Roundup: Historians' Take

Amity Shlaes: Three Policies That Gave Us the Jobs Economy

Miss Shlaes, author of the forthcoming "Coolidge" (HarperCollins), joined the George W. Bush Institute this week as director of its economic growth project.Sometimes two separate news events turn out to be related. That's the case with the Wall Street protesters and the extraordinary mourning at the death of Steve Jobs.Some protesters have praised Jobs as the billionaire who was different—unlike the callous Wall Streeters, he was "beneficial to society." There's a second connection. More than anything else, the Wall Street protesters feel powerless, mere individuals against great banks. Maybe the mourning over the Apple founder is so intense precisely because Jobs gave individuals power. It's hard to think of a gift more empowering than your own personal computer.Also fueling the grief is a more general suspicion that another Jobs won't come along soon. He was a creature of his times, the late 1970s, the 1980s and 1990s. There wasn't merely Jobs; there was also that economy in which he and other venture-capital recipients operated. Americans fear that the opportunities Jobs enjoyed won't come again.It's worthwhile therefore to go back and look at what happened in those years, and then to look at how policy changes may have affected innovating firms that received venture capital.

Jill Lepore: Forget 9-9-9. Here’s a Simple Plan: 1

Jill Lepore is a professor of history at Harvard and the author of “The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History.”...Lately, Mr. Cain has risen in the polls, buoyed by Tea Party populism, which is curious because when the word “populism” was coined, in 1890, it meant opposition to a monopoly on wealth held by businessmen and bankers.Henry George, the most popular American economic thinker of the 19th century, was a populist before populism had a name. His economic plan was known as the Single Tax. His plan wasn’t 9-9-9; it was just: 1....In 1879, George finished a draft of his most important book. “Discovery upon discovery, and invention after invention, have neither lessened the toil of those who most need respite, nor brought plenty to the poor,” George wrote. He thought the solution was to abolish all taxes on labor and instead impose a single tax, on land. He sent the manuscript to New York. When no one would publish it, he set the type himself and begged publishers simply to ink his plates. The book, “Progress and Poverty,” sold three million copies....

Andrew J. Bacevich: America ... With God On Our Side

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. He is the editor of The Short American Century: A Postmortem, to be published next year. In the United States, despite a Constitution that mandates the separation of church and state, religion and politics have become inseparable. To lend authority to their views, presidential aspirants of both parties regularly press God into service. They know what he intends. So the claims made by Republican front-runner Mitt Romney in a recent speech at the Citadel managed to be both striking and unexceptionable. "God did not create this country to be a nation of followers," Romney announced. "America must lead the world." Absent the "clarity of American purpose and resolve, the world becomes a far more dangerous place," with freedom itself in jeopardy. To avert this catastrophe, Romney declared, "this century must be an American century," with the United States economically preeminent and wielding "the strongest military in the world." Whence do these insights derive? "Why should America be any different than scores of other countries around the globe?" Romney asked rhetorically.

Alan Brinkley: Bonus March and Occupy Wall Street

Alan Brinkley, a history professor at Columbia University, is the author of “Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin & the Great Depression.” His most recent book is “The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century.”Protests are usually messy, noisy and often confused. But they have produced some of the most important changes in American history — the Sons of Liberty, the abolitionists, the populists, the labor movements, the civil rights movements, the anti-war movements and many others. All were first attacked as rabble and mob rule. But our democracy would be far more fragile without them — seldom more so than during economic crises.The Occupy Wall Street protests are the product of the 2008 economic crisis and the growing anger toward the financial world. Whether this new movement will survive, no one knows — but it is a continuation of a long-standing tradition.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Exaggeration Springs Eternal

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).Last week, I bumped into one of my students on her way to the "Occupy America" protest near Wall Street. I told her I was glad she was participating in the most exciting political development I'd seen in years. "You're right," she replied cheerily. "It's like our own Arab Spring."No, it isn't. Such analogies demean demonstrators in the Middle East, who have risked torture and death. And they discount America's rich tradition of free speech, which has been on vibrant display since the Occupy America movement began....By every measure - income, home ownership, education - the gap between our haves and have-nots has widened. That's why I'm a fan of the Occupy America demonstrators, who have shone a bright light on these facts.But it's also why I deplore facile comparisons to the Arab Spring, which harm the credibility of anyone who makes them. Consider that an estimated 2,900 people have already lost their lives in Syria alone, according to the United Nations' human rights office. More than 800 died in the protests in Egypt, and nearly 500 in the demonstrations in Tunisia, Yemen, and Bahrain....

Timothy Garton Ash: Those Gloating at the Eurozone's Plight Should Be Careful What They Wish For

Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist. His personal website is www.timothygartonash.com.  What if it falls apart? For all my adult life, I have been what in England is called a pro-European or Europhile. For most of that time, European history has been going our way. Now it may be on the turn. Soon, it could be heading the Eurosceptics' way. What then? Over the last half-century, the institutional organisation of Europe has progressed from a common market of six west European states to a broader and deeper union of 500 million individual Europeans and 27 countries, from Portugal to Estonia and Finland to Greece; 17 of them share a single currency, the euro. There are no border controls between 25 European countries in the Schengen area.

Louis Hyman: Laid Flat by Layaway

Louis Hyman is an assistant professor of history at Cornell and the author of “Debtor Nation: A History of America in Red Ink.”IN another sign that the national economy is suffering through a rerun of the 1970s, Wal-Mart recently announced that it was bringing back its Christmas layaway program. Beginning on Oct. 17, shoppers who buy at least $50 worth of goods, put 10 percent down and pay a $5 fee will be able to pay for their purchases slowly over the next two months, all for the ostensible purpose of avoiding debt.Wal-Mart’s press releases suggest that the restoration of the layaway program, which was discontinued in 2006, is meant to help its customers “budget” so that Christmas can be “worry-free.” The company is partly playing on the economic insecurity of its customers, and partly on the national nostalgia for the days before credit-card debt. But the truth is, the program is a bad deal for everyone — except Wal-Mart.

Victor Davis Hanson: Obama’s Blame Game

NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author most recently of the just-released The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom. We are told there are lots of reasons why borrowing $5 trillion in less than three years and federalizing health care have not yet restored prosperity. The residents of George Orwell’s Oceania daily screamed at the infamous visage of arch-enemy of the people Emmanuel Goldstein. In the same way, almost every week for the last 140, Americans have been reminded just how nefarious and lasting was the work of George W. Bush. Now ensconced somewhere in Texas, Bush, in insidious ways, somehow still blocks our collective recovery. Wall Street likewise continues to conspire to thwart Americans. “Fat-cat bankers,” “millionaires and billionaires,” people who fly in “corporate jets,” and those who “don’t pay their fair share” and who junket to Las Vegas or jet to the Super Bowl “on the taxpayers’ dime” have all ignored the president’s warnings. Did they not hear that “now is not the time for profit” and “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money”?...

Peter A. Coclanis: Roots of Global Economy Grow from the 15th Century

Peter A. Coclanis is Albert R. Newsome Distinguished Professor of History and director of the Global Research Institute at UNC Chapel Hill.Food and foodways are often linked closely with place, culture and memory. What would Indian cuisine be without chili peppers, Italian cuisine without tomatoes and the Swiss without chocolate? That in each one of these cases the food so closely identified with a particular place and culture was native not to that place or culture, but to the Americas is one of the key takeaways from Charles C. Mann's provocative new book, "1493."Although globalization has been well talked about for decades, scholars have been tireless in pointing out that globalization is neither new nor irreversible. Because these scholars often write for their peers rather than for general audiences, their findings seldom make it off campus, which makes works by smart, accessible journalists such as Mann so valuable. Mann also wrote "1491," a best-selling history of the Americas before Columbus.In "1493" Mann makes the case that Columbus' profound significance relates to the fact that his landing on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola (in what is now the Dominican Republic) marked the true beginnings of globalization....

Han Dongping: The Yuan Can't Solve U.S. Problems

Han Dongping is Professor of History and Political Science at Warren Wilson College, NC. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the China Daily website....As the only superpower of the world, the U.S. has a tendency to blame its problems on others. It wants other countries to take the medication for its illness, and it wants other countries to pay the price for its mismanagement of its finance and economy. The most recent bill the U.S. Senate passed on Monday is to pressure China to value its currency is such a measure again. This bill is arbitrary and unreasonable, and will not help the U.S. solve its financial and economic crises in the end....One of the protesters in New York said it as well. America has so much wealth that would allow everybody to live adequately if it had been distributed more evenly.The U.S. government should stop blaming others for its own problems, and stop forcing others to take the medication for its own illness. Instead, it should start by doing three right things: cut its senseless military overspending, end the senseless wars overseas and give the middle class a break by taxing the rich more. With these three right measures, America will surely be able to solve its problems gradually....

Julian E. Zelizer: Why 'Obama the Populist' is Not a Winning Re-Election Theme

Julian E. 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....In some ways, Obama is looking back to President Harry Truman's 1948 campaign against Republican Thomas Dewey. In a stunning come-from-behind campaign, where most of the pollsters were wrong in their predictions, Truman railed against the "Do-Nothing Congress" and appealed to core Democratic constituencies such as organized labor to win re-election.But this style of campaign poses many risks to the president in 2012. Obama does not have the same kind of huge foreign policy record that helped Truman neutralize the GOP in 1948, a campaign that came one year after the Truman Doctrine and the same year as the Marshall Plan....

Niall Ferguson: The Geniuses We'll Never Know

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, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, was published in November. This essay is not about Steve Jobs. It is about the countless individuals with roughly the same combination of talents of whom we’ve never heard and never will. Most of the 106 billion people who’ve ever lived are dead—around 94 percent of them. And most of those dead people were Asian—probably more than 60 percent. And most of those dead Asians were dirt poor.

Yoni Appelbaum: Can Rhetoric Create a Recession? It Has Before

Yoni Appelbaum is a social and cultural historian of the United States. He is a doctoral candidate at Brandeis University, and a lecturer in history at Babson College. He previously contributed to TheAtlantic.com under the name Cynic.

H.W. Brands: The End of the Dollar Standard

H.W. Brands taught at Texas A&M University for sixteen years before joining the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is the Dickson Allen Anderson Centennial Professor of History. His books include “Traitor to His Class,” “Andrew Jackson,” “The Age of Gold,” “The First American,” and “TR.” “Traitor to His Class” and “The First American” were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.This is an excerpt of an excerpt from his latest book, "Greenback Planet."...The nineteenth century had been the era of the gold standard, the twentieth of the dollar standard. What the twenty-first century will be is anyone’s guess. But some guesses have been more credible than others. The dollar has had a good run. It made America rich; it saved democracy; it defeated communism. Yet it suffered from its very success. As the closest thing to a world currency, it knitted the planet into a single economy more fully than any currency before. In doing so it spread prosperity more widely than prosperity had ever been spread, but it diluted prosperity for those steelworkers in America, maize farmers in Mexico, cobblers in Italy who found they couldn’t compete in the new world market.

Victor Davis Hanson: Democracy’s New Discontents

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom.Once upon a time, loud dissent, filibustering in the Senate, and gridlock in the House were as democratic as apple pie.

Walter Russell Mead: Will Egypt Have A Revolution?

Walter Russell Mead is professor of foreign affairs and the humanities at Bard College and editor-at-large of The American Interest.The Arab Spring has reached its first autumn, and it is still not clear whether Egypt will have a revolution.  In my view, it hasn’t had one yet.  The Mubarak family attempted a revolution of its own early in the year, replacing the military-business regime that has ruled the country since the 1950s with a dynastic dictatorship.  The military beat that revolution back with the help of popular demonstrations; the Mubaraks are gone, but the military state at the core of Eygptian power since Nasser’s time lives on.The most recent demonstrations in Tahrir Square are trying to change that.  Both liberal and Islamic groups fear that the army will continue to rule by stuffing the parliament with cronies who have roots in the old regime.  Those fears seem well judged; that is presumably exactly what those who rule Egypt hope to accomplish.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Occupy Wall Street: An American Tradition Since 1776

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author, most recently, of “Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory.”Most of the “Occupy Wall Street” protesters in New York and their imitators around the country seem decidedly scruffy – which is just how you would look if you slept in a city park for several days. Some of them have even dressed up as “corporate zombies” in white face paint, chanting “I smell money!” So it may be tempting to think of them off-kilter extremists at the edge of society.Think again. Taking aim at corporate greed and corruption, the demonstrators embody a venerable tradition of American populism. From the dawn of the republic until the recent past, Americans celebrated hard-working folk and denounced financial titans who preyed upon them. However intemperate or excessive, their protest language fueled some of our most important social reforms – including the regulation and control of the financial sector itself.

Julian E. Zelizer: Gridlock Hurts Democrats, Helps Republicans

Julian E. 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. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Julian E. Zelizer.

Harold James: Bleed the Foreigner

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.PRINCETON – Today, the world is threatened with a repeat of the 2008 financial meltdown – but on an even more cataclysmic scale. This time, the epicenter is in Europe, rather than the United States. And this time, the financial mechanisms involved are not highly complex structured financial products, but one of the oldest financial instruments in the world: government bonds.While governments and central banks race frantically to find a solution, there is a profound psychological dynamic at work that stands in the way of an orderly debt workout: our aversion to recognizing obligations to strangers.

Mark LeVine: This is How a Great University Dies

Mark LeVine is a professor of history at UCI and Chair of the Irvine Faculty Association. He can be reached at mlevine@uci.edu.It sounded promising, the loud drum rhythm outside my office window. The first day of class and already the protests against tuition hikes were beginning! At least that’s what I fantasized.Of course, the drums did not represent an opening salvo of a full-blown protest movement against the huge raise in tuition once again imposed on UC students as they begin a new year. It was just a student organization looking to attract passers-by to its table along Ring Road.But surely, someone must be protesting? I thought. There must be at least three dozen booths on Ring Road. With tuition rising over 17 percent in the last year, courses and TAships cut, sections more crowded, less staff to handle increased demand — except at the senior administration level, which somehow keeps growing without rhyme or reason — surely students were no longer going to take the situation laying down.The students obviously care enough about something to take time out of their schedules to sit there for hours and talk to strangers; otherwise, they wouldn’t be there.