History As It Happens

In the aftermath of Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine, there has been an overdue reckoning with the fact that many historians, foreign policy analysts, politicians, and others underestimated Vladimir Putin and overstated Russia's decline. This was despite the fact that Russia's forever-president habitually broadcast his grievances about "the West." It is, therefore, critical to understand what d...

Ukraine's counteroffensive, launched three months ago amid increasing pressure to turn the tide of the war, has made meager gains on its eastern and southern fronts against tough Russian defenses of minefields and trenches. Russia's war of aggression is now a war of attrition, and it's unclear which side may crack first. The high casualty figures -- an estimated 500,000 dead and wounded since the...

Anniversaries have a way of concentrating our minds on important events, but most Americans paid little attention to a certain date in history when it crossed their calendars this month. On August 19, 1953, the CIA toppled Iran's democratic prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh and installed the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, an event whose consequences haunt U.S.-Iran relations to this day. For Iran, th...

The massive gathering of Americans on the National Mall sixty years ago, on August 28, 1963, is best remembered by the final few minutes of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s soaring call for racial harmony, "I Have A Dream." But there was much more to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In this episode, historians Thomas Jackson and William P. Jones recover aspects of Black intellectual history...

This is the final episode in a three-part series about "Oppenheimer" and the historical debates raised by the blockbuster film. By the time he left office in early 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower had overseen the expansion of the nation's nuclear arsenal to 20,000 weapons. The United States had dramatically outpaced the USSR in the opening years of the arms race. The Soviet Union had roughly 2,0...

This is the second episode in a three-episode series about "Oppenheimer" and the historical debates raised by the blockbuster film. When Robert Oppenheimer accepted the job to lead the top-secret Manhattan Project, he and his fellow physicists expected any bomb would be used against Nazi Germany. But by the time the A-bomb was ready in late July 1945, Hitler was dead and Germany had surrendered. S...

This is the first episode in a three-episode series about "Oppenheimer" and the historical debates raised by the blockbuster film.  On November 16, 1945, Robert Oppenheimer delivered an address to the American Philosophical Society about the changed world ushered in by a "most terrible weapon." The father of the atomic bomb cautioned his audience at the University of Pennsylvania that internationa...

A single sentence in Florida's new K-12 social studies curriculum caused a political uproar: "Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit." People on the left say Florida, under Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, is trying to teach kids that Black people benefited from slavery. People on the right are defending the new stand...

A new exhibit at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery is compelling its viewers to reflect on the roots of U.S. hegemony. "1898: Imperial Visions and Revisions" is a superbly presented and thought-provoking collection of portraits, paintings, political cartoons, old newspaper clippings, and other artifacts that tell the story of overseas expansion through the eyes of Americans and the peopl...

In 2023 labor is striking back. In a resurgence of labor militancy after decades of dormancy, tens of thousands of American workers are walking off their jobs as they demand better pay, conditions, protections, and dignity from their employers -- from Hollywood to hotels. In this episode, Michael Kazin, a distinguished historian of social movements at Georgetown University, discusses the long figh...

On today's geopolitical chessboard, most eyes are watching Eastern Europe or the Indo-Pacific. Somewhat unnoticed is what's happening in Cuba. Russia has turned to an old ally for help in its "clash with the West." Beginning early this year, high-level Russian officials began visiting Cuba to deepen economic, military, and diplomatic ties with the Communist island. In this episode, historian Jerem...

Historian Alexis Coe wants you to read George Washington's Farewell Address. She's been reading it repeatedly, and describes it as a "shockingly modern document." Coe, whose short biography of our first president, "You Never Forget Your First," was a best-seller, says Washington's warnings about factionalism and despotism have burning relevance for our current times. In this episode, Coe talks abo...

Thursday, July 27, marks the seventieth anniversary of the Korean War armistice. It ended three years (1950-1953) of brutal combat between North Korea and its Communist allies, namely Mao's China, on one side, and South Korea, the U.S., and more than a dozen allies fighting under the U.N. banner on the other. It was an armistice, not a peace treaty. And to this day real peace remains a distant pos...

In his concurring opinion supporting the majority ruling striking down race-based affirmative action in college admissions, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas argued for a race-neutral reading of historical efforts to remediate the effects of slavery and racism. In his view, the formerly enslaved "freedmen," who were supposed to be cared for under the Freedmen's Bureau established after the Civ...

There's been talk of Ukraine possibly joining NATO since the early years of post-Cold War Europe, but it never happened. And the allies aren't quite ready to go ahead with membership now, as evidenced by their vaguely-worded commitment issued at the Vilnius summit "to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met." From the moment the post-Soviet wor...

Nearly four centuries ago, authorities in Windsor, Connecticut hanged Alice Young, the first recorded execution for witchcraft in the British colonies. In all, twelve people were charged and convicted of witchcraft in Connecticut; eleven were hanged. This year, after persistent lobbying by descendants of the wrongly accused, state legislators exonerated them all, an act of moral restitution for a...

Note: Audio clips of "A Small Light" are courtesy NatGeo. Anne Frank's 'A Diary of a Young Girl' has been read by tens of millions of people in dozens of languages. It is an entry point for Holocaust studies for each new generation of school students. Her tragic story has been the subject of stage plays and movies, too. And now the young Dutch woman who tried to hide the Frank family from the Nazi...

This is a bonus episode in a three-part series on the radicalism of the Declaration of Independence. The video version will air on C-SPAN 2's American History TV on July 15.  George Washington University historian Denver Brunsman joins Martin Di Caro in a conversation about the contested meanings of the American Revolution and the enduring radicalism of the ideals embodied in the Declaration of In...

This is the last in a three-part series of episodes about the radicalism of the Declaration of Independence and enduring importance of the American Revolution. Whatever its authors meant by them at the time – in the summer of '76 while at war with Great Britain – the words the American revolutionaries wrote in the Declaration of Independence would inspire generations of Americans of all races and...

This is the second in a multi-part series of episodes about the radicalism of the Declaration of Independence and enduring importance of the American Revolution. The Declaration of Independence contains the most recognizable words in American history, a source of egalitarian inspiration that transcends time. But at the time they drafted the document, the Continental Congress was absorbed with more...

This is the first in a multi-part series of episodes about the radicalism of the Declaration of Independence and enduring importance of the American Revolution. All Americans recognize the famous words of the Declaration of Independence. " We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among thes...

What just happened in Russia? In a stunning although not entirely surprising turn of events, Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin turned his troops and tanks toward Moscow after spending weeks criticizing Russia's abysmal performance in the Ukraine war. A violent confrontation was averted, however, when Prigozhin struck a deal with the Kremlin to abort his mutiny and leave for Belarus. The cri...

In the early years of the Cold War, as the Korean peninsula was divided and then embroiled in a hot war, an orgy of killing took place on a small island off the southern tip of present-day South Korea. Villages were liquidated. Civilians were massacred. And it began while the U.S. military government still ruled over post-war southern Korea. But the Jeju Incident, known as 4/3 in native tradition,...

The Republican Party's disappointing showing in the midterm elections renewed grumbling that former president Donald Trump was a drag on the party. After all, the GOP might have won back the Senate had it not been for the inept campaigns of Trump-preferred candidates such as Herschel Walker. But Mr. Trump's popularity somehow survived. Eight months later, following his second indictment on felony...

If a two-state solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is dead, does this mean Israel exists as a "one-state reality?" Do Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank live in conditions tantamount to apartheid? In an essay in Foreign Affairs, four scholars of the Middle East argue that analysts and policymakers should drop the illusion a two-state solution is possible as long as Israel's military o...