Roundup: Historians' Take

Adam Laats: The Real Wall of Separation in Public Schools

Adam Laats teaches in the Graduate School of Education at Binghamton University in Binghamton, N.Y., where he is an assistant professor of history and director of the university’s Center for the Teaching of American History.Voters in Missouri recently approved — by overwhelming margins — a constitutional amendment guaranteeing students’ rights to pray quietly in public schools. But Missouri’s amendment does more than that. Missouri now joins New Hampshire in erecting a new and potentially devastating wall of separation in public schools. The new rules represent an effort by activists to throw up barricades around the minds of individual students. Meanwhile, they redirect resources that could be spent on education to fund lawsuits, bankroll public face-offs and support activist groups and political campaigns.Students can’t learn this way. Schools can’t work this way.   

Rick Perlstein: The GOP Throws a Tampa Tantrum

Rick Perlstein, the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, is at work on a book about the 1970s and the rise of Ronald Reagan.Republican conventions didn’t always used to be like this. They used to be only partly like this.For generations, GOP national meetings were sites for one of the longest-running ideological blood feuds in the nation. In 1952, the Grand Old Party’s moderate and conservative wings almost fought to a draw. The right-wing partisans of Senator Robert Taft marched into Chicago’s International Amphitheater locked arm in arm, singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” and left united in the dubious conviction that the convention had been “stolen” from them by the better-organized supporters of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower—just one more instance, many of them went on to insist, of what Joe McCarthy called a Communist “conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.”

Juan Cole: America's 9/11 Response Subverted Our values and Liberties

Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan and author of "Engaging the Muslim World." The United States government's reaction to the attacks of 9/11 some 11 years ago took the world into a tragic era of unnecessary wars and confrontation that destabilized allies and threatened vital long-term U.S. interests.At home, American liberties were endangered. It needn't have unfolded in that way. The U.S. is still bearing the costs of its lost decade, and is still debating whether to continue failed post-9/11 policies. We would do well to heed the warning of James Madison, that "Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded."Then-French President Jacques Chirac advised George W. Bush to avoid the phrase "war on terror," and urged that 9/11 be treated as a crime by a cartel. It is not as if such rogue organizations are harmless. Mexico's drug cartels are alleged to have killed 47,515 people since 2006

Andrew J. Bacevich: How We Became Israel

Andrew J. Bacevich is a visiting professor at the University of Notre Dame.Peace means different things to different governments and different countries. To some it suggests harmony based on tolerance and mutual respect. To others it serves as a euphemism for dominance, peace defining the relationship between the strong and the supine.In the absence of actually existing peace, a nation’s reigning definition of peace shapes its proclivity to use force. A nation committed to peace-as-harmony will tend to employ force as a last resort. The United States once subscribed to this view. Or beyond the confines of the Western Hemisphere, it at least pretended to do so.A nation seeking peace-as-dominion will use force more freely. This has long been an Israeli predilection. Since the end of the Cold War and especially since 9/11, however, it has become America’s as well. As a consequence, U.S. national-security policy increasingly conforms to patterns of behavior pioneered by the Jewish state. This “Israelification” of U.S. policy may prove beneficial for Israel. Based on the available evidence, it’s not likely to be good for the United States....

Victor Davis Hanson: Storming Embassies, Killing Ambassadors, and ‘Smart’ Diplomacy

NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom. The attacks on the U.S. embassy yesterday in Cairo and the storming of the American consulate in Libya, where the U.S. ambassador was murdered along with three staff members — and the initial official American reaction to the mayhem — are all reprehensible, each in their own way. Let us sort out this terrible chain of events. Timing: The assaults came exactly on the eleventh anniversary of bin Laden’s and al-Qaeda’s attack on America. If there was any doubt about the intent of the timing, the appearance of black al-Qaedist flags among the mobs removed it. The chanting of Osama bin Laden’s name made it doubly clear who were the heroes of the Egyptian mob. Why should we be surprised by the lackluster response of the Egyptian and Libyan "authorities" to protect diplomatic sanctuaries, given the nature of the "governments" in both countries?

Rick Perlstein: Stand against Rahm!

Rick Perlstein is the author of "Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America" and "Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus" CHICAGO — I was awoken by honking car horns yesterday morning, and couldn’t have been happier for the fact. Chicago’s public schoolteachers are on strike against the city government and Mayor Rahm Emanuel. And while no one likes the budget crisis that forms the strike’s fiscal context, nor the fact that 350,000 students aren’t at school, much of Chicago is finding joy in the municipal impasse — which is why, anywhere within earshot of the schools where the Chicago Teachers Union’s 25,500 members are picketing in front of their workplaces, solidarity car horns are blasting away.

Stephanie Coontz: Marriage is Not An Antidote to Poverty

Stephanie Coontz teaches at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and serves as director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families. Her most recent book is "A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s."(CNN) -- Here we go again. Just as in the 1980's, some conservative moralists and pundits are trying to blame America's current economic insecurity, joblessness and social inequality on the very people most victimized by these socioeconomic trends. Once again, they are telling us that people can make it if they just pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, keep their shoulders to the grindstone and cross their legs until marriage.

Jonathan Levy: Risk as We Know It

Jonathan Levy, an assistant professor of history at Princeton University, is a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, at Stanford University.Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only! Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me; For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go, And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.—Walt Whitman, "Passage to India" (1871)In the 19th-century United States, voyage was an im­age that Americans invoked time and again to capture what it was like to live on the stormy seas of capitalism. In 1871, Walt Whitman offered a maritime allegory of the experience of individual freedom. To do so he evoked risk. Long a technical concept in the financial arena of marine in­surance, at the end of the 18th century "risk" still simply referred to the commodity bought and sold in an insurance contract. Outside the world of long-distance maritime trade, risk had very little meaning or use.

Brent Staples: When Family Trees Are Gnarled by Race

Brent Staples is an editorial writer for the New York Times.My paternal grandfather, Marshall Staples (1898-1969), was one of the millions of black Southerners who moved north in the Great Migration. Those of us in the family who were born Yankees in the years just after World War II were given an earful about our place in 19th-century Virginia — and specifically about Marshall’s white grandfather, a member of a slaveholding family who fathered at least one child with my great-great-grandmother, Somerville Staples.Stories like this are typical among African-Americans who have roots in the slave-era South and who have always spoken candidly about themselves and their relationships with slaveholding forebears. In some cases, the Negro second families carried the names of their masters/fathers into Emancipation and settled in the same areas.This was inconvenient for the white progenitors and their families, who feared the taint of blackness so much that they often declined to acknowledge or speak to their darker relatives on the street. In nullifying these family connections, they embraced the fiction of racial purity that has dominated how white Americans see themselves for hundreds of years....

Jonathan Zimmerman: Romney's Radical Vision for Education

Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of history and education at New York University. He is the author of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory."As schools around the country open their doors for the fall term, here's a quick end-of-summer quiz: Which major presidential candidate has offered the most radical proposal to change public education?And here's a hint: It's not Barack Obama. Emphasizing high-stakes tests and charter school expansion, Obama has simply continued — or accelerated — the policies handed down by George W. Bush in his signature education reform, No Child Left Behind.By contrast, Mitt Romney has put forth a plan that could completely transform the way Americans organize and fund public schools. And that's why it has little chance of being implemented any time soon....

Eileen Boris: Ghost of Hiram Johnson is Looking over Brown's Shoulder

Eileen Boris is the chair of feminist studies and professor of history and black studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author (with Jennifer Klein) of "Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State."In 1913, California's Progressive and Republican governor, Hiram Johnson, cried out for "the necessity" of providing thousands of women workers "a living wage." With social reform at flood tide, Johnson signed one of the nation's first labor standards laws, establishing a state Industrial Welfare Commission with powers to investigate and establish proper working conditions for women and children.Denounced by Harrison Grey Otis' Los Angeles Times as one of "the socialistic, senseless, and freakish measures" of "Holy Hiram," the commission would over time curb the hours and raise the wages of women employed in stores, offices, canneries and factories. But omitted was the largest single female occupation, domestic service....

David W. Blight: Voter Suppression, Then and Now

David W. Blight, a professor of history at Yale, is writing a biography of Frederick Douglass.SUPPRESSING the black vote is a very old story in America, and it has never been just a Southern thing.In 1840, and again in 1841, the former Frederick Bailey, now Frederick Douglass, walked a few blocks from his rented apartment on Ray Street in New Bedford, Mass., to the town hall, where he paid a local tax of $1.50 to register to vote. Born a slave on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 1818, Douglass escaped in an epic journey on trains and ferry boats, first to New York City, and then to the whaling port of New Bedford in 1838.By the mid-1840s, he had emerged as one of the greatest orators and writers in American history. But legally, Douglass began his public life by committing what today we would consider voter fraud, using an assumed name.

Steven Conn: Big Government-Small Government Debate Distorts History

Steven Conn, a professor of history and director of the public history initiative at Ohio State University, is the author of the forthcoming book "To Promote the General Welfare: The Case for Big Government."Every four years Americans are presented with different visions of the future and are asked to choose between them. This year, we've been told, the choice is between two conceptions of government: small versus big. The Republican presidential ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan has promised to "restore" America to its "small government" past.Any vision of the future is built upon a certain understanding of the past. Although past and future are inextricably linked, we spend much less time evaluating candidates as historians than we do assessing their skills as fortunetellers able to predict the future.

Jonathan Zimmerman: History Shows Business Experience Doesn't Make a Good President

Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of history and education at New York University. He is the author of “Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory” (Yale University Press).Good presidents need experience in the business world, right? Wrong. Of all the GOP’s campaign-season talking points, this one is the easiest to debunk.The assumption was on vivid display at last week’s Republican National Convention, where nominee Mitt Romney – a former private equity manager – contrasted his resume to President Obama’s. “He took office without the most basic qualification that most Americans have and one that was essential to his task,” Romney said, criticizing Mr. Obama. “He had almost no experience working in a business.”

Joseph M. Adelman: The Complicated History of Journalistic Plagiarism

Joseph M. Adelman is a historian of the politics and media of the American Revolution. He is a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the American Antiquarian Society. The past few weeks have given rise to a new round of hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing in journalism circles with two more plagiarism scandals. In the first, Jonah Lehrer of The New Yorker was caught fabricating quotes of Bob Dylan [note to self: don’t mess with icons with large fan bases, they’ll figure it out every time] and then international relations pundit Fareed Zakaria was found to have lifted material for an op-ed piece from a Jill Lepore essay in The New Yorker. Both of these cases are serious, and are clear violations of modern standards of journalistic ethics (in their own ways).

Julian Zelizer: Obama Not Carter; Romney Not Reagan

Julian Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of "Jimmy Carter" and of the new book "Governing America."(CNN) -- This week, Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan leveled the ultimate insult at President Barack Obama. He said: "The Jimmy Carter years look like the good old days compared to where we are right now."In the modern political era, comparing any Democratic (or Republican) president to Jimmy Carter is just about as nasty as a politician can get. The characterization of Carter might not be fair -- as many historians have started to look again at the accomplishments of his term, such as his initiatives on energy and his role in the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt -- but the poor state of the economy on his watch and trouble in Iran and Afghanistan left the Georgian as a symbol of incompetence and failed presidential leadership.A different way to think about Ryan's statement is to ask a question, one that is equally relevant to Ryan and his future: What is the condition of the Republican Party compared with where it stood in 1980?

Timothy C. Winegard: The View from Colorado, a Presidential Swing State

Timothy C. Winegard is a professor of history at Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction, Colo. He wrote this article for the Globe and Mail's series U.S. Election 2012: Canadians in America series – Canadian expats talking about life and politics south of the border.I support President Obama, and his political and social platform, although as a Canadian citizen I cannot vote.Has Mr. Obama lived up to the popular hype and the promises of his brilliant inaugural speech? No. One of my fellow participants in this project reminded me that I should not be so disparaging. “If this country is good enough for my wife and kids,” he argued, “then it is good enough for me.”...But I still see the American future under President Obama as sanguine and as a leading catalyst for positive global engagement. Socio-cultural and political evolution, and progressive change, takes years, and this election is an important stepping-stone in the United States redefining its role as a democratic beacon for the world – and for its citizens and residents at home.

Michael S. Roth: Learning as Freedom

Michael S. Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, is the author, most recently, of “Memory, Trauma and History: Essays on Living With the Past.”...The philosopher John Dewey, America’s most influential thinker on education, opposed this effort. Though he was open to integrating manual training in school curriculums, Dewey opposed the dual-track system because he recognized that it would reinforce the inequalities of his time. Wouldn’t such a system have the same result today?To be sure, Dewey recognized the necessity of gainful employment. “The world in which most of us live is a world in which everyone has a calling and occupation, something to do,” he wrote. “Some are managers and others are subordinates. But the great thing for one as for the other is that each shall have had the education which enables him to see within his daily work all there is in it of large and human significance.”

Michael Ledeen: The Death of the Left

Michael Ledeen is a foreign policy analyst and holds a PhD in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.I have a good friend, an Italian who lives in Milano, who for a while was the head of the youth organization of the Italian Communist Party.  One day he was walking across one of the major Milanese piazzas, and had an epiphany, which he later described very simply.  “I shouted, ‘There is no working class!’”...The epiphany was a fine example of one of Hegel’s basic insights, which is that the world is constantly changing, and ideas must accordingly be updated, or become anachronisms.  So it was with “working class,” a concept that accurately described a group in a society at a certain stage of industrial development, as in 18th- and 19th-century England and Europe.  For much of that period, “working class” helped understand what was going on, and it helped policy makers deal with very real problems.  There were working-class parties, scholars who specialized in studying the working class, politicians who made careers by representing working-class districts, and so forth.

Victor Davis Hanson: The New Reactionaries

NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom.