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Islamophobia and Our Love of Shopping

Posted by Ellen on 2 September 2010, 9:47 am

We welcome a guest post today from Susan Nance, author of How the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream, 1790-1835. Americans have always shown a fascination with the people, customs, and legends of the “East,” such as the stories of the Arabian Nights, the performances of Arab belly dancers and acrobats, the feats of turban-wearing vaudeville magicians, etc. In her book Nance argues that the leisure, abundance, and contentment that many Americans imagined were typical of Eastern life were the same characteristics used to define “the American dream.” In this post, she offers insight on recent American engagements with the globalized Muslim world.

Recently I was asked to participate in a panel discussion on “Islamophobia” in the United States. Although I declined due to a scheduling conflict, I was also ambivalent about the event. I wondered: if journalists, opinion-makers, and academics boil down Americans’ perceptions of the Muslim world to a collective, primal fear of “Islam,” won’t we be diverted from asking more introspective questions about the American experience?

Consider this: many New Yorkers are currently engaged in a public argument over plans to build an Islamic Center called Park51 a few blocks from Ground Zero. Some accuse those opposed to the project of being Islamophobes who vent their stress over the recession by placing guilt for the attacks of 9/11 on innocent American Muslims. Others contend the naysayers are rightfully still traumatized from those events nine years ago. To them, the Islamic center would be salt in the wound, not a symbol of American religious freedom. In fact, what New Yorkers are really trying to figure out is this: with its millions of Muslim citizens and declining middle class, how will Americans come to terms with the fact that the United States itself is now part of the Islamic world?

More to my point, how do the New Yorkers from TV’s Sex and the City navigate this reality? This may sound like a strange question, but the DVD of Sex and the City 2 is set to be released this October, about three weeks after the anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks. Its coexistence with the roiled political climate in lower Manhattan shows how confused many Americans are about the complexities of globalized living. The film is a sequel to the 2008 film and highly successful cable show of the same name depicting the changing lives and fashion of four New York women, Carrie, Charlotte, Samantha, and Miranda. The latest installment sees these familiar characters working through new feelings about babies, marriage, and Islam by way of a luxury vacation to Abu Dhabi. “I’ve always been fascinated by the Middle East. Desert moons, Scheherezade, magic carpets,” says Carrie. “Like Jasmin and Aladdin?” asks Charlotte’s young daughter Lily. Replies Carrie wryly: “Yes, sweetie. But with cocktails.” “I can hear the decadence cal-ling!” Samantha joyfully declares.

And sure enough, the film recasts today’s affluent Middle East in the age-old American genre of the Oriental tale. Continue reading ‘Islamophobia and Our Love of Shopping’ »

Filed under American Studies, Current Events, Film, Gender Studies, Guest Bloggers.
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Sport, Religion, and Native Identity

Posted by Ellen on 1 September 2010, 10:34 am

Michael Zogry, author of Anetso, the Cherokee Ball Game: At the Center of Ceremony and Identity guest blogs over at First Peoples, New Directions today about anetso, the precursor to field lacrosse which blends sport, religious ritual, and cultural identity. An excerpt:

Throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, certain members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Nation have continued a centuries-long practice by engaging in a:ne:tso (anetso), what has, in English parlance, come to be called the “Cherokee ball game.” Noted as early as 1714 in non-Cherokee written accounts, missionaries, ethnographers and other itinerant travelers have described and discussed anetso regularly for almost three centuries.

Furthermore, Cherokee cultural narratives (“myths”; I choose not to use this term because it implies the story is false) record games that were played by “other-than-human persons” even before humans inhabited the earth. In the foundational cultural narrative of Kanati and Selu, the first Cherokee man and woman, the phrase “to play ball against” is used as a figure of speech. This narrative is analogous to the Hebrew Bible story of Adam and Eve, and other narratives in which individuals play anetso are of the same significance as those contained in other texts considered to be key components of particular religious systems.

Ostensibly an athletic contest that at one time pitted teams from the local community against one another in a regular seasonal schedule of games, it is a vigorous, sometimes violent activity that rewards speed, strength, and agility. However, interpreted as “game” within a broader framing of “religion,” anetso simultaneously resists and problematizes such classifications. Anetso, as an event, is itself the focus and hub of a “ceremonial complex” (or cycle), an extended series of activities that historically has featured virtually every activity that Cherokee people and non-Cherokee observers have identified as elemental of Cherokee “religion” or “ritual.”

Read Zogry’s full post over at First Peoples blog.

Filed under History, Native American Studies, Religion, Sports.
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The Story of Service, Part 4: Black Wall Street

Posted by Alyssa on 31 August 2010, 2:08 pm

On July 26, a mural named SERVICE was dedicated at UNC’s School of Government in the Knapp-Sanders Building. The mural depicts a gathering of African-American leaders at the counter of a diner, painted by Colin Quashie as a creative interpretation of the historical 1960 Greensboro, North Carolina sit-in. We will be featuring each of the eight panels in a series, highlighting some of the people represented.

Today as we look at Panel 4, “Parish Street, Durham, North Carolina,” we welcome a guest post from Leslie Brown, author of Upbuilding Black Durham: Gender, Class, and Black Community Development in the Jim Crow South.

The fourth panel of SERVICE depicts Parrish Street, in downtown Durham, North Carolina, in the background. As a prosperous black business district, Parrish Street was an outgrowth of entrepreneurial efforts inherent to the urban South during the Jim Crow era, when white stores refused or alternately insulted customers of color. Racial segregation created a critical mass of customers, a captive clientele that needed black banks, insurance companies, retail stores and professional offices.

When I walked the area in the 1990s as a graduate student at Duke, the facades of the buildings did little to reveal their past importance. But my historian’s eye looked past the frontage to the beauty and structural grace of the buildings, most of them built by African Americans for African Americans. North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance, known as the North Carolina Mutual and Provident Association in 1906 when it moved to that block, located its offices on the second floor of the structure it built. The first floor housed retail and office space along with the Mutual’s brother institution Mechanics and Farmers Bank. In 1921, the Mutual moved to a stunningly handsome—and very modern—building in the same vicinity on Parrish Street.

Among the famous black North Carolinians, Panel 4 also depicts Dr. Aaron M. Moore, Durham’s first black physician and a founder of Lincoln Hospital, Bull City Drug Store, Mechanics and Farmers Bank, and North Carolina Mutual. Parrish Street and Aaron Moore are tied together not only by a history of entrepreneurial spirit or institution building among black leaders of Durham, but also by the theme of service.

The Mutual’s motto was “A Company with a Soul and a Service,” truly a complex approach to black business that voiced articulated personal and pecuniary responsibility for black progress. It was a vision of freedom set against the backdrop of slavery, emancipation, and the racial violence that followed. Racial violence targeted successful African Americans. Thus, if black business survived, black people survived; if black business succeeded, black people succeeded. In this way, black business was a movement, as W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1912: Continue reading ‘The Story of Service, Part 4: Black Wall Street’ »

Filed under African American History, African American Studies, Civil Rights, North Carolina, Southern Studies.
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‘Confederate Minds’ and the Page 99 Test

Posted by Alyssa on 31 August 2010, 9:35 am


We’ve previously mentioned the “Page 99 Test,” with which one can “Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you,” according to Ford Madox Ford. Marshal Zeringue edits a blog that follows this theme, asking authors to test their books and analyze the content based on page 99. The authors respond, giving the blog a unique way of reporting about new books. Most recently, Michael T. Bernath evaluated his latest book, Confederate Minds: The Struggle for Intellectual Independence in the Civil War South.

Bernath reports:

While page 99 captures well the spirit and vision of Confederate nationalists at the start of the war, it does not speak to what Confederates actually did in their attempt to secure southern intellectual independence during the war – the periodicals they launched, the books they published, the poems they wrote, the plays they produced, the critiques they leveled – which is the focus of the bulk of my book. Nor does it mention the related and essential campaign for southern educational independence in which Confederate teachers and educational reformers sought to liberate southern children from the pervasive and, in their view, insidious influences of the North by writing and publishing their own textbooks, training and hiring their own native teachers, and supporting their own native schools.

His full response can be found at The Page 99 Test blog

Filed under American History, Civil War, History, Military History, Southern Studies.
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“Mama Dip is a blessing.”

Posted by Ellen on 30 August 2010, 11:54 am

That’s what employee–and prison inmate–Paul Scott says. Scott is one of the many inmates who have worked their way through Mama Dip’s Kitchen through a work-release program as they prepare to re-enter society upon completing prison sentences in Orange and Durham counties.

We’ve written before about Mildred “Mama Dip” Council, who is a Chapel Hill institution in her own right, beloved by generations of students and townies for her good cooking and her community engagement.

This News & Observer article is just the latest reminder of how Mama Dip changes lives on a regular basis:

Council doesn’t judge the dudes who work for her, which may be the reason they seem to appreciate her so much. “I don’t ask them what they’ve done, but sometimes they tell me. They’re not all bad people. Most of them are locked up for drugs. If you could take a broom and sweep out all of the drugs, … you’d be surprised at what you might find.”

Read more

How can a community say enough thanks to match the quantity and quality of the gifts she has given? By dining at her restaurant, sure, that’s the delicious part; but also by saying thanks, publicly, as often as possible.

So thank you, Mama Dip, for your gifts and your willingness to give them. This town–and the world!–is a better place because of you.

Filed under African American Studies, Cooking / Food, North Carolina, UNC Press Authors.
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Follow Our Tweeting Authors

Posted by Alyssa on 26 August 2010, 11:33 am

We’ve been gleaning some helpful tips from an ongoing #dearpublisher discussion on Twitter lately, one of which is to provide a list of Twitter handles of our authors. While we have 1,500 tweeple following us and a list of our authors, we thought we’d take it one more step to make it easier for readers to find their authors. Now, on every book page with a tweeting author, you’ll find a link under “Special Features” called “Follow The Author On Twitter,” which links to that author’s Twitter account.

Whether or not you’re a Twitter convert, we recommend checking out our tweeting authors. Their 140-character messages range from updates on new research to weekend plans with the family, and convey the information slightly faster than books! To make it as easy as possible, we’re adding a widget in the sidebar that features tweets from our authors, just below the widget for our own tweets. And now: meet our tweeting folks:

buntGary Bunt @garybunt
Gary R. Bunt is senior lecturer in Islamic studies at the University of Wales. He is author of iMuslims: Rewiring the House of Islam and blogs at Virtually Islamic.

Lynn Coulter @lynn_coulter
Lynn Coulter is a journalist and writer whose work has appeared in Delta Sky, Family Circle, Southern Living, and other publications. She lives with her husband and son in Georgia. Her book, Gardening with Heirloom Seeds: Tried-and-True Flowers, Fruits, and Vegetables for a New Generation, has helped many readers become true green thumbs! (She guest blogged for us about her appearance at Epcot’s International Flower and Garden Festival in April.)

duboisLaurent Dubois @soccerpolitics
Laurent Dubois is professor of history and Romance studies at Duke University. He is author of A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Carribean, 1787-1804 and Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France.

edgeJohn T. Edge @johntedge
John T. Edge is director of the Southern Foodways Alliance. He is author of several books, including Fried Chicken: An American Story, and serves as general editor of the book series Cornbread Nation: The Best of Southern Food Writing (volumes 1, 2, and 3 of which are available from the University of North Carolina Press). He is an editor of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Volume 7: Foodways.

thorpgoldsteinBuck Goldstein @buckgold1
Buck Goldstein is University Entrepreneur in Residence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and coauthor of Engines of Innovation: The Entrepreneurial University in the Twenty-First Century with UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Holden Thorp.

Sandra Gutierrez @sandralatinista
Sandra is working on a fantastic cookbook that’s not yet published, but trust us, you’ll want to get to know her. She keeps up a blog, Sanda’s Kitchen Studio, where she writes about her culinary adventures and posts delightful pictures and recipes. This snack will hold us over, but we’re really looking forward to the main course!

kelleyBlair L.M. Kelley @profblmkelley
Blair L. M. Kelley is associate professor and director of graduate programs in the History Department at North Carolina State University. She’s one of our most Twitter-active authors, and the author of Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson. She was recently featured on WUNC’s The State of Things and she also guest blogs for us.

Paul Knipple @PaulKnipple
Paul Knipple shares a common interest with the UNC Press gang as a lover of food. He and he wife, Angela, are working on a cookbook not yet published, but you can learn more about their latest adventures through their blog.

loweryMalinda Lowery @malindalowery
Malinda Maynor Lowery (Lumbee) is an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a native of Robeson County, North Carolina. She is author of Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation and has produced three documentary films about Native American issues.

Joe Miller @joeagogo
Joe Miller has been writing about health, fitness, and the outdoors for about 18 years. His writing first appeared in the Travel section of the Raleigh daily newspaper The News & Observer, in features about hiking, cycling, climbing, and other adrenaline-inducing adventures. His features turned into a weekly column, which evolved to cover health and fitness on his blog, Get Going NC! His book, Backpacking North Carolina: The Definitive Guide to 43 Can’t-Miss Trips from Mountains to Sea, is due out Spring 2011.

protheroStephen Prothero @sprothero
Stephen Prothero is professor of religion at Boston University and author or editor of several books, including American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon and A Nation of Religions: The Politics of Pluralism in Multireligious America. He’s a regular Tweeter and contributor to CNN’s Belief Blog.

whisnantAnne Whisnant @amwhisnant
Anne Mitchell Whisnant received her Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she is now Director of Research, Communications, and Programs for the Office of Faculty Governance and adjunct assistant professor of history. She has worked as a consultant to the National Park Service and is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation. She wrote Super-Scenic Motorway: A Blue Ridge Parkway History, which has more information available online at www.superscenic.com.

Filed under UNC Press News.
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The Story of SERVICE, Part 3: Music All Over the Ocean

Posted by Ellen on 24 August 2010, 11:24 am


On July 26, a mural named SERVICE was dedicated at UNC’s School of Government in the Knapp-Sanders Building. The mural, depicting a gathering of African-American leaders at the counter of a diner, was painted by Colin Quashie as a creative interpretation of the historical 1960 Greensboro, North Carolina, sit-in. We will be featuring each of the eight panels in a series, highlighting some of the people represented. Visit our SERVICE mural post archive to read more.

Today we welcome a guest post about the SERVICE mural and the Menhaden Fishing Fleet and Chanteymen panel from David Cecelski, author of The Waterman’s Song and coauthor of Democracy Betrayed.

Many of the historical figures depicted in Colin Quashie’s marvelous mural strike close to home for me. George Henry White (panel 1), Abraham Galloway (panel 1), and Charles Chestnutt (panel 5) are all central figures in Democracy Betrayed: the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy, a UNC Press anthology that Tim Tyson and I edited to commemorate the race riot’s centennial. Civil rights leader Golden Frinks (panel 5) is also a pivotal player in my first book published with UNC Press, Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North Carolina, and the Fate of Black Schools in the South. You’ll find a little about Reginald Hawkins (panel 4), the pioneering health care activist, there, too.

Menhaden Fishing Fleet and Chanteymen

Likewise, David Walker (panel 1), Harriet Jacobs (panel 7), and, again, Abraham Galloway, are all important figures in my most recent book with UNC Press, The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina. Only a few years ago, none of those African-American leaders appeared in our state’s history books, museums, or historical markers. Today, thanks in large part to UNC Press’s devotion to publishing African-American history, they’re increasingly understood to be at the heart of North Carolina’s past.

As I look at the mural’s third panel today, I’m especially excited to see the Beaufort menhaden fishing fleet and chanteymen. I grew up near Beaufort and many of my neighbors were menhaden fishermen. They were part of the rich African-American maritime heritage that I chronicled in The Waterman’s Song.

The menhaden fishermen mostly stopped singing their legendary chanteys with the introduction of power blocks and hardening rigs in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. However, those songs have remained a powerful memory for all who ever heard them.

As a child, the first thing I ever heard about the menhaden industry was my mother’s stories about those chanteys. She grew up on a small farm near Beaufort, and the menhaden fishermen used to drive ox carts down the dirt road in front of her house on their way to Beaufort. Early Monday mornings, long before first light, she would wake up in her bed at the sound of their beautiful, haunting songs and listen to them as the fishermen moved through the darkness and toward the sea.

The last menhaden factory in North Carolina closed 5 years ago, but I recently had the chance to listen to oral history interviews with some of the state’s last African-American menhaden fishermen. They were interviewed by my friend and colleague, an extremely talented folklorist named Barbara Garrity-Blake, as part of a community project commemorating the local menhaden industry’s history.

In those interviews, the menhaden fishermen talked about the chanteys in much the same way as my mother. It “just seemed like music was all over the ocean,” a veteran first mate named “King” Davis told her. They mostly sang “in the net,” but sometimes, Mr. Davis said, they’d sing all night long just to keep their minds off the cold and hurt.

Those songs have not been heard on a menhaden boat in a long time, but older people around Beaufort still remember them. On cool autumn days, they say, you could stand on shore and sometimes hear the chanteys coming across the water. They filled the air and stirred the heart and got deep inside your bones. And if you heard those songs, like my mother did when she was a little girl, you never forgot them or the way that they made you feel.

It’s hard to put into words, but it was not just the beauty of their melodies or the men’s fine voices, either. At times, the songs appeared to rise right out of the sea. And beyond their gospel strains or sassy, sometimes bawdy lyrics (they sang both kinds of chanteys), you could hear the men’s sense of brotherhood, their reverence and fear for the storms that nearly took their lives, their pride in their work, and the pain caused by cold ropes that cut their hands to the bone.

You could hear, too, the joy that they found in the sea and its wonders, or, as Bobby Chambers, a menhaden fisherman from Morehead City, put it, in “the beautiful stuff…on the water that God had created.”

David S. Cecelski is an independent scholar living in Durham, North Carolina.

Filed under African American Studies, American History, Guest Bloggers, History, Music, North Carolina.
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Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: A Source of Inspiration

Posted by Ellen on 23 August 2010, 3:09 pm

Now this is the kind of thing that just makes a publisher’s day: Area Man Inspired by UNC Press Book! Your Career Choice Validated! Okay, so that’s not exactly the headline of this Charlotte Observer story that made my day, but it’s certainly how the story made me feel. The Observer introduces us to Belmont, NC, resident Jack Page, who, upon reading about southern naming practices in the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, went on to ponder over the nicknames of his southern neighbors. For four years he kept a running list of nicknames that entered the public record through the obituary pages of the Observer.

From October 1999 to Dec. 10, 2003, Page’s early morning routine included feeding catfish fillets to the wild hawks in his backyard and then scanning the Observer’s obituaries for his list. He handwrote each name carefully into a blue spiral-bound notebook, then every few months would transfer those names to the computer.

“As I accumulated the names, I had things that I pondered,” said Page, now 77. “How did that person get that nickname? Did they like it? Did it reflect their personality?” (Read the full article here.)

I went digging around the original Encyclopedia to find the entry that might’ve inspired Mr. Page and found it in the Language section, under “Names, Personal.” It’s an interesting essay, alright, covering the commemorative (Washington), classical (Atticus), biblical (Jethro), congenial (Jimmy), double (Billy Bob and Tammy Jo), initials-only (J.R.), and ah, yes, nicknames:
Perhaps more than any other section of the country, the South is distinguished by picturesque names, including nicknames. From politics come William “Fishbait” Miller, the longtime doorkeeper of the House of Representatives; Goat Harris, an official in Durham, N.C.; Foxy Robinson, the water commissioner of Laurel, Miss.; and Shag Pyron, a former Mississippi football star and highway commissioner. The world of sports, too, glitters with the names of southern luminaries–Bear Bryant, Dizzy Dean, Mudcat Grant, Catfish Hunter, Bum Phillips, Vinegar Bend Mizell, and Oil Can Boyd.

Now some of those names I’d never heard of until reading them just now. But I’d love to take a look at Page’s list, which grew to some 600 nicknames over just four years–and those are just the nicknames that made the Charlotte paper.

The Encyclopedia is a classic that keeps on giving. We love it so much we’re doing it again–in parts, this time around. Instead of one huge tome, The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture is being published in individual volumes based on the sections that formed the original book, and the folks at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, who sponsor the series, are guiding the updates, revisions, and additions to the contents as we go. We’re up to Volume 16, Sports and Recreation, coming out this December, and there will be 24 volumes before we’re through. The bit on nicknames you’ll find in Volume 5: Language, edited by Michael Montgomery and Ellen Johnson.

Thanks, John “Jack” Page, for your curious little trip into one of the South’s curiosities. May the Encyclopedia continue to fascinate and inspire.
–ellen
Filed under American Studies, Southern Studies.
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The starting lineup for The Journal of the Civil War Era

Posted by Alyssa on 20 August 2010, 2:02 pm

Back in April we mentioned a call for papers for the inaugural edition of The Journal of the Civil War Era, a peer-review journal published in collaboration with UNC Press and the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Pennsylvania State University. There’s been great response, and the issues are starting to take shape. We’ve got a special sample of what’s to come in issue number one.

The journal is being developed as a means of publishing creative work and fresh perspectives on military, political, and legal history of the era. With new research and understanding of the struggles in that period, The Journal of the Civil War Era will be an engaging publication with scholars addressing myriad subjects, such as popular culture, intellectual history, expansionism and the history of African Americans, women, capitalism, and more.

Subscription info:

Members of the Society of Civil War Historians receive a subscription to The Journal of the Civil War Era as a benefit of membership. To join the society, go to http://scwh.la.psu.edu/. For non-SCWH members, individual subscriptions for one year (four issues) are currently being offered at a special pre-publication discount of $36.00/year (10% off the $40.00 regular price). Institutional subscriptions are $60.00/year.

To learn more about advertising, subscribing, or submitting papers to The Journal of the Civil War Era, you can check out the website.

Although the first issue of the quarterly journal isn’t due until March 2011, we have a sneak preview of the Table of Contents:

Continue reading ‘The starting lineup for The Journal of the Civil War Era’ »

Filed under African American History, American History, Civil War, History, Labor Studies, Law / Legal History, Political Science, Southern Studies, UNC Press News, Women's Studies.
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General McChrystal, General Petraeus, and General Confusion

Posted by MHHunt on 19 August 2010, 10:44 am

Barack Obama’s Afghanistan commanders are something else. First, they promoted a highly debatable counter-insurgency strategy. Then, despite the numerous and cogent contemporary critiques, they got the president to buy into their particular brand of wishful thinking, and they got from him the additional troops supposedly needed for success. They have since failed to deliver. There are no convincing signs of progress toward their promise of pacification.

You would think they would have enough to do in Afghanistan. They should keep pretty busy managing an international coalition, bucking up the Karzai government, building an Afghan army, and distributing U.S. largesse, not to mention figuring out where the assorted bad guys are and how to put them in their place. But no, they manage to find quality time to spend with the media, unburdening themselves at remarkable length.

Stanley McChrystal and his aides got carried away, and now David Petraeus has caught the media bug, going on a blitz earlier this week. He wants us all to know that he rejects “a graceful exit,” even though that is probably the best to be hoped for. He assures us that he is working hard to “achieve our objectives” (whatever they may be). And in impressively technocratic language he sheds light on the situation on the ground by indicating that he is close to getting “the inputs about right.”

The real general in command seems to be confusion. There is most obviously confusion about what the personalities are up to. Heaven knows what Petraeus has in mind. Has he suddenly recalled that Nixon’s troop withdrawal from Vietnam was a version of “a graceful exit” strategy — and he wants no part of a repeat? Or has settling into McChrystal’s chair convinced him that the situation is far worse than he imagined? So he turns to the U.S. public and the president with a plea for more time. By doing so, it seems on the basis of the evidence offered in Jonathan Alter’s The Promise that he is double-crossing his commander in chief. Late last year at the end of extended deliberations over Afghan strategy, he joined Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen in making a firm commitment to respect the 2011 deadline for beginning significant U.S. troop withdrawals. Petraeus may well calculate he can get away with this reversal: an inexperienced president with one sacking behind him is not likely to attempt a second, especially if the fresh challenge is mounted adroitly.

Is it possible on the other hand that Obama is at least tacitly behind this backpedaling? Continue reading ‘General McChrystal, General Petraeus, and General Confusion’ »

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Filed under American History, Current Events, Guest Bloggers, Michael H. Hunt, Military History, Military Studies, Politics.
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