Roundup: Historians' Take

Mark LeVine: From Protest Songs to Revolutionary Anthems

Mark LeVine is a professor of history at the University of California: Irvine, and author, most recently, of Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the soul of Islam (Random House 2008) and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books, 2009).

Robert S. McElvaine: Want to Avoid Another Depression? Try Understanding the First One

Robert S. McElvaine, a professor of history at Millsaps College, is the author of “The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941.” He is at work on a new book about the 1960s.“I have seen the future, and it works,” journalist Lincoln Steffens famously said of his 1919 visit to Bolshevik Russia. Guided by his economic faith, Steffens saw the future as he wanted it to be, not as it would be.What excuse do we have when we follow people who, guided by a different economic faith, see the past as they want it to have been, not as it was? Today, under the influence of leaders blinded to facts by certain faith, we are careening toward a repetition of mistakes that led to catastrophe....

Garry Wills: Edmund Burke Against Grover Norquist

Garry Wills is Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern. His latest book, Outside Looking In: Adventures of an Observer, was published in October 2010.Grover Norquist is the powerful president of Americans for Tax Reform (where reform means elimination). He issues to all Republican candidates and office holders Tax Payer Protection pledges—a promise never, under any conditions, to support the raising of a tax—and then he monitors and reports the performance of those who have taken the pledge, as almost all Republicans in Congress have. That, in effect, puts a ban on congressional discussion of tax income, since the Republican bloc has pledged not even to consider it.

Mostafa Henaway and Rami El-Amine: A People's History of the Egyptian Revolution

Mostafa Henaway is a Canadian-born Egyptian based in Montreal where he is a community organizer with the Immigrant Workers Centre. He is active with Tadamon! Montreal which works in solidarity with struggles for self-determination, equality, and justice in the Middle East and an end to Israeli Apartheid.Rami El-Amine is an editor of Left Turn magazine.

Victor Davis Hanson: War in Libya: Dumb and Dumber

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.Almost daily over the last four months we were told that Moammar Qaddafi was about ready to throw in the towel and give up.Libya, after all, is not a distant Afghanistan or Iraq with a population of some 30 million. Yet this tiny police state of less than 7 million people, conveniently located on the Mediterranean Sea opposite nearby Europe, continues to thwart the three great powers of the NATO alliance and thousands of “Arab Spring” rebels.In March, President Obama ordered the use of American bombers and cruise missiles to join with the French and British to finish off the tottering Qaddafi regime. Obama was apparently stung by liberal criticism that the U.S. had done little to help the rebels in their weeks-long effort to remove Qaddafi — after only belatedly supporting the successful revolutionaries in Tunisia and Egypt....

Timothy Garton Ash: Phone Hacking Scandal ... Britain Should Seize This Chance to Break the Culture of Fear at its Heart

Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist. His personal website is www.timothygartonash.com. Britain's drama has penetrated the carapace of American self-preoccupation. Legendary reporter Carl Bernstein compares it to Watergate. On morning television, Hugh Grant appeals to Americans to wake up to Rupert Murdoch's pernicious influence on their own media. Business reporters track the impact on News Corp shares. Senator John Rockefeller calls for an inquiry into whether Americans' phones were hacked. If it turns out that 9/11 victims were targeted, as suggested by the campaigning MP Tom Watson in prime minister's questions, then this will no longer be just a foreign story. Only on Murdoch-owned Fox News is it as if none of this had really happened.

Walter Russell Mead: Obamageddon Coming to a City Near You?

Mr. Mead is a professor of foreign affairs and humanities at Bard College and editor-at-large of The American Interest.The election of the first African-American president was widely hailed as a giant step forward for American racial politics.  The future, however, may remember this administration as a giant step back for Black America during a period of  deepening alienation, anger and despair in America’s inner cities.Not since the 1960s, when scores of American cities were shaken by one race riot after another, have African-Americans faced such deadly conditions: high expectations and hopes running up against a reality of vanishing jobs, shrinking government budgets and a fractured and fragmented leadership.  Barring an unlikely change in economic fortunes we could soon face a new period of explosive anger and even violence; alternatively, the urban poor could fall prey to a new kind of passive despair and anomie as hope dies on one inner city street after another.

Julian Zelizer: President's Bully Pulpit is Not What It Used To Be

Julian Zelizer, a history professor at Princeton University, is the author of “Jimmy Carter” and the editor of “The Presidency of George W. Bush.”At key moments in his presidency, Barack Obama has struggled to win the support of the American people through the power of his oratory. The power of persuasion has traditionally been one of the most powerful weapons of the commander in chief.On Wednesday, in his most recent effort to recreate the power of the bully pulpit in the modern age of communication, the president conducted a town hall tweet session on the White House Twitter account, which enjoys more than 2 million followers. This is the latest effort in a series of attempts to use social media, such his Facebook town hall, to communicate to the American people.Thus far, however, President Obama has had trouble taking his case directly to the public. This is ironic and puzzling since he was the candidate who dazzled Americans during the 2008 campaign, including many Republicans.

Harold James: Learning from Crises

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 – Crises, especially very severe ones, are often learning opportunities. Unfortunately, so far the world seems to have learned very little from the recent financial crisis. In fact, the situation today is just as dangerous as it was in 2007, with the United States now worried by its anemic economic recovery, Europe paralyzed by fears for the survival of its currency union, and emerging markets wrestling with asset-price bubbles.Learning from crises is partly an exercise in analyzing what went wrong. But it is also about finding solutions. Collectively, we have done well on the former, and very poorly on the latter.Most explanations of the causes of the post-2007 financial crisis point to five sources of instability. First, the crisis was precipitated by the peculiarities of the US real-estate market, by government incentives for increased homeownership, and in imprudent lending by financial institutions.

Victor Davis Hanson: Obama 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 . . .

NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the editor of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome, and the author of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.

Daniel Mandel: Entebbe Celebrated

Daniel Mandel is a Fellow in History at Melbourne University and author of H. V. Evatt and the Establishment of Israel: The Undercover Zionist (Routledge, London, 2004). His blog can be found on the History News Network. Thirty-five years ago last week, Israeli commandos flew into the heart of Africa to the old terminal building at Uganda’s Entebbe Airport. In a lighting operation, they freed 103 hostages. 248 passengers and 12 crewmembers had been hijacked a week earlier aboard Air France Flight 139 en route from Athens to Paris.

Victor Davis Hanson: The Demagogic Style

NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the editor of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome, and the author of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern. The noun dêmagôgos first appeared in Thucydides’ history, mostly in a neutral, only slight disparaging way (usually in reference to the obstreperous Cleon), in its literal sense of “leader of the people.” But very soon — in later fifth- and fourth-century authors (e.g.,

Simon Schama: Out, Damned Tweet!

Simon Schama is Columbia University professor and Newsweek columnist. America was built by work, but it was created by words. A declaration, heady with classical eloquence, pitch perfect in the gravity of its steady polemical meter, brought the republic into the world. Knowing that one rebels in poetry but governs in prose, the Constitution gave the nation its institutions in more austerely workmanlike English. Where its language is sharp and clear, arguments are contained; where ambiguous and elastic, contention is invited, never more so than now. Along the way to the present, rhetoric of great passion and moral intelligence—that of Daniel Webster, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, William Jennings Bryan, and Franklin Roosevelt—reminded Americans of the highest purposes of the Union and of the terrible penalties of falling short.

Niall Ferguson: The Global Temper Tantrum

Niall Ferguson is Harvard professor and Newsweek columnist. This is the age of indignation. Politics in the Western world are becoming more emotional—because our problems are so intractable. Recently a Chilean friend of mine was at a bullfight in Barcelona, where a spectator threw a bottle at one of the picadors. The police duly arrested the bottle thrower. But as he was led away, the crowd began to boo the policemen and to chant “Libertad! Libertad!” This captures the illogical mood of the moment. Leave aside your feelings about bullfighting, because this could equally well have happened at a tennis match. Throwing a bottle at a participant in a sporting event is a dangerous criminal act. Someone who behaves that way deserves to be arrested. Yet the crowd’s feelings of hostility to the police trumped that rational view.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Why Ghana Doesn't Love Obama Anymore

Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of education and history at New York University. He is teaching in NYU’s study-abroad program in Ghana this summer.Here’s a quick quiz culled from the opinion pages in Ghana, where I’m teaching this summer: Who is the imperialist race traitor waging war on Africa?The answer, of course, is Barack Obama. The reason is the bombing of Libya, which is immensely unpopular over here. And so is President Obama, who now stands accused of betraying his own African heritage.

David Shneer: My Commitment Ceremony With Obama

David Shneer is a professor of history at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a writer, whose most recent book is “Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust.”I’m one of those Americans who pounded the pavement for candidate Barack Obama in 2008 but has since grown ambivalent about his presidency. He wasn’t pulling out enough troops from Afghanistan; he wasn’t working hard enough to push Israel to halt settlement building; the health care initiative turned into a disaster. And he wasn’t coming out in favor of the legal rights for all Americans to get married, a shortcoming made all the more glaring by New York’s recent legal victory. But my ambivalence fell away when I fell in love again with Obama after he invited me over to his house.

Conrad Black: Surveying the Muslim World

Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom and Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full. He can be reached at cbletters@gmail.com.Most observers seem to be wearying of the Arab Spring, just as it is becoming interesting. The idea of a democratic contagion that would suddenly sweep away centuries of autocratic misrule and replace it with Tocquevillean civic-mindedness was too far-fetched for all but the most robustly wishful. But the notion that Mubarak in Egypt and Saleh in Yemen would be replaced almost magically by preferable people did enjoy wider currency than it deserved. Stretching the canvas across the Western and Near Eastern Muslim lands, more than a dozen countries can be seen, in snapshots, at widely differing stages of fermentation.

Victor Davis Hanson: Illiberal Immigration

NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the editor of Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome, and the author of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.

Frangois Furstenberg: What History Teaches Us About the Welfare State

Frangois Furstenberg is the author of “In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation” and is an associate professor of history at the Universite de Montreal.In the wake of the economic crash, which has led to soaring budget deficits, Democrats and Republicans are negotiating “to move forward to trillions of spending cuts,” as House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said recently. A report from House Speaker John Boehner’s office called for “eliminating government agencies and programs” and “reducing transfer payments to households.” These changes would result in unprecedented reductions in the size of the welfare state and the American social compact as it developed over the last century.Lost in this debate is an appreciation of the historical origins of the American welfare state -- long before FDR and the New Deal, after another epochal financial crash.

Walter Russell Mead: The Shame of the Cities and the Shade of LBJ

Mr. Mead is a professor of foreign affairs and humanities at Bard College and editor-at-large of The American Interest.President Lyndon Johnson and the “best and the brightest” who staffed his administration led this country into three quagmires.  By far the most famous, but perhaps not the most expensive and dangerous resulted from LBJ’s escalation of the Vietnam War.  More than 50,000 Americans and many more Vietnamese died as a result of that policy; our country was bitterly divided in ways that still weaken us today, and the economic cost of the war was immense.  It contributed to the wave of inflation that shook the country in the 1970s and in addition to the interest on the debt from this ill-starred venture we are still paying (as we certainly should) pensions and medical costs for the vets and their spouses.