Robert E. Wright is the Nef Family Chair of Political Economy at Augustana College in South Dakota and the author of “Corporation Nation,” which will be published in December by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

The uproar over allegations of politically motivated investigations by the Internal Revenue Service shouldn’t be surprising given Americans’ long love affair with nonprofits and their strong disdain of partisanship, especially within bureaucracies.

After independence, and especially after ratification of the Constitution, Americans began forming businesses, charities and other associations at unprecedented rates. Unshackled from British law and the threat of monarchical tyranny, they sought to invest in long-term stability, and in each other, in ways that required the establishment of large and lasting organizations.

To create these institutions, early Americans adapted corporate laws from Britain. At first, incorporation required both for-profit and nonprofit organizations to obtain a charter from state governments. Charters were special laws passed by state legislatures and signed by governors under the rules of state constitutions.

Before the Civil War began in early 1861, more than 22,000 businesses and untold numbers of churches, charities, promotional associations and other nongovernmental organizations incorporated....

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His new book, The Savior Generals, will appear later this month from Bloomsbury Press.

...As the congressional hearings on Benghazi were taking place last week, we also learned that the IRS, administered by the Department of the Treasury, has been going after conservative groups in a politicized manner that we have not seen since Richard Nixon’s White House. There was no evidence that any of these conservative associations had taken thousands of dollars in improper tax deductions — in the manner of former Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner, the one-time overseer of the IRS.

Instead, groups with suspiciously American names like “Patriot” or “Tea Party” prompted IRS partisans to scrutinize their tax information in a way that they would not have for the tax-exempt MoveOn.org or the Obama-affiliated Organizing for Action.

On top of that, the Justice Department just announced that it had secretly seized the records of calls from at least 20 work and private phone lines belonging to editors and reporters at the Associated Press in efforts to stop suspected leaks. At about the same time as the Benghazi and IRS disclosures, it was learned that there was a strange relationship between the Obama White House and the very center of the American media — odd in a way that might explain the unusually favorable media coverage accorded this administration....

Robert Zaretsky, a professor of French history at the University of Houston Honors College, is the author of Albert Camus: Elements of a Life (Cornell University Press, 2010). His next book, A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning, will be published this fall by Harvard University Press.

Truth, we’re told, is the first casualty of war. But as I hunker in my office bunker, the dull thud of history term papers landing on my desk, columns of sleep-deprived and anxiety-ridden students trudging past the door, I’m convinced that truth is also the first casualty of undergraduate paper writing. It is not only the historical truths trampled in the mangled and muddied papers written by my students. More insidiously, a deeper truth also suffers. Only tatters remain of the contract, implicit but immemorial, that teachers will grade student papers fairly and honestly. This shared conviction, that the students’ level of writing can be raised only if the teacher levels with them, now seems a historical artifact....

To be honest, I’ve mostly failed. It is not, I think, for want of effort. I urge students to hand in rough drafts. Invariably, few take me up on the offer, and those rough drafts I receive I cover in red ink. As for the first batch of papers, I’m no less generous with corrections and suggestions. And just as my comments are in red, so too is the red line of grades: A’s are rare, C’s are common. I’ve drawn the line, and I mean business!

But, to be honest, I mean mostly funny business. Many of the final papers are as garbled as the first papers. As for the good papers, they are mostly the work of students who knew how to write when they arrived. And yet, an odd alchemy begins to crackle and pop. While the tenor of my comments remains as sharp as ever, the paper grades begin to rise toward the heavens. Or, more accurately, the grading standard—the one supposedly locked in that empyrean place—begins to sink earthward....

Alan Brinkley, the Allan Nevins professor of history at Columbia University, is the author of "Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depression" and "The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War." His most recent book is "The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century."

In the aftermath of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Washington Post began a series of editorials calling for an end to unregulated guns. Those editorials continued every day for months.  After a while, the editor gave up, and gun control eventually was forgotten – as it has been over and over again.

Now, almost five months after the killing of 20 first-graders in Newtown, Connecticut, riveted the nation, Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) is talking about trying to resurrect his bill on gun background checks that was defeated in the Senate last month.

Why is it so difficult to regulate guns in America?  Part of it is a result of the Second Amendment of the Constitution, which says “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of the state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Many Americans now believe that the Second Amendment means only using arms for regulated militias. But many people outside of big cities believe that keeping unregulated guns is part of what America means....

Julia F. Irwin is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Florida. She specializes in the history of U.S. relations with the 20^th century world, with a particular focus on the role of humanitarianism in U.S. foreign affairs. She is the author of Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening. Her current research focuses on the history of U.S. responses to global natural disasters.

Each year on May 8, the Red Cross and Red Crescent societies of dozens of nations unite in celebration of World Red Cross/Red Crescent Day. This global event observes the birthday of Henry Dunant, one of the founders of the International Committee of the Red Cross and Red Crescent (ICRC), and commemorates the humanitarian principles that this organization represents. This year’s Red Cross Day is a particularly noteworthy occasion for the year 2013 marks the 150th anniversary of the ICRC’s founding.

This May 8, 2013, the American Red Cross (ARC) will join 186 other national societies in marking this momentous occasion and honoring the ICRC’s sesquicentennial. This probably comes as little surprise: after all, the ARC is an important and influential humanitarian organization, both domestically and globally. And yet, this has not always been the case. It was not until 1881, eighteen years after the ICRC’s creation, that U.S. citizens formed their own national Red Cross society. Only in the early twentieth century, moreover, did the ARC come to be recognized as a major international war and disaster relief society. The story of these developments -- of the creation of the American Red Cross and its path to becoming the official voluntary aid association of the United States -- is an important part of the history of U.S. international engagement, and of its evolution at the turn of the last century.

This process began in 1859, when a young Swiss citizen named Henry Dunant observed a bloody battle in Solferino, Italy and witnessed the horrors of wartime suffering firsthand. The experience convinced him of the necessity of establishing permanent associations of humanitarian volunteers, ready to provide neutral medical care on the battlefield whenever the need arose. These ideas started coming to fruition when, in February 1863, Dunant met with four fellow Swiss citizens in Geneva to develop an organization dedicated to the relief of wounded soldiers. The result of their meeting would be the formation of the International Committee of the Red Cross. The ICRC’s founding members lobbied for two goals: the creation of Red Cross societies in every nation and the passage of new international laws to protect both wounded soldiers and aid workers. By August 1864, their mission had achieved considerable success. In Geneva, representatives from twelve nations signed a treaty to establish international standards for wartime humanitarianism, the First Geneva Convention. In the ensuing months and years, additional countries would become signatories as well.

In 1864, the ICRC’s leaders invited the United States to participate in this fledgling international humanitarian movement. However, the U.S. government demurred. Preoccupied with the nation’s ongoing Civil War, policymakers had their hands full with domestic concerns. Yet even after the Civil War came to an end, U.S. diplomatic officials chose not to follow the growing number of nations that had signed the Geneva Treaty. Citing longstanding precedents in U.S. foreign policy, dating back to the eighteenth century, government officials declared it best for the United States to avoid entering any entangling political alliances with Europe.

Not all Americans agreed with this decision. Several former members of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, an agency that provided aid to sick and wounded Union soldiers during the U.S. Civil War, lobbied the government to join the International Red Cross Movement. Beginning in the early 1870s, so did an American woman named Clara Barton. Barton had served as a volunteer during the Civil War, helping to deliver medical supplies to Union field hospitals and to identify wounded and dead soldiers. After the Civil War ended, she traveled to Europe to rest and recover. Soon, however, she became involved again in war relief. After the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, Barton volunteered with the newly formed ICRC to assist its medical aid efforts. It was there that she met Dunant and became inspired by his international humanitarian mission.

In 1873, Barton returned to the United States and began to lobby against the U.S. government’s policy of non-engagement. For nearly a decade, she led a twin crusade for U.S. ratification of the Geneva Convention and the formation of an American Red Cross society. Eventually, Barton achieved both of her goals. In May 1881, she and fifty-one other U.S. citizens drafted and signed a charter to create the American Association of the Red Cross. The next year, in the spring of 1882, the United States joined a growing body of nations -- in Europe and throughout the world -- in ratifying the Geneva Convention. U.S. government officials had come to see signing the Geneva Convention as compatible and consistent with U.S. foreign policy goals. As Secretary of State James G. Blaine put it, the American tradition of non-entanglement in foreign political affairs “was not meant to ward off humanity.” Thus, in the early 1880s, the United States became a belated entrant into the world’s foremost international humanitarian movement.

The ARC remained quite limited, in terms of its membership, finances, and power, for several decades to come. It was not until 1900 that the U.S. Congress granted the organization its federal charter. Although President William Howard Taft designated the agency as the “official volunteer aid department of the United States” in 1911, it was only during the First World War — fifty years after the First Geneva Convention — that the ARC began to attain broad popular support and financial stability. It took U.S. entry into the conflict, in April 1917, for the ARC to truly solidify its status as the recognized face of American humanitarian aid.

Despite this slow progress, the creation of the American Red Cross and the subsequent U.S. ratification of the Geneva Convention in the early 1880s marked a major milestone in the histories of U.S. humanitarianism and international cooperation. On May 8, as the world unites in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the ICRC, it is worth taking a moment to remember how the United States and its citizens came to see relieving the suffering of others as a national and an international obligation.

Michael Lind is the author of Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States and co-founder of the New America Foundation.

Will the third revolutionary wave hit the U.S. next? The revolutions in today’s world are getting ever closer to America.

Revolutions tend to occur in waves, triggered by the aftermath of wars, like the world wars, or by revolutions in leading countries, like the French Revolution and the revolutions of 1848. In the last generation, there have been four regional waves of revolution. With the end of the Cold War, communist regimes were swept from power from Eastern Europe to Central Asia, surviving only in a few countries including China, North Korea and Cuba. Unable to justify themselves with the pretense of fighting communism, military dictatorships were swept away in Latin America. Then the Arab Spring triggered a wave of populist if not necessarily democratic revolutions against autocracies in North Africa and the Middle East.

Are we seeing a new wave of revolutionary politics in the heartland of the industrial West? Although governments are not being violently overthrown in Europe, political systems are being destabilized by the rise of anti-system movements opposed to the major establishment parties. In Greece, the leftist Syriza party and the far-right Golden Dawn have sapped power from the political center. The most recent Italian election was dominated by anti-system candidates, including Silvio Berlusconi and the comedian Beppe Grillo....

Andrew Edwards is a PhD student in American history at Princeton University. The opinions expressed are his own.

As the euro area tries to wrestle member states into fiscal submission through bailouts, austerity and capital controls, it would be well advised to consider a historical precedent: the American Revolution.

In the early 18th century, North America held a role in the British Empire that was similar to the one occupied by Cyprus or Slovenia in the euro area today. Americans were slavers, smugglers, rumrunners and fanatics -- as “opulent, commercial, thriving” as they were irresponsible and fiscally profligate. But as the empire struggled to stay solvent after the Seven Years War, the government of Prime Minister George Grenville attempted to bring the colonists to heel in the name of fiscal austerity.

“The Circumstances of the Times, the Necessities of the Country, and the Abilities of the Colonies, concur in requiring an American Revenue,” wrote Thomas Whately, a Grenville ally, in 1765.

To be sure, the 18th century British Empire and the euro area are very different. But the similarities are still worth noting: A central unelected body (at least not by North Americans), attempted to solve a fiscal problem by inflicting misguided pain on the periphery....

Timothy R. Furnish has served as an Arabic linguist with the 101st Airborne and as an Army chaplain, holds a PhD in Islamic history from Ohio State, is the author of Holiest Wars: Islamic Mahdis, Their Jihads, and Osama bin Laden (2005), and blogs at MahdiWatch. His extended piece for the History News Network, The Ideology Behind the Boston Marathon Bombing, recently received “top billing” in Zen’s Recommended Reading of April 24th.

Pew has released another massive installment of data from its research, 2008-2012, into Muslim attitudes, entitled “The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society.” Over 38,000 Muslims in almost 40 countries were surveyed, thus constituting a survey both statistically sound and geographically expansive. Herewith is an analysis of that information and what seem to be its major ramifications.

The first section deals with shari`a, usually rendered simply as “Islamic law” but more accurately defined as “the rules of correct practice” which “cover every possible human contingency, social and individual, from birth to death” and based upon the Qur’an and hadiths (sayings and practices attributed to Muhammad) as interpreted by Islamic religious scholars (Marshal G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, Vol 1: The Classical Age of Islam, p. 74). Asked “should sharia [as Pew anglicizes it] be the law of the land,” 57% of Muslims across 38 countries answered “yes” — including, most problematically for the US: 99% of Afghans, 91% of Iraqis, 89% of Palestinians, 84% of Pakistanis and even 74% of Egyptians. Should sharia apply to non-Muslims as well as Muslims? Across 21 countries surveyed on this question, 40% answered affirmatively — with the highest positive response coming from Egypt (its 74% exceeding even Afghanistan’s 61%). And on the question whether sharia punishments — such as whippings and cutting off of thieves’ hands — should be enacted, the 20-country average was 52%, led by Pakistan (88%), Afghanistan (81%), the Palestinian Territories [PT] (76%) and Egypt (70-%). On the specific penalty of stoning for adultery, the 20-country average was 51% — with, again, Pakistan (89%), Afghanistan (85%), the PT (84%) and Egypt (71%) highest in approval. Finally, 38% of Muslims, across those same 20 nations, support the death penalty for those leaving Islam for another religion.

Huge majorities of Muslims across most of these surveyed nations say that “it’s good others can practice their faith” — but Pew’s imprecise terminology on this topic makes possible that this simply mean many Muslims are willing to grant non-Muslims the tolerated, but second-class, ancient status of the dhimmi. Majorities, too, in most countries say that “democracy is better than a powerful leader;” however, the latter was actually preferred by most surveyed in Russia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as by 42% of Iraqis, 40% of Palestinians and 36% of Egyptians. Most Afghans, Egyptians and Tunisians (and even 1/3 of Turks) believe that “Islamic political parties” are better than other ones, although 53% of Indonesians and 45% of Iraqis are also worried about “Muslim extremists.” (Curiously, 31% of Malaysians are, on the other hand, worried about “Christian extremists” — although evidence of such existing in that country is practically non-existent.) There is good news on the question of suicide bombing, however: across 20 countries, only 13.5% think it is ever justified — although the support is much higher in the PT (40%), Afghanistan (39%) and Egypt (29%)....

Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, and the recently published A Matter of Principle. He can be reached at cbletters@gmail.com.

But a couple of other points should be taken into account before this cavalcade of gloom rolls much farther: Undemocratic countries aren’t doing very well either. No one is really pointing even to China, let alone dismal political burlesques such as Iran or North Korea, with envy or even respect, such as Bernard Shaw and Nancy Astor expressed in their pilgrimages to Stalin, or Oswald Mosley and Ezra Pound did of the fascists, in the Thirties. And appalling, vulgar, and broken-down though much of our societies are, they are not irreparable. What we seem to have is an economic problem compounded by a cultural problem. The economic system is less responsive and inspires more doubts about its sustainability than at any time since the Thirties. And it is hard to banish the suspicion, because it may well be true, that the level of public entertainment, the quality of the principal informational media, the effectiveness of the public education systems, and the reliability of the legal and judicial and correctional systems, despite immense increases in funding and endless calls for reform and radical improvement, are greatly worse than they were 20 or 40 or even 60 years ago.

All these woes are very serious and widely demoralizing, but they don’t so much impugn democracy as the long-entrenched and psychologically very necessary notion of progress. No sane person who is now audible proposes a better system of government; it is just that what we have isn’t working as well as we came to expect when democracy had rivals. We are now in the midst of an often absurd and generally debilitating effort to talk ourselves into an economic recovery. It is obvious that there is really no recovery in any traditionally recognizable terms. The best that can be said is that perhaps the rise in taxation and the python-like encroachment of the coils of red tape have caused large parts of the economy to cease to report. This happens when a free people is labored in the name of redistribution of wealth from those who have earned the money to those who have not, beyond what can be reasonably justified (and in implicit exchange for the votes of the self-interested, pseudo-conscientious majority)....