Roundup: Historians' Take

Mark Mazower: Democracy’s Cradle, Rocking the World

Mark Mazower is a professor of history at Columbia University.YESTERDAY, the whole world was watching Greece as its Parliament voted to pass a divisive package of austerity measures that could have critical ramifications for the global financial system. It may come as a surprise that this tiny tip of the Balkan Peninsula could command such attention. We usually think of Greece as the home of Plato and Pericles, its real importance lying deep in antiquity. But this is hardly the first time that to understand Europe’s future, you need to turn away from the big powers at the center of the continent and look closely at what is happening in Athens. For the past 200 years, Greece has been at the forefront of Europe’s evolution.

David Greenberg: G.O.P. Vs. World

David Greenberg, a historian at Rutgers, is a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. After Barack Obama announced new troop withdrawals from Afghanistan last week, it was no surprise to hear rebukes from the mushrooming field of Republican presidential candidates. The surprise came in what they said: although some predictably implied that he was looking to cut and run, several others declared the move too little, too late....Modern Republican isolationism began with the 1919 battle over joining the League of Nations, when Senate Republicans, led by so-called Irreconcilables like William Borah of Idaho, killed the deal — even though without American guidance, European affairs were doomed to explode again. A pattern emerged, as liberal Democrats, along with Northeastern Republicans, wanted America to actively manage world affairs, while the Republicans’ powerful Midwestern and Western factions viewed cooperative international ventures as dangerously entangling alliances....

Timothy Garton Ash: The New Rome is Not the New Greece Yet, But the US Must Look to its laurels

Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist. His personal website is www.timothygartonash.com. We are approaching the anniversary of America's Independence Day. As we all know, 15 years ago an alien invasion, deploying giant saucer-shaped warships hovering over earth, was repulsed by the ingenuity, true grit and heroism of US forces, leading a worldwide coalition of the willing. President Thomas J Whitmore declared that 4 July would henceforward be celebrated as Independence Day not just for the US but for the entire world. His speech was described by one reviewer as "the most jaw-droppingly pompous soliloquy ever delivered in a mainstream Hollywood movie" – which, given the competition, is saying a lot. It's just a movie, of course, but the 1996 blockbuster is also a document of its time.

Grace Palladino: What Would Gompers Say?

Grace Palladino is codirector (with Peter J. Albert) of the Samuel Gompers Papers and a member of the history faculty at the University of Maryland. The Samuel Gompers Papers, Volume 12: The Last Years, 1922-24 was just published by the University of Illinois Press.For the first time since 1981—the year President Ronald Reagan famously broke the Professional Air Traffic Controllers strike—organized labor is back in the news.  And this time the headlines are just as discouraging.  In Wisconsin, Ohio, and New Jersey, collective-bargaining rights are under attack.  In Maine and Missouri, child labor is making a comeback. Even in Montgomery County, Maryland, probably the most reliably liberal section of the state, arbitration awards are being revoked.  Despite vigorous and united protests, union members haven’t been able to turn things around, probably because they represent less than 12 percent of the nation’s wage earners.  That’s about the same proportion they represented a century ago, when Samuel Gompers led the American Federation of Labor, which raises the question:  Would Gompers be turning in his grave today or would he be saying “I told you so?”

Christopher J. Lee: Street Politics in the West Bank

Christopher J. Lee is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was recently a faculty fellow of the Palestinian American Research Center, an affiliate of the Council of American Overseas Research Centers.

Stanley N. Katz: How to Justify Our Paychecks

Stanley N. Katz directs the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School.

Andrew J. Bacevich: U.S. foreign policy ... War fever subisdes

by Andrew J. Bacevich

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His most recent book is Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War. A longer version of this piece appears at tomdispatch.com. At periodic intervals, the American body politic has shown a marked susceptibility to messianic fevers.

Niall Ferguson: America’s Dumbest Budget Cut

Niall Ferguson is a Newsweek columnist and Harvard professor. Bring the troops home. Considering how polarized American politics is supposed to be, the consensus on this one point verges on the supernatural. President Obama recently announced a new schedule for scaling down the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. A total of 10,000 men will come home this year and a further 20,000 by the end of next summer. The surge is over.

Geoffrey R. Stone: Our Untransparent President

Geoffrey R. Stone is a professor of law at the University of Chicago and chairman of the board of the American Constitution Society.AS a longtime supporter and colleague of Barack Obama at the University of Chicago, as well as an informal adviser to his 2008 campaign, I had high hopes that he would restore the balance between government secrecy and government transparency that had been lost under George W. Bush, and that he would follow through on his promise, as a candidate, to promote openness and public accountability in government policy making.

Max Boot: History Will Not Be Deceived

Mr. Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is writing a history of guerrilla warfare and terrorism.

Timothy Garton Ash: Europe's crisis is China's opportunity. No wonder nice Mr Wen is on his way

Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist. His personal website is www.timothygartonash.com.

Juan Cole: The End of the Beginning in Afghanistan

Breaking news: CNN is reporting that President Obama has decided to take 30,000 troops out of Afghanistan over the next year eighteen months, including 10,000 by the end of this year. Military commanders had requested that he limit this first draw down to as little as 5,000, so this step was unexpected.

Nelson Lichtenstein: Wal-Mart’s Authoritarian Culture

Nelson Lichtenstein, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the author of “The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business.”MONDAY’S Supreme Court decision to block a class-action sex-discrimination lawsuit against Wal-Mart was a huge setback for as many as 1.6 million current and former female employees of the world’s largest retailer. But the decision has consequences that range far beyond sex discrimination or the viability of class-action suits.

Victor Davis Hanson: Obama’s Illiberal Foreign Policy

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

Max Boot: How to Handle the Infuriating Hamid Karzai

Mr. Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is writing a history of guerrilla warfare and terrorism.

Niall Ferguson: World May Soon Face a New Ottoman Empire

Niall Ferguson is the Laurence A. Tisch, professor of history at Harvard and a contributing editor of The Financial Times.

Juan Cole: Repeal the PATRIOT Act is the Lesson of Bush White House Spying

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).

Sara Lipton: Those Manly Men of Yore

Sara Lipton, an associate professor of history at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, is a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

Jonathan Tremblay: Libya - Civil War Amongst the Roman Ruins

(Jonathan Tremblay is a historian and a Breaking News Editor for the History News Network) Thousands of years ago, what we know as Libya today was a land of ancient civilizations.

Brooke L. Blower: A Paris Invented for the American Imagination

Brooke L. Blower is assistant professor of history at Boston University and the author of Becoming Americans in Paris: Transatlantic Politics and Culture between the World Wars.