Roundup: Historians' Take

Faheem Younus: This Fourth of July, Why I love America, Like Most Muslim Americans

Faheem Younus is an adjunct faculty member for religion and history at the Community Colleges of Baltimore County and a clinical associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. He blogs at The Huffington Post.

Juan Cole: 10 Ways Arab Democracies Can Avoid American Mistakes

Juan Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. For three decades, he has sought to put the relationship of the West and the Muslim world in historical context. His most recent book is Engaging the Muslim World (Palgrave Macmillan, March, 2009) and he also recently authored Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

Nicolaus Mills: Saving Affirmative Action from Itself

Nicolaus Mills is professor of American studies at Sarah Lawrence College and author of Like a Holy Crusade: Mississippi 1964 and Debating Affirmative Action: Race, Gender, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Inclusion.THESE DAYS the future of affirmative action in higher education is in jeopardy. A series of states—among them Michigan, California, Florida, Nebraska, and Arizona—have banned the consideration of race, ethnicity, or gender by any unit of state government, including public colleges and universities. As a result, state-run institutions of higher education with the greatest capacity for accepting minorities are increasingly less able to do so.Nor can these institutions turn to the public for support on affirmative action. By a 55-to-36 percent margin voters believe affirmative action should be abolished altogether, and by a 61-to-33 percent margin they oppose affirmative action for blacks in hiring, promotion, and college entry, according to a 2009 Quinnipiac University poll.

Michael Kazin: Man Without a Plan: Obama’s Short-Sighted View of U.S. Politics

Michael Kazin is the author of American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation, to be published in August. He teaches history at Georgetown University.Remember when liberals believed and conservatives feared that Barack Obama might become another Franklin D. Roosevelt? On its cover, Time depicted the president-elect smiling from the driver’s seat of a 1930s roadster, cigarette holder pointing toward the welcoming sky. That dream—or nightmare, for Republicans—of Obama as both a great reformer and beloved statesman was quickly extinguished by the toxic mixture of a stagnant economy, unending GOP filibusters, the health care legislative muddle, and the president’s own failure to use his rhetorical skills to empathize with troubled citizens and inspire the nation.

Mark Mazower: Any New Marshall Plan Will Founder in the Minds of Europe's Hesitant Leaders

Mark Mazower teaches history at Columbia University. His most recent book, Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe [Penguin] won the LA Times Book Prize for History.

Max Boot: U.S. Foreign Policy: In Praise of Nation-Building

Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is completing a history of guerrilla warfare and terrorism.

Erwin Chemerinsky: The Supreme Court Closes the Door to Justice

Erwin Chemerinsky is dean of the UC Irvine School of Law. Has the Supreme Court lost faith in the American court system? That is a strange question to ask about the justices who sit at the top of the country's judicial hierarchy. But in case after case in the just-completed term, the court, usually in 5-4 decisions with the conservatives in the majority, denied access to the courts. Consider just a few of the examples:• The court ruled that patients who suffer devastating injuries from generic prescription drugs cannot sue the manufacturers for failing to provide adequate warnings even when drug companies making the non-generic versions of the same drugs can be sued on the same basis....

Kenneth C. Davis: Why the U.S. is Not a Christian Nation

Kenneth C. Davis is the author of "Don't Know Much About History: Anniversary Edition" (HarperCollins). He posts regularly at his blog at http://www.dontknowmuch.com/. (CNN) -- As America celebrates its birthday on July 4, the timeless words of Thomas Jefferson will surely be invoked to remind us of our founding ideals -- that "All men are created equal" and are "endowed by their Creator" with the right to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." These phrases, a cherished part of our history, have rightly been called "American Scripture."But Jefferson penned another phrase, arguably his most famous after those from the Declaration of Independence. These far more contentious words -- "a wall of separation between church and state" -- lie at the heart of the ongoing debate between those who see America as a "Christian Nation" and those who see it as a secular republic, a debate that is hotter than a Washington Fourth of July.It is true these words do not appear in any early national document. What may be Jefferson's second most-quoted phrase is found instead in a letter he sent to a Baptist association in Danbury, Connecticut.

Juan Cole: The Arabs’ Fourth of July

Juan Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. For three decades, he has sought to put the relationship of the West and the Muslim world in historical context. His most recent book is Engaging the Muslim World (Palgrave Macmillan, March, 2009) and he also recently authored Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).The United States today is celebrating the declaration of independence issued by a murky group of dissidents in 1776, who, had they been rounded up by the duly constituted authorities, would have been summarily and ignominiously hanged. Their brief against their government — a government that claimed an ancient heritage and right to govern them — was that it acted high-handedly and tyrannically, with no regard to public welfare. They charged their king with warring on their economic welfare and of depriving residents of the Thirteen Colonies of basic rights expected by all subjects of the crown, including the right to be represented on bodies that set taxes.

Victor Davis Hanson: Not So Fast on Strauss-Kahn

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.Almost everyone who has written about Strauss-Kahn has, quite correctly, used the adjective “allegedly” in relation to the charges against him, which are as yet unproven in a court of law....Whether she proves to be a prostitute with a sordid past and a slick modus operandi, whether the mess hinges on arguments over money, whether Strauss-Kahn is released from all criminal liability due to proof of consent, or an absence of money exchanging hands, whether he is let go, Spitzer-style, with the finding that the end of a career trumps the trouble of filing misdemeanor charges of solicitation — what bothered most observers still remains:First, we were given a rare glimpse of the otherwise discreet lifestyle of an aristocratic socialist, and we learned that the life he practices in no way approximates the ideology of equality of result that he embraces....

Richard Greenwald: Academics Defending Teachers

Richard Greenwald is professor of history and social sciences and dean at St. Joseph’s College, in New York City. He is the author of a forthcoming book entitled The Death of 9-5: Permanent Freelancers, Empty Offices and the New Way America Works (Bloomsbury Press).K-12 education has been consuming a great deal of of our political attention of late. There have been series of articles in most newspapers and national opinion magazines in the past few months and lots of discussion on cable news channels. Schools across the nation are dealing with body-blow budget cuts, the demands of No Child Left Behind and the Obama administration’s Race to the Top, as well as numerous changes in state regulations. Add to this the outright assault --- and there is other way to describe it -- on teachers by many of the nation’s governors and mayors....

Joyce Appleby: Warring Ambitions

Joyce Appleby is a professor of history emerita at UCLA and the author of "The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism."James Madison would have smiled had he heard about President Obama's maneuver, seemingly in defiance of the War Powers Act, to avoid asking Congress to authorize military action in Libya.The act, passed in 1973, came at a time when the Vietnam War had been underway for years without any president asking for congressional approval. Members of Congress wanted future presidents to be obliged to come to them early on in a military action.The Constitution, after all, had invested in Congress the sole power to declare war. And it rankled legislators that no president had sought congressional approval of a war since 1941, when Franklin D. Roosevelt appeared before a joint session of Congress the day after Pearl Harbor. The War Powers Act was expected to put a stop to presidential impunity in entering armed conflicts by requiring presidents to notify Congress within 48 hours of sending troops into action, and to begin withdrawing them after 60 days unless Congress voted to authorize the action.

Daniel K. Gardner: China’s ‘Official’ History Still Being Worked Out

Daniel K. Gardner is a professor of history and the director of the program in East Asian studies at Smith College and the author of ChinaMusings.com. He wrote this for the Los Angeles Times.Mao Tse-tung, Confucius and Louis Vuitton have been mixing it up lately on China's most-renowned stage: Tiananmen Square.For decades, Mao's portrait has hung over the Tiananmen Gate at the far north of the square, at the entrance to the Forbidden City, even as his embalmed body has lain in the mausoleum built immediately after his death in the center of the square. Chairman Mao, the Great Helmsman, founder of the People's Republic of China, looms mightily over the square, reminding the Chinese people of the Communist Party's achievement in raising the country out of its “feudal” and impoverished past and restoring it to prosperity and global influence.

Julian E. Zelizer: What Happened to Dealmakers in Congress?

Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of "Jimmy Carter," published by Times Books, and editor of a book assessing former President George W. Bush's administration, published by Princeton University Press. Princeton, New Jersey (CNN) -- The troubled negotiations over the debt ceiling have offered yet another reminder of the perilous state of Congress. Republicans and Democrats have found it to be virtually impossible to reach a deal.At one point, Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Virginia, simply bolted from the room and refused to come back. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, started his discussions with President Barack Obama by announcing that there would be absolutely no give from the GOP on tax increases.Congress constantly fosters an environment that is not conducive to bipartisan negotiations. Legislative leaders are reluctant to reach out to the other side of the aisle, knowing there is little chance their opponents will work with them and realizing that anything they say can be used against them in the court of the 24-hour news cycle.

Jeffrey Herf: Why Did Yale Close, Then Open, a Center for Studying Anti-Semitism?

Jeffrey Herf teaches modern European history at the University of Maryland, College Park. His most recent book is Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World.Developments at Yale University in recent weeks concerning the scholarly study of anti-Semitism have aroused broad attention. In early June, Yale’s Provost Peter Salovey accepted the recommendations of a faculty committee to close the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA). On June 19, however, following an outcry over the news, Salovey announced that a new center, the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism (YPSA) would be established. The university’s Whitney Humanities has agreed to sponsor it, and Professor Maurice Samuels, whose scholarship focuses on the presentation of Jews in French literature, will convene this reconstituted center.

Max Boot: U.S. Foreign Policy ... In Praise of Nation-building

Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is completing a history of guerrilla warfare and terrorism. textSize() The signature line of President Obama's June 22 Afghanistan address was "America, it is time to focus on nation-building here at home." This no doubt resonates among an electorate sick of foreign wars and eager to focus on domestic problems, but it is a wrongheaded statement.Whenever America has eschewed commitments abroad and turned inward, the results have been disastrous. The most isolationist decade in the country's history — the 1930s — was followed by World War II. The "Come Home, America" isolationism of the 1970s was followed by the fall of South Vietnam, the genocide in Cambodia, the Iranian hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Joyce Appleby: Founding Fathers Could Have Predicted Libya

Joyce Appleby is a professor of history emerita at UCLA and the author of The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism. James Madison would have smiled had he heard about President Obama's maneuver, seemingly in defiance of the War Powers Act, to avoid asking Congress to authorize military action in Libya.The act, passed in 1973, came at a time when the Vietnam War had been underway for years without any president asking for congressional approval. Members of Congress wanted future presidents to be obliged to come to them early on in a military action. The Constitution, after all, had invested in Congress the sole power to declare war. And it rankled legislators that no president had sought congressional approval of a war since 1941, when Franklin D.

Walter Russell Mead: The Future Still Belongs to America

Mr. Mead is a professor of foreign affairs and humanities at Bard College and editor-at-large of The American Interest.   It is, the pundits keep telling us, a time of American decline, of a post-American world. The 21st century will belong to someone else. Crippled by debt at home, hammered by the aftermath of a financial crisis, bloodied by long wars in the Middle East, the American Atlas can no longer hold up the sky. Like Britain before us, America is headed into an assisted-living facility for retired global powers. This fashionable chatter could not be more wrong. Sure, America has big problems. Trillions of dollars in national debt and uncounted trillions more in off-the-books liabilities will give anyone pause. Rising powers are also challenging the international order even as our key Cold War allies sink deeper into decline. But what is unique about the United States is not our problems. Every major country in the world today faces extraordinary challenges—and the 21st century will throw more at us.

Victor Davis Hanson: Liberal Frankensteins

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. This Fourth of July, what remains is the Founders’ vision of a limited government; the idea of a population united by common values, themes, and ideas; a republican form of checks-and-balances government to prevent demagoguery, factions, and tyranny of the majority; the sanctity and autonomy of the nation-state; and individual freedom and liberty as protected through the Bill of Rights. Everything after and against that has proved a failure.

Eric Posner: Stop Complaining About Harold Koh’s Interpretation of the War Powers Act

Eric Posner teaches at the University of Chicago Law School and is coauthor of The Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic.Harold Koh and John Yoo are two peas in a pod, except that Yoo is the right-wing pea and Koh is the left-wing pea. Yoo, a Justice Department lawyer during the Bush administration, interpreted “torture” narrowly in order to advance a constitutional agenda in which executive power has primacy. This interpretation permitted the Bush administration to use harsh interrogation tactics on suspected members of Al Qaeda. Koh, the legal adviser for Obama’s State Department, has now interpreted “hostilities” narrowly in order to advance a constitutional vision in which international norms and institutions play a role. Under Koh’s interpretation, Obama can keep troops in Libya despite apparently contrary provisions in the War Powers Act.