History As It Happens

It's Election Day in America and the survival of liberal democracy is said to be on the ballot. What does this mean? Has the United States ever been a democracy where all enjoy political freedom and economic rights? In this episode, historians Sean Wilentz and James Oakes delve into the history of political conflict in America, the progress and regress of democracy and liberty, a story of liberali...

**New episode! History As It Happens has returned!** This is the eighth and final episode in a monthly series examining influential elections in U.S. history. The most recent episode, Election of 2008 , was published on Sept 17. As the Obama presidency ended, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was the obvious frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. As for the Republicans, 17 candidates v...

This episode was first published on March 4, 2024. Original show notes: The embattled incumbent expressed anguish over soulless materialism. The optimistic challenger promised Americans they could overcome any and all problems. The election of 1980 pitted Democrat Jimmy Carter against Republican Ronald Reagan as Americans struggled with stagflation at home and crises abroad. Reagan's victory marke...

This episode was first published on Feb. 22, 2024 as part of a series marking the second anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Original show notes: In every war, there is a battle over its origins. In this episode, historians Michael Kimmage and Mark Galeotti discuss Kimmage's new book, "Collisions," which seeks to explain why the excessive optimism of the early 1990s about Russia's path to...

This episode was first published on Oct. 24, 2023. Original show notes: Today's war between Israel and Hamas has its origins in the unresolved problems caused by the events of 1948. The year that witnessed the creation of an independent Jewish state in the former British mandate of Palestine, is known by Palestinians as the  nakba , or catastrophe. Internecine violence intensified in 1947 as the U...

This episode was first published on April 12, 2022. Original show notes: Was the Constitution pro- or anti-slavery? Maybe that is the wrong question to ask, even though it remains  the question  at the heart of public discourse about the founding generation. In this episode, Sean Wilentz and James Oakes -- two major scholars of eighteenth and nineteenth century America -- argue the Constitution wa...

This episode was first published on June 25, 2024. Original show notes: Why are Palestinians stateless more than 75 years after the founding of a Jewish state in the same land? Why have international law and the rules-based order established after 1945 failed the Palestinian people? Why hasn't the U.N. with its security council designed to prevent conflict, stopped the Israel-Palestinian conflict?...

This episode was first published on August 17, 2023. Original show notes: 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. Some scientists questioned whether it was necessary to use...

This is the second of two episodes dealing with the consequences of the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel and ensuing year of war. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says his country will prevail over its enemies and change the Middle East for the better. This is not the first time Netanyahu (or other national leaders) have claimed war will produce positive results. PLO violence against Isra...

This is the first of two episodes dealing with the consequences of the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel and ensuing year of war. A year after Israel began its military campaign in Gaza with the aim of destroying Hamas in retaliation for the 10/7 terrorist atrocities, the radical Islamist group survives. Hamas is weakened, but it maintains a brutal grip on power in Gaza. Hamas also continues to hol...

Israel's invasion of southern Lebanon is evoking comparisons to 1982, the year Israel tried to rout an enemy on the other side of the border, leading to a catastrophe for Palestinian civilians. What happened at Sabra and Shatila sparked international outrage and a rebuke from Washington. Forty-two years later, Israel is risking falling into a Lebanese abyss once more. In this episode, historian Ah...

Russian exiles in the West may not be able to change, let alone save, their home country, which is locked in the grip of the Putin autocracy, at war in Ukraine, and in a long conflict with the United States. Yet the exiles are important beyond the realm of politics because their minds and talents enrich Western societies. In this episode, historian Michael Kimmage and Russian journalist and politi...

After the disastrous failures of the U.S. projects in Iraq and Afghanistan, many Americans have soured on nation-building, especially if it involves the deployment of U.S. troops in a hostile country for years on end. Americans also remember the fiasco in Somalia in 1993 or the hazy national interest when it came to intervening in the Balkans. In this episode, Keith Mines, a former U.S. Army offic...

As another presidential election looms, so does the possibility that the ultimate winner will lose the popular vote. The race is decided by the Electoral College, which critics say is anti-democratic body that distorts outcomes. Since 1988, Republican candidates have won the popular vote once (2004), but twice won the White House thanks to an Electoral College majority -- in 2000 and 2016. In this...

Is there a Biden Doctrine? What did it achieve? Where did it fail? The president sought to reset U.S. foreign policy after the unilateralism of the Trump years. Biden spoke of a global battle pitting democracies versus autocracies, and he reinforced U.S. alliances in Europe and Asia. Presidents from Truman to Reagan to George W. Bush saw their names attached to actionable ideas, i.e. containment o...

A crushing economic crisis, caused by the subprime mortgage meltdown, and two failing wars were the backdrop for the election of 2008. At the onset of the year, a first-term Democratic senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, was a long shot taking on Hillary Clinton, the New York senator and former first lady with universal name recognition. On the Republican side, Arizona Senator John McCain emerged...

The Israeli military raids and unchecked settler violence in the West Bank are shifting, for a moment, the world's attention away from the ongoing war in Gaza -- and revealing the brutal realities of Palestinian life under military occupation. In July the U.N.'s top court issued a non-binding opinion saying Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories and expanding settlement activity violate in...

In Israel (and the Palestinian territories), support for a two-state solution has dramatically dropped since the more optimistic years of the Oslo peace process. Since the Second Intifada from 2000, the Israeli peace camp "suffered domestic delegitimization," according to Dahlia Scheindlin, a political strategist and a public opinion expert who has advised on nine national campaigns in Israel amon...

In our world of conflicts, a civil war in Africa is going mostly unnoticed in the United States, at least compared to the attention given to the wars in Ukraine and Israel. For the third time in its post-independence history (from 1956), Sudan is embroiled in a horrendous civil war full of massacres, the displacement of millions, and the potential for mass famine. In this episode, Alex de Waal, on...

Russia invaded Ukraine in an act of naked aggression more than 900 days ago. Both sides have lost at least tens of thousands of their soldiers, yet the 750-mile front has not moved much in the past two years. Neither side appears close to military victory, but they also appear far apart on a possible negotiated settlement. As Ukrainian forces invade the Russian territory of Kursk, and as Ukraine's...

This is the second conversation in a two-part series recorded inside the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon. John Adams' one-term presidency was sandwiched between towering figures of the American past. He succeeded the living legend George Washington and was succeeded by Thomas Jefferson, and Adams' time in office was marked by incessant crisis and ferocious partisanship. Hist...

This is the first conversation of a two-part series recorded at the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon. Hundreds of thousands of Americans visit Mount Vernon annually. Relatively few people see the inside of the George Washington Library. Its new executive director is historian Lindsay Chervinsky, and she wants to make the library a meeting place for elevated, historically-info...

This month marked 50 years since Richard Nixon resigned the presidency for the crimes of Watergate. The endless fascination with the break-in and the cover-up has obscured what may be more important in Nixon's legacy as Americans demand a more restrained foreign policy today: his contribution to the imperial presidency and the crimes he got away with. In the summer of 1974, Congress had a chance t...

The selections of Republican JD Vance and Democrat Tim Walz as vice presidential running mates received non-stop media attention this summer, but will either choice really matter come November? Does anyone vote for vice president? John Adams once called the vice presidency "the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived." Yet many vice president...

This is the sixth episode in an occasional series examining influential elections in U.S. history. The most recent episode,  Election of 2000 , was published on July 11. If you believe American society has never been as politically polarized as it is now, you may not be familiar with the late 1790s. Federalists and Republicans viciously attacked each other, trading accusations of frittering away t...