Roundup Top 10!

Why Obama underestimated ISIL in Syria and Iraq by Juan Cole "Obama gets it right that ISIL is a political problem, not primarily a military one. But he gets it wrong that it is rooted in primordial identity politics."

Practice of beheading not limited to Islamic State by Jonathan Zimmerman Beheading is as old as human civilization itself.

Keeping the White House Open by Jeff Shesol The White House has fortified itself by degrees. Fences grew higher and more imposing, gates were closed, windows were filled with bulletproof glass, walls were reinforced, security checkpoints were installed.

From Robespierre to ISIS by Gertrude Himmelfarb Edmund Burke’s war on terror—and ours.

The war on high-school history classes is a whole new level of dumb by Jeb Lund Colorado’s school board and the American conservative movement in general are trying to pretend history never happened.

The Wilderness Act Turns 50 by William deBuys Celebrating the Great Laws of 1964

Hirohito: String Puller, Not Puppet by Herbert P. Bix The Japanese government’s new biography perpetuates the false but persistent myth of a benign, passive figurehead.

What Bill O’Reilly ignored about George Patton by Richard Cohen "How O’Reilly could have written 335 pages on Patton and not have mentioned his repellentanti-Semitism and its impact on the DPs is beyond me."

The Instrumentalisation of History by Dr Huw J Davies In reality, history can be misleading, its so-called ‘lessons’ proving counter-productive if their context is not properly understood.

How Not To Understand ISIS by Alireza Doostdar Sensationalist accounts of “shari‘a justice” notwithstanding, we do not have much information about how ISIS administers the lives of millions of people who reside in the territories it now controls.