History As It Happens

Note: Clips of 'Ghosts of Beirut' are courtesy Showtime. Audio of Lebanon at war is from the Associated Press archive. As Lebanon sank into the abyss in the 1980s, few people noticed a teenager who had worked as a bodyguard for Yasser Arafat's PLO. But his deeds would soon start making international headlines. Long before Osama bin Laden became a household name, this unknown young man began a deca...

Note: Audio clips of "White House Plumbers" are courtesy HBO. Audio of the "smoking gun" Nixon tape is from millercenter.org. Will Americans ever tire of Watergate? The notorious scandal that brought down a president – the scandal against which all future cases of presidential malfeasance would be measured – continues to bubble up in pop culture. The HBO series "White House Plumbers" is a comedic...

June 6, 1944 continues to hold a central place in Americans' popular memory of the Second World War. It is synonymous with D-Day, the Allied invasion of Normandy, which took place 79 years ago today. The largest amphibious assault in human history, immortalized in pop culture by epic films such as "The Longest Day" and "Saving Private Ryan," initiated the battle for France and the downfall of Hitl...

The images of Bakhmut, the latest Ukrainian city to be left in ruins after months of Russian shelling, evoke memories of the Second World War. Every building reduced to piles of pulverized concrete or a flimsy facade with windows blasted out, streets clogged by rubble and wrecked vehicles. But you don't have to peer back into the 1940s for parallels to what's happening in Ukraine today. In the mid...

Americans – many of them, anyway – revere the Constitution and the men who framed it. We can recite its preamble with its aim of securing "the blessings of liberty" for future generations. But more than 230 years after its ratification, historian Jack Rakove contends we're still laboring under damaging myths about what the Constitution does and does not mean. Rakove, who has written or edited doze...

Henry Kissinger, sage of American diplomats, is celebrating his milestone 100th birthday on May 27. To some, Kissinger is the embodiment of realpolitik whose shrewd diplomatic efforts left an enduring mark on the global order. To others, he's a war criminal. During the Vietnam War, Kissinger was a driving force behind the secret bombing of neutral Cambodia in 1969. He also backed the coup that top...

Martin Luther King Jr. had serious problems with American capitalism. He considered himself more of a democratic socialist as he demanded the federal government spend billions to eradicate poverty, and as he worked to build a multiracial working-class movement. Today, as the share of American workers in labor unions continues to decline and as income inequality worsens, one wonders if the country...

American allies in the Indo-Pacific are in a difficult spot. They have economic ties to Beijing, but China's rising influence and coercive methods underscore the importance of their long-standing military pacts and trade relationships with the United States. The visit by South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol to Washington in April opened a window into this complex diplomatic problem. The warm recep...

This is the fourth episode in a multiple-part series marking the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War, which began on March 20, 2003. Earlier episodes were published in March. From 1990 to 2003 the United States, through the U.N. Security Council, imposed the most punishing sanctions on a sovereign state in modern history. The sanctions on Iraq caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children fr...

Russian president Vladimir Putin, who sees himself as an astute student of history, once more exploited his nation's victory over Nazi Germany to justify his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. In his annual speech on May 9 – Victory Day in 1945 – Mr. Putin said Russia would continue its war against "torturers, death squads, and Nazis," repeating his fantasy version of reality. "Once again, we see war...

Can the 14th Amendment save the U.S. from defaulting on its debts if Congress fails to raise the federal government's borrowing limit? That may depend on who you ask. Like so much else in the Constitution, Section 4 of the 14th Amendment means different things to different people today as it did in the 1860s when it was ratified. In this episode, historian Jeremi Suri discusses Section 4's endurin...

This is the second in a two-part series of conversations recorded at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello as History As It Happens goes on location, with special guests historian Alan Taylor and Brandon Dillard, Monticello's director of historic interpretation and audience engagement. The "history wars" have reached Monticello. Visitors to Thomas Jefferson's old plantation in rural Virginia often bring t...

This is the first in a two-part series of conversations recorded at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello as History As It Happens goes on location, with special guests historian Alan Taylor and Brandon Dillard, Monticello's director of historic interpretation and audience engagement. Thomas Jefferson wrote the most famous, inspiring words in all of American history. "We hold these truths to be self-evide...

As Ukraine prepares to launch its spring offensive to break the stalemate against the Russian invaders, it's unclear if Ukrainian forces will be able to reach Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula which for centuries has been of vital strategic importance. In this episode, the Quincy Institute's Anatol Lieven, who spent three weeks in Ukraine reporting on public opinion toward the war, talks about Crime...

Fifty years ago the U.S. agreed to withdraw the last of its forces from Vietnam. After years of excruciating negotiations held as the combatants lost tens of  thousands of casualties, the Paris Peace Accords of 1973 were heralded by President Richard Nixon as "peace with honor." But everyone who signed the accords knew peace was not in the offing. Two years later, in late April 1975, Saigon fell t...

Nearly 40 years before Russian security agents arrested Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and falsely charged him with spying, the KGB did the same to Nicholas Daniloff, whose plight became an international incident. The Moscow bureau chief for U.S. News and World Report, Daniloff was nabbed in the summer of 1986 as the Reagan White House was negotiating the terms of the next nuclear a...

April is Confederate Heritage Month in Mississippi. Since the Confederacy was created by secession with the aim of protecting human chattel slavery, one wonders what kind of heritage Mississippians are supposed to celebrate. Maybe Governor Tate Reeves' bland proclamation, which makes no mention of slavery, treason, or the ruin brought on by Confederate defeat, is less a statement about history tha...

The 1990s began with the collapse of the Soviet Union and expulsion of Saddam Hussein's armies from Kuwait. As the world's only superpower, the U.S. would intervene militarily – on humanitarian grounds – in countries most Americans knew little about: Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo (but not Rwanda). President Clinton worked with Russian president Boris Yeltsin on establishing a stable U.S.-Russ...

Few things in life, let alone politics, are truly unprecedented . When it comes to the American presidency, Donald Trump did make history as the first former chief executive to be charged with a crime. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg got a grand jury to indict Trump on 34 felony charges of falsifying business records. Trump's case comes half a century after President Gerald Ford pardoned R...

Historian Michael Kazin, a distinguished scholar of the American left, says American politics are caught in "the long 1960s." For decades Congress has been unable to pass sweeping measures desired by the progressive left to fundamentally reform American capitalism. They simply don't have the votes. In fact, neither major party recently has dominated Congress the way, for instance, Democrats did du...

Forty years ago, 'Return of the Jedi' opened in movie theaters, but 1983 also was a big year for another kind of 'Star Wars.' Two months before the movie premiered, President Ronald Reagan delivered a nationally televised address announcing an initiative to build a space-based missile shield that would use lasers to shoot down incoming ICBMs. Derisively dubbed "Star Wars" by skeptics -- skeptics w...

Former President Donald Trump held his first rally of the 2024 campaign near a special place in far-right mythology. Thirty years ago in Waco, Texas, federal agents lay siege to the Branch Davidian compound where charismatic religious leader David Koresh awaited the end of the world. In this episode, historian Nicole Hemmer contends Trump's choice of location was a deliberate move to stoke anti-go...

One consequence of the United States' massive military failures in the Greater Middle East is its waning influence in a region where U.S. leaders once dreamt democracy would spread outward from Kabul and Baghdad. As the U.S. presence and its credibility have shrunk, regional powers are looking elsewhere to resolve entrenched disputes. Enter Beijing. In this episode, the Quincy Institute's Trita Pa...

This is the third in a multi-part series of episodes examining the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which began on March 20, 2003. The video version of this episode will air on C-SPAN 2's American History TV on April 1. Melvin Leffler, an eminent historian of U.S. foreign policy, joins Martin Di Caro in a conversation about Leffler's new book, "Confronting Saddam Hussein." The histor...

This is the second in a multi-part series of episodes marking the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which began on March 20, 2003. Iraqi voices are largely absent from U.S. retrospectives on the war and its consequences. In this episode, Baghdad native and  The Guardian journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad reflects on everything he witnessed over the past 20 years -- the fall of Saddam, milit...