kasich, and a good omen for Obama’s struggle for this key swing state in 2012—but they should also be wary of myopia.

Michael Kazin: Anarchism Now: Occupy Wall Street Revives an Ideology

Michael Kazin is the author of American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation. He teaches history at Georgetown University and is co-editor of Dissent. From Zuccotti Park to the streets of Oakland, the Occupiers have been careful to define their ideology as broadly and vaguely as possible. That has been a wise decision. If you claim to represent the “99 percent,” it would be contradictory, as well as self-defeating, to assert there is just one correct explanation for what caused the economic crisis and just one true way to achieve economic justice for the heterogeneous majority. The very size and breadth of the protests have also defied any honest attempt to paste a single label on them.Yet, at the risk of handing a juicy talking point to the likes of Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, one can detect an ideological preference among a vocal and articulate minority of the young activists behind this remarkable, if still embryonic, movement. And that preference goes by the name of anarchism.

Roger E. Backhouse and Bradley W. Bateman: Wanted: Worldly Economists

Roger E. Backhouse, a professor of economic history at the University of Birmingham, and Bradley W. Bateman, a professor of economics at Denison University, are the authors of “Capitalist Revolutionary: John Maynard Keynes.”...Course lists from economics departments used to be filled with offerings in “comparative economic systems,” contrasting capitalism and socialism or comparing the French, Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon models of capitalism.Such courses arose in the context of the cold war, when the battle with the Soviet Union was about showing that our system was better than theirs. But with the demise of the Soviet Union, that motivation disappeared. Globalization, so it is claimed, has created a single system of capitalism driven by international competition (ignoring the very real differences between, say, China and the United States). We now have an economics profession that hardly ever discusses its fundamental subject, “capitalism.”Many economists say that what matters are questions like whether markets are competitive or monopolistic, or how monetary policy works. Using broad, ill-defined notions like capitalism invites ideological grandstanding and distracts from the hard technical problems....

Jonathan Zimmerman: Sex Ed in New York’s Schools? Fine, but Respect Religious Parents Who Want to Opt Out

Zimmerman teaches history at NYU. He is the author of Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory. Suppose someone comes up to you on the street and says we should require prayer in the public schools. “Kids aren’t getting religion at home anymore,” he explains, “so schools need to teach it.”If you’re a liberal New Yorker, like I am, you may tell him to be fruitful and multiply — but in less gentle words. Religion is a private matter, you’ll say, and he has no business trying to impose his beliefs on others.But when it comes to sex education, liberals seem to think such compulsion is perfectly fine, because, the logic goes, lessons on condoms and the like make kids act in more responsible ways. Alas, there is no definite proof of that. So we need to show much more solicitude toward parents who oppose it.Witness the current kerfuffle in New York, where public schools are requiring sex education for the first time in nearly two decades. Starting this fall, schools must teach the subject in sixth or seventh grade and again in ninth or 10th grade.

David A. Bell: The Case Against Referendums: From Greece to California, They Always End Up Undermining Democracy

David A. Bell, a Contributing Editor to The New Republic, teaches European History at Princeton.In calling for a referendum on Greece’s bailout plan, Prime Minister George Papandreou has, it could be said, embraced one of his country’s oldest political traditions: direct democracy. The idea that the citizens of a state should all cast votes to decide matters of common interest was arguably born within an easy walk of his Athens office, some two and a half millennia ago.Of course, referendums have remained a part of democratic politics into the modern era, with a formal place in the constitutions of many countries and regions, from France to Australia. In the United States, their use goes back to the town meetings of colonial New England, and they still have a crucial role in the politics of several states, notably California.But the use of referendums as a political procedure has always been tense, even problematic, for democracies—and that is no less true of Greece’s planned vote in January. Papandreou says he is paying deference to the unmediated will of the Greek people, and so presents the vote as the very essence of democracy. Yet in fact, referendums have most often done more to weaken democratic institutions than to strengthen them, and this new example is no exception....

Matthew D. Lassiter: Who Speaks for the Silent Majority?

Matthew D. Lassiter, an associate professor of history at the University of Michigan, is the author of “The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South.”AMERICAN politics might appear polarized along a red-blue divide, but the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements are claiming to do the same thing: defend the real majority against the powerful elites and vocal interest groups that control the political system. Conservatives in the Tea Party attack big government and rally behind the slogan “Silent Majority No More!” Progressives in Occupy Wall Street denounce big business and embrace the manifesto “We Are the 99 Percent.”On both the right and the left, strategists want to mobilize the elusive group of voters that Richard M. Nixon first labeled the “great silent majority” during a speech about the Vietnam War on Nov. 3, 1969. With one rhetorical stroke, Nixon identified a new populist category that redefined how political groups strive for influence.

Norman Davies: How Historians Will Look Back on Euroland's Demise

  The writer’s latest book is Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe, published by Allen Lane. If Sparta and Rome perished”, asked Rousseau in his Social Contract, “how can any state hope to live for ever? The Body Politick, like the body of a man, begins to die as soon as it is born; it contains the seeds of its own destruction.” The histories of Europe’s numerous extinct states testify to this truth. Early examples come from the five Kingdoms of Burgundy or the Crown of Aragon, a recent one from the Soviet Union, which evaporated in 1991. Yet states continue to vanish; sooner or later, all human institutions fall apart. The German Democratic Republic merged with West Germany. Czechoslovakia broke up when Czechs and Slovaks agreed their velvet divorce. The federation of Yugoslavia was torn asunder between 1991 and 2006. The map of Europe has repeatedly been transformed by state dissolution and EU expansion. Speculation spreads about which state will be the next to fall. Some say Belgium, others Italy.Most recently, the demise of Euroland came into view. It is not a sovereign state, but it is a body politick of sorts and subject to the same vagaries of fortune afflicting everything else.

Ruth Rosen: Are Male Baby Boomers Doomed To Become Lonely Seniors?

Ruth Rosen, Professor Emerita of History at U.C. Davis, was a former columnist for the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle. She is currently a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Right-Wing Movements at U.C. Berkeley and the author, most recently, of “The World Split Open:How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America.It’s not just the young in the Occupy Movement who fear for their futures. Many older people, who are marching with them, dread retirement, even if they hate their jobs. They fear social isolation, the loss of friends they enjoyed at work and the freedom of too much unstructured time. The good news is that women are already preparing for what is often called the "third chapter” of their lives. What’s sad is that men of the same age, for a variety of reasons, are largely unprepared and less likely to participate in activities that offer stimulation and friendship....They are re-creating opportunities to explore their lives and finding ways to resurrect the world of women’s groups that gave them the confidence to reinvent their lives decades ago....

Niall Ferguson: America's 'Oh Sh*T!' Moment

Niall Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard University and a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. 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, will be published in November.Don’t call me a “declinist.” I really don’t believe the United States—or Western civilization, more generally—is in some kind of gradual, inexorable decline.But that’s not because I am one of those incorrigible optimists who agree with Winston Churchill that the United States will always do the right thing, albeit when all other possibilities have been exhausted....

Robert Zaretsky: Occupy Paris

Robert Zaretsky is professor of history in the Honors College, University of Houston, and the author, most recently, of Albert Camus: Elements of a Life.A nation reeling from unprecedented economic and political crises votes into office a left-leaning government promising change. When the promises are thought by many to be too little, and many others too much, popular unrest surges toward the extremes of the political spectrum. Citizens on the left and right turn away from traditional parties and labor organizations and take matters into their own hands. Spontaneous strikes and occupations break out across the nation, and all eyes turn to the political leader who had promised change his supporters could believe in.It is déjà vu all over again. The Occupy Wall Street movement has pirouetted onto the political center stage just as France is marking the 75th anniversary of the mass strikes that accompanied the electoral victory of the Popular Front government led by Léon Blum. The many parallels between then and now, particularly in the personalities of Blum and Barack Obama, cast the OWS movement in a new and intriguing light.

Sean Wilentz: The Long and Tragical History of Post-Partisanship, from Washington to Obama

Sean Wilentz is a contributing editor at The New Republic, and the author of Bob Dylan in America (Doubleday). This article ran in the November 17, 2011, issue of the magazine.

Douglas Brinkley: Buffering the Grand Canyon

Douglas Brinkley, a professor of history at Rice University, is the author of “The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America.”IN 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt didn’t need a guidebook to tell him that the Grand Canyon was the most precious heirloom the United States possessed. Staring out for the first time from the canyon’s rim at the immensity of the chasm, he trembled with sheer joy. This was America’s Westminster Abbey, Louvre and Taj Mahal rolled into one.Back then, the Arizona Territory was debating whether to preserve the canyon or mine it for zinc, copper, asbestos and other minerals. A similar threat looms today over the canyon vistas just beyond the park’s boundaries, where mining companies, foreign and domestic, have been filing claims to extract uranium from the surrounding national forest.The idea of letting miners loose on the Grand Canyon struck Roosevelt as criminal. To him, the canyon was an American birthright. “In your own interest and the interest of all the country keep this great wonder of nature as it now is,” he told a crowd of Arizonans assembled for his visit. “You cannot improve upon it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.”...

Walter Isaacson: The Genius of Jobs

Walter Isaacson is the author of “Steve Jobs.”ONE of the questions I wrestled with when writing about Steve Jobs was how smart he was. On the surface, this should not have been much of an issue. You’d assume the obvious answer was: he was really, really smart. Maybe even worth three or four reallys. After all, he was the most innovative and successful business leader of our era and embodied the Silicon Valley dream writ large: he created a start-up in his parents’ garage and built it into the world’s most valuable company.