Roundup: Historians' Take

Max Hastings: The West’s Crisis of Honest Leaders

Max Hastings is a British journalist, historian and author. He is currently an FT contributing editor.Hardly a day passes without public lamentation about the paucity of leadership in the Western democracies. Where, cry a score of the nations’ pundits, is a Churchill, Kennedy, De Gaulle, Adenauer for our generation? As a biographer of Churchill, I answer that question partly by saying: be grateful that, however turbulent our times, they are not so dire as to demand his resurrection. Warriors are usually unsuited to addressing social and economic issues. Wellington, the great commander, was a disastrous prime minister, while Churchill’s response to Britain’s 1926 General Strike was histrionic and divisive.

Yoni Appelbaum: Why Progressives Are Losing the National Debate

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.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Nation Could Use a Vacation

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 August 1937, Good Housekeeping ran an article titled "Why Is a Vacation?" The short answer was to obtain rest, the magazine advised, "and the best way to do that is to work hard at something that is enjoyable."And that tells you all you need to know about the Great American Vacation. More than 70 Augusts later, we're still working hard to relax. And, more often than not, we're falling down on the job.The problem dates back to our Puritan forebears, who drew a sharp distinction between recreation (good) and amusement (bad). "A recreation is something which recruits, restores, and prepares the man for better service," a New England newspaper explained in 1851, two centuries after the Puritans landed on these shores. Amusement, by contrast, was "pleasure for pleasure's sake." That was taboo....That's why the average American worker gets nine days of paid vacation per year, while Europeans get two or three times that. It's even more telling that almost half of Americans don't take all the vacation days they are entitled to.

Niall Ferguson: Debt Debate: China's View

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.Xian, China—viewed from inside the Beltway, the passage of legislation to raise the federal debt ceiling was a triumph for democracy....

Victor Davis Hanson: Paralytic Western Society

Victor Davis Hanson is a contributing editor of City Journal. He is the author of the forthcoming novel "The End of Sparta." Adapted from the summer issue of City Journal.It is fascinating to see how postmodern Western societies react to wide-scale rioting, looting, and thuggery aimed at innocents. In Britain, politicians contemplate the use of water cannons as if they were nuclear weapons; and here the mayor of Philadelphia calls on rappers to appeal to youth to help ease the flash-mobbing that has a clear racial component to it (is the attorney general’s Civil Rights Division investigating?). His appeal is perhaps understandable, but many of the themes of rap music — violence against the police, racial chauvinism, and nihilism—may well be some of the cultural catalysts behind the flash violence, though to suggest as much would be seen as more racist than the racist profiling used by the flash beaters. All these incidents are symptomatic of a general breakdown and loss of confidence in Western society. Such urban violence was of course a constant in 19th- and 20th-century Europe and America, but now it is deeply embedded within modern sociology and no longer seen quite as criminality....

William J. Thompson: A Memorabilia Collector is Not a 'Historian'

William J. Thompson is a history instructor at Stevenson University. His email is wthompson@stevenson.edu.In recent weeks, at least one local television station has referred to Barry H. Landau, the New York man arrested with an accomplice and charged with stealing documents from the Maryland Historical Society, as a "presidential historian." The TV station, WJZ-Channel 13, had it wrong. Mr. Landau is not a "historian"; he is a professional collector of presidential memorabilia, and has befriended several former chief executives in the process.As a professional historian who was trained within the academic field and has taught history at the college level for 20 years, I can sadly say that the terms "historian" and "history" have been, particularly in recent years, distorted, unduly inflated, and diminished.

Max Boot: The Afghan Mission and the SEAL Tragedy

Mr. Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is completing a history of guerrilla warfare and terrorism.  I recently visited a Special Operations headquarters in the Middle East—the location, along with other details, must remain classified. I received an incredibly impressive briefing on how U.S. commandos generate intelligence, locate targets, and then swoop down on them. The "operators" are the model of manly understatement. They don't brag but convey a quiet confidence that they know what they are doing—and they do. As has been reported in several outlets, the Joint Special Operations Command—which comprises Navy SEALs, the Army's Delta Team, the Air Force's "Night Stalker" helicopter crews and other, even more clandestine forces—carries out a dozen operations a night in Afghanistan alone. Other JSOC contingents carry out raids in Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and other lands where al Qaeda and its ilk operate.

Max Boot: A False Sense of National Security

Max Boot, a contributing editor to Opinion, is a senior fellow in national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is completing a history of guerrilla warfare and terrorism.

Victor Davis Hanson: California's Water Wars

Victor Davis Hanson is a contributing editor of City Journal. He is the author of the forthcoming novel "The End of Sparta." Adapted from the summer issue of City Journal.

Jim Sleeper: The Republic After Obama

Jim Sleeper is a lecturer at Yale University.Hannah Arendt characterized politics as a realm of "speech-acts," in which words are close enough to deeds so that the words aren't evasive or empty and the deeds aren't mindless or brutal.In April our national orchestra of high-minded opinion presented President Obama's oration on the deficit as a great speech-act. A chorus of pundits rejoiced that he'd exposed the hypocrisies of Rep. Paul Ryan and other Republican deficit hawks-cum-rollback artists. The orchestra oomph-pah-pah'd its way through its familiar medley, "This Is the Best of All Possible Worlds." After all, it's only an orchestra, not a politically organized force.I couldn't help feeling -- and warning here, in virtually the same words you're reading now -- that most of what Obama said he stood for was about to be eviscerated by a bought-and-paid-for Congress whose members' words have become so divorced from deeds that brutality has entered the congressional arena itself, as in the Tea Party disruptions of congressional town-hall meetings, not to mention in Tuscon.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Homeschoolers Have to be Monitored

Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of history and education at New York University and the author of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory" (Yale University Press). He can be reached at jlzimm@aol.com.Under Pennsylvania law, I have to get my family's cars inspected every year. I can't say I enjoy it - especially when my mechanic finds my aging minivan needs an expensive repair - but I accept it. We all share the same roads, so we need to make sure our cars don't endanger other drivers.So why are some Americans allowed to educate their children without any government inspection at all?That's the question brewing in New Jersey, where the death of a homeschooled child prompted a recent proposal to mandate annual medical examinations of kids who are educated at home. The measure would also require homeschooling families to submit portfolios of their children's work to demonstrate that they are actually learning.That's all as it should be. Like our cars, our children don't exist in a vacuum. They're going to drive the same roads and live in the same society as we do. So we all share an interest in what they study, absorb, and know....

Jane Ziegelman: Immigrant Identities, Preserved in Vinegar?

Jane Ziegelman is the author of “97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement.”TENSIONS over immigration in Europe are flaring this summer, along with questions about what — whether language, dress or diet — makes a foreigner a citizen. Of course, these questions also have a long history in America.One of the biggest battles over assimilation occurred a century ago in New York City, and the battleground was food. Politicians, public health experts and social reformers were alarmed by what they saw as immigrants’ penchant for highly seasoned cooking. They used too much garlic, onion and pepper. They ate too many cured meats and were too generous with the condiments. Strongly flavored food, these officials believed, led to nervous, unstable people. Nervous, unstable people made bad Americans.In other words, to be a good American, you had to eat like one.

Timothy Garton Ash: Facing Gridlock and Hysteria, the US May Yet Be Reformed

Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist. His personal website is www.timothygartonash.com. American politics have become so hopeless that I begin to be hopeful. From anger and disgust flow the energy for reform. In a CNN poll, 77% of Americans say elected officials in Washington have behaved like "spoiled children" in the crisis over the debt ceiling; 84% disapprove of the way Congress is doing its job. A couple of years back, it was still vaguely original to describe America's political system as dysfunctional. Now the word is on every commentator's lips. More than that: it's official.

Why Debt Ceilings and Balanced-Budget Requirements Violate the Original Intent of the Constitution

by William Hogeland

The Constitution came about precisely to enable a newly large government to tax citizens for funding a public debt.

Robert Dallek: U.S. Debt Deal: The Cracks are Starting to Show

Robert Dallek is one of America's leading presidential historians; his latest book is 'The Lost Peace: Leadership in a Time of Horror and Hope, 1945-1953'. There is much that is admirable about America's politics: the growing opportunity for anyone, regardless of religion, race or gender, to run for any and all offices; and the long history of peaceful transitions set in place when Thomas Jefferson announced in his first Inaugural: "Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists."Jefferson also counselled tolerance for those who saw republican government as an error: "Let them stand," he said, "undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it."

Jonathan Tremblay: Italy is Crumbling - 150 Years in the Making

(Jonathan Tremblay is a historian and Breaking News Editor for the History News Network) With all this talk of the United States possibly defaulting on their international loans and of Greece receiving a second bailout from Germany and the European Union to continue existing, one thing is clear: the global economic recession is far from over. This week, I specifically turn to a country that has the fourth-largest economy of the European Union, that is part of the G8 most powerful countries on the planet, that has 60 million inhabitants, that holds thousands of years of history and that is generally crumbling in debt: Italy. We are far from the US’ $14 trillion in debt but Italy’s $2.2 trillion in debt is more than Italians can handle.

Tera W. Hunter: Putting an Antebellum Myth to Rest

Tera W. Hunter, a professor of history and African-American studies at Princeton, is the author of “To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War.”WAS slavery an idyllic world of stable families headed by married parents? The recent controversy over “The Marriage Vow,” a document endorsed by the Republican presidential candidates Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum, might seem like just another example of how racial politics and historical ignorance are perennial features of the election cycle.The vow, which included the assertion that “a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President,” was amended after the outrage it stirred.

Alasdair Roberts: A Precipitous Situation, Not Without Precedent

Alasdair Roberts is the Jerome L. Rappaport Professor of Law and Public Policy at Suffolk University Law School. His book The First Great Depression will be published by Cornell University Press in 2012. Unless Congress acts, the United States will reach a statutory limit on federal debt in early August. The US Treasury might then default on its loans. This, says Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, would be “an unprecedented event in American history’’ that would inflict catastrophic damage on the economy.But it isn’t entirely unprecedented. While the federal government has never defaulted, we’ve had a very similar experience.Between July 1841 and December 1842, eight of the country’s 26 states defaulted on their loans. Other states and the federal government also struggled to avoid insolvency. The entire nation quickly became a pariah in international financial markets.

Jacob S. Hacker and Oona A. Hathaway: Our Unbalanced Democracy

Jacob S. Hacker is a professor of political science at Yale. Oona A. Hathaway is a professor of international law at Yale.OUR nation isn’t facing just a debt crisis; it’s facing a democracy crisis. For weeks, the federal government has been hurtling toward two unsavory options: a crippling default brought on by Congressional gridlock, or — as key Democrats have advocated — a unilateral increase in the debt ceiling by an unchecked president. Even if the last-minute deal announced on Sunday night holds together, it’s become clear that the balance at the heart of the Constitution is under threat.The debate has threatened to play out as a destructive but all too familiar two-step, revealing how dysfunctional the relationship between Congress and the president has become.The two-step begins with a Congress that is hamstrung and incapable of effective action. The president then decides he has little alternative but to strike out on his own, regardless of what the Constitution says.Congress, unable or unwilling to defend its role, resorts instead to carping at “his” program, “his” war or “his” economy — while denying any responsibility for the mess it helped create. The president, on the defensive, digs in further....

Fouad Ajami: Barack Obama the Pessimist

Mr. Ajami is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and co-chairman of Hoover's Working Group on Islamism and the International Order. In one of the illuminating, unscripted moments of the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama said—much to the dismay of his core constituency—that the Reagan presidency had been "transformational" in a way that Bill Clinton's hadn't. Needless to say, Mr. Obama aspired to a transformational presidency of his own. He had risen against the background of a deep economic recession, amid unpopular wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; he could be forgiven the conviction that the country was ready for an economic and political overhaul. He gave it a mighty try. But the transformational dream was not to be. The country had limits. Mr. Obama couldn't convince enough Americans that the twin pillars of his political program—redistribution at home, retrenchment abroad—are worthy of this country's ambitions and vocation. Temperament mattered. Ronald Reagan was the quintessential optimist, his faith in America boundless.