History As It Happens

President Biden's decision to withdraw the last U.S. troops from Afghanistan in September is raising questions about the future of a country that has seen little but conflict and humanitarian crises since 1979. The U.S. war could end the way it started: with the Taliban in power. Former U.S. diplomat Johnny Walsh took part in negotiations with the Talibs at the peace table, and was a senior adviso...

Will history be made in the U.S. House? The Democratic-led chamber is expected to vote to make the District of Columbia the 51st state in the Union. Although the legislation faces poor odds in the Senate, the D.C. statehood movement believes it is closer than ever to achieving its goal. Opponents say the Constitution forbids Congress from acting because new states require ratification of a constit...

Republican lawmakers in state legislatures nationwide are proposing more than 250 measures that, critics say, are designed to curb access to the ballot or open the road to partisan interference in elections. Georgia's new election laws are ground zero in the fight for voting rights, provoking a corporate backlash and comparisons to Jim Crow, the system of white supremacy that grew from the ashes o...

Filibuster, schmilibuster! The origins of the word filibuster seem to belie any claims that the tool of partisan warfare is really a pillar of senatorial greatness, and therefore must be guarded against efforts to weaken or eliminate it. Princeton historian Sean Wilentz returns to the podcast to discuss the pros and cons of doing away with the Senate's long-lasting accident. (Blame Aaron Burr!)

University of Virginia historian Philip Zelikow says President Woodrow Wilson made the most consequential diplomatic error in U.S. history. In his new book, "The Road Less Traveled," Zelikow presents compelling evidence that Wilson could have avoided getting the U.S. involved in the First World War and brought the conflict to a negotiated end in 1916 in the process. The peace ball was in his hands...

Fifty years after Nixon's move to open the door to Mao's China, the world's most populous country is vying to become the most militarily and economically powerful one. In 1971, few Americans might have foreseen the dramatic changes China would undergo, as it began incorporating market reforms into its one-party, Communist state. Is the door now open to conflict, competition, or cooperation? The Wa...

Facing the biggest migrant surge in 20 years, the Biden administration is struggling to cope with the influx. Beyond its immediate causes tied to the president's new policies, however, the wave of unaccompanied children is part of a larger historical pattern fueled by varying "push" and "pull" factors and created by decades of political corruption, U.S. interventionism, civil war, and economic dis...

Is American capitalism broken? The 2020 presidential campaign, in the midst of an economy-shattering pandemic, reignited the debate over whether our version of capitalism needs some socialism to survive. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders offered a full-throated defense of democratic socialism, for instance, while his opponents on the Republican side warned against tilting too far to the left. Harvard...

Since Richard Nixon won about 30 percent of the Black vote in 1960, at a time when Black people were disenfranchised wholesale in the South, no Republican presidential candidate has been able to crack 15 percent (Gerald Ford in 1976) for the past half century. Donald Trump won as much as 12 percent of the Black vote in 2020, but he left the Republican Party facing accusations that it embraces raci...

What's more important to U.S. foreign policy, human rights or oil and regional alliances? What should take precedence, morality or realpolitik? President Biden's decision not to directly punish Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi raises questions that date to 1945, when FDR became the first U.S. president to meet a Saudi king. Philip Zelikow, who was the executive di...

One year after the rhythms of daily life were upended by the unchecked spread of an invisible, deadly pathogen, Americans have a degree of optimism that the worst of the coronavirus pandemic is behind them. Glimmers of hope are mixing with dark realities, however, as more than 1,000 Americans people are dying each day. Historian John Barry, author of 'The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadlies...

The U.S. faces a May 1 deadline to withdraw its last 2,500 troops from Afghanistan, nearly 20 years after invading to avenge the 9/11 terrorist strikes by al-Qaeda. What will it take to end this forever war? Washington Times national security reporter Guy Taylor and the Quincy Institute's Adam Weinstein, a U.S. Marine veteran, join the conversation. 

If the Reagan era is long over, and if the Tea Party has had its day, the makeup of a post-Trump Republican Party, as well as the broader conservative movement, remains unclear. Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, author of 'The Age of Reagan: A History 1974-2008' says Trump and the current GOP share important similarities but also differ sharply from the party during the Reagan era -- and that make...

Abraham Lincoln was neither a faultless hero nor an irredeemable white supremacist. Remembered as the Great Emancipator who saved the Union, Lincoln's lesser-known views about race are coming under scrutiny as Americans reckon with their nation's history of racial injustice. Historian David S. Reynolds, winner of the prestigious Lincoln Prize for his biography of the sixteenth president, Abe: Abra...

President Biden's decision to order airstrikes against targets in Syria, as a warning to Iran against backing militias in Iraq, served Americans an important reminder. The situation remains unstable and dangerous, and relations between the U.S. and Iran remain at a low point. But it does not have to be this way, says Middle East expert John Ghazvinian. He explains what the U.S. keeps getting wrong...

More news and information is available at your fingertips than ever before, but journalism is in serious trouble. The problems run deeper than perceived partisan bias, social media chaos, and cratering public trust. Maybe the biggest issue of all is advertising-based journalism cannot survive, and we are drowning in misinformation as a result. This episode also features an interview with Washingto...

What is fascism? The word brings to mind Mussolini, Hitler, and the catastrophes of the twentieth century. Nowadays, fascism --  like socialism  -- is often hurled as an insult in American politics. NYU historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present , explains fascism's roots and why the term retains so much potency in contemporary politics. 

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph Ellis joins the podcast to talk about conspiratorial thinking in American politics, from George Washington to QAnon. Wild theories and zany ideas have always been a part of the political landscape, even if the QAnon cult seems more outlandish than anything we have seen before.

To paraphrase Noam Chomsky, you are either for free speech or you are not. Few issues in American culture today stoke such controversy as free expression, one of America's most cherished traditions. But at a time of Big Tech control over social media platforms, cancel culture, political correctness, and safe spaces, free expression is under attack.

The popular unrest following the arrest of opposition politician Alexei Navalny provoked a heavy-handed police crackdown in Russia, where more than 10,000 demonstrators were arrested. More than 20 years after assuming power, Vladimir Putin continues to grip the reins of control, with the maintenance of Russia's global influence his primary goal. Call him Vladimir the Survivor. How does Russia's st...

Few words in the American political lexicon are as freighted with fear as socialism . It can conjure thoughts of diabolical Communism, the horrors of Stalin and Mao, and the Iron Curtain. In some quarters socialism is un-American because of its perceived threat to overturn capitalism and erode freedom.  But attitudes are changing, especially among younger Americans who are embracing less narrow de...

The historian who drafted an open letter, signed by more than 1,000 scholars, calling for Donald Trump's impeachment explains why experts on the past should weigh in on the present. A must-listen, as the Senate prepares for the fourth presidential impeachment trial -- in this case, of an ex-President. There seems little doubt Donald Trump will be acquitted. Since Watergate, Americans politics have...

A decade after the Occupy Wall Street protesters called out the reckless greed that brought down the economy, a different kind of anti-Wall Street, populist uprising is happening online -- on comment threads and in trading apps -- and these protesters are dumping equal parts money and defiance into their cause. The GameStop revolution also speaks to general frustration with the state of work in Am...

King sharply criticized capitalism. He condemned the Vietnam War, referring to the U.S. government "as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" in a powerful oration at a historic church in New York in 1967, a year before his death. King pointedly criticized white moderates who were "more devoted to 'order' than to justice." Recovering the full profile of King's activism and worldview...

The fate of President Biden's ambitious legislative agenda will depend on whether Congress embraces his FDR-like call for bold government action to deal not only with the immediate economic fallout of the pandemic during his first 100 days in office, but long running inequities in American society that will require work extending well into his term — more like 1,000 days and beyond.