History As It Happens

Keep the narrative flow going!  Subscribe now for ad-free listening, bonus content, and access to the entire catalog of 500 episodes. The Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani is the favorite to be elected New York City's mayor next month. He is an inheritor of a largely forgotten municipal socialist tradition in America, one in which dozens of cities and towns were once governed by men dedicated to...

Subscribe now to listen to the entire episode. Americans' trust in the news media has plummeted to the lowest point since pollsters began tracking the data. Across the political spectrum, people have little confidence that the traditional powerhouses -- major newspapers along with TV and radio networks -- are giving it to them straight. In this episode, the accomplished newsman Greg Jarrett, who s...

Keep the narrative flow going!  Subscribe for ad-free listening, bonus content, and access to the entire catalog of 500 episodes. Out of the destruction of war and disgrace of Nazism, a new (West) Germany emerged after 1945. It was democratic, prosperous, and peaceful. Another caesura occurred in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, East and West. This was 'the e...

Keep the narrative flow going! Subscribe for ad-free listening, bonus content, and access to the entire catalog of 500 episodes. Major changes are afoot in the Middle East, but there are continuities with the past. One is Russian influence in Syria. Moscow remains involved in this country on the Mediterranean, although the civil war is over and a former jihadist is president in Damascus, a man who...

Keep the narrative flow going! Subscribe now for ad-free listening and to get bonus content. The story of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is violent, full of sorrow, and littered with missed opportunities for lasting peace. The origins of the peace process might be traced to the late 1960s, when an American spy made his first clandestine contacts with the PLO. In this episode, Pulitzer Prize-winn...

Subscribe now to listen to the entire episode. The massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, when U.S. troops butchered at least 150 Lakota men, women, and children, is rightfully remembered as a moral stain on American history. So why is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth defending the soldiers who participated in it? Nineteen soldiers of the 7th Cavalry received the Medal of Honor after Wounded Knee. Hegset...

Subscribe to skip ads, get bonus content, and access the entire podcast catalog of 500 episodes. Ideas cannot be killed, but movements come and go. Some 40 years after it emerged during the first Palestinian uprising, Hamas may be about to leave the scene, its crusade of violently resisting Israel having led to ruin in Gaza. In this episode, Nathan Brown, an expert on Hamas and Middle East politic...

Subscribe now to skip ads, get bonus content, and access the entire podcast catalog of 500 episodes. The Trump administration is seeking regime change in Venezuela as top officials accuse that country's president, Nicolás Maduro, of helming an international drug cartel. President Trump boasts about blowing up the boats of alleged Venezuelan drug runners in the Caribbean, and Secretary of State Mar...

Subscribe now to listen to this entire episode and get more bonus content - without ads! Moldova's parliamentary elections drew international attention because of Russian meddling aimed at subverting the outcome. The incumbent pro-EU party prevailed anyway, winning an absolute majority. This keeps Moldova on track to join the European Union, although Moscow remains miffed by countries in its histo...

Subscribe now to skip ads, get bonus content, and access the entire podcast catalog of 500 episodes. Sudan's civil war, genocide, and famine continue to go mostly unnoticed in the United States. This is even though millions of people are being brutalized, murdered, raped, or displaced in a conflict where there are no good sides, and where democracy is not on the line. In this episode, Tufts Univer...

Subscribe now to skip ads, get bonus content, and access the entire podcast catalog of 500 episodes. *** Where does the question of Israel's right to exist come from? At the moment of Israel's independence in 1948, its Arab neighbors rejected its statehood. Today, Israel's defenders say the Jewish state must be allowed to defend itself from Hamas to ensure its survival. In this episode, political...

Subscribe to listen to this entire episode. Free expression as a First Amendment right and cultural value is under assault in America. Yes, there's a hurricane of partisan hypocrisy concerning who can say what and when. But the battles over this cherished right are as old as the republic. The uproar over Jimmy Kimmel is merely the latest chapter. The veteran First Amendment litigator Bob Corn-Reve...

Want to skip ads? Subscribe now .  A U.N. commission reported that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, provoking denials and denunciations from Israel's government and its U.S. supporters. What explains the endless wrangling over a term coined by Raphael Lemkin to define the crime of national destruction, even as Israeli officials openly express their intent to make Gaza uninhabitable? In this...

Subscribe now to skip ads, get subscriber-only bonus episodes, and access the entire podcast catalog. If the ties that bind the republic are disintegrating, imperiling the survival of American democracy, there may be something to learn from the collapse of a European polity 100 years ago. The Weimar Republic was eviscerated by hyper-polarization, national traumas, and economic shocks, leading to t...

Enjoy this free bonus episode! Subscribe now to skip ads, get access to the entire podcast catalog, and listen to future subscriber-only bonus episodes. A month after the world's eyes were fixed on the Alaska summit, the Russia-Ukraine War is no closer to concluding. U.S. diplomacy has come up empty. Moscow is escalating air attacks on Ukrainian civilians. Russian drones have violated NATO airspac...

Subscribe now to skip ads, receive access to the entire podcast catalog, and listen to subscriber-only bonus episodes! A group of Palestinians whose families were uprooted from their ancestral homelands in 1948 has filed a legal petition with the British government. The petition is seeking an apology and reparations for British support of Zionist immigration, starting with the Balfour Declaration...

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This is the final episode in a 5-part series marking the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in August 1945. When the Second World War began, few expected the United States would emerge six years later as an unrivaled military and economic power at the head of a new world order built upon the graves of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Eighty years on, U.S. hegemony and the key glob...

This is the fourth episode in a 5-part series marking the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in August 1945. Before 1947, the United States did not have peacetime intelligence-gathering agencies such as the CIA. Foreign policy was formulated on an informal basis. Even during the Second World War, interservice cooperation was voluntary in the U.S. military. The Army and Navy had to...

This is the third episode in a 5-part series marking the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in August 1945. In 1942, the Japanese seemed unstoppable in the Pacific, and the Germans steamrolled toward Stalingrad. Their victories proved ephemeral. And, in defeat, the Axis powers took millions of innocent people with them. This human drama is captured in historian Peter Fritzsche's n...

This is the second episode in a 5-part series marking the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in August 1945. Most wars do not end in total victory. They usually end at the negotiating table after years of indecisive combat. What made the Second World War different? Was the Allied formula of unconditional surrender counter-productive? In this episode, acclaimed war historian and po...

This is the first episode in a 5-part series marking the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in August 1945. No individual bore more responsibility for plunging Europe into another world war than Adolf Hitler, who was obsessed with reversing Germany's defeat in 1918 and getting rid of all the Jews within his reach, remaking the racial map of Eurasia in the process. Eighty years aft...

Since 1945, has there been an antiwar U.S. president? Is it even possible to be an antiwar president when one has at his disposal history's most powerful war machine and is expected to maintain American primacy? President Donald Trump began his second term promising peace in the world, but after six months, the structures of empire and his unforced errors as a negotiator have thwarted progress. In...

For half a century, the Cold War defined global politics. Contested by two superpowers with opposing ideologies and interests, it touched nearly every part of the globe. It threatened nuclear war, and brought incalculable devastation to its battlefields – from Korea to Vietnam to Afghanistan and beyond. Could all the tension and violence have been avoided? Did the U.S. triumph or did the Soviet Un...

Has Haiti passed the point of no return? Nearly 5,000 people have been killed in gang violence since last October, according to the U.N. Gangs control an estimated 90 percent of the capital, Port-au-Prince, as a Kenya-led security mission remains undermanned and outgunned. Government services are collapsing, and people are desperate for food. The country hasn't had a president since 2021. There is...