History Behind News Program

From Atatürk to Erdoğan. From Secularism to Islamism. From a parliamentary system to absolute presidential power. Türkiye is set to hold a runoff election next week, on May 28th, between President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the opposition leader, Mr. Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. And the general consensus is that Erdoğan is in the lead. This has come as a surprise and a disappointment to many, particularly si...

Title 42 Expired. From Chinese & Catholic & Jewish immigrants of yesteryears to immigrations now at our southern border. After Title 42 expired last week, America expected a deluge of immigrants to pour over our border with Mexico. But the post-Title 42 reality hasn't yet met the awful specter that everyone feared. Regardless, the strains of migration from our southern border are not l...

King Charles III will be crowned by the Archbishop of Canterbury. But Napoleon crowned himself! As my guest, Dr. Jaume Aurell, tells it, many monarchs have performed self-coronation. What is interesting is that they did this, perhaps defying firmly adhered-to precedence, to establish their own authority, their own supremacy, and to send a clear and visual message about their real and perceived pow...

Hey there News Peelers, We have a great lineup of episodes starting this Fri., May 5, through the end ofMay. Listen to this brief trailer to find out more about them. Also, if you are not already supporting the History Behind News podcast, please consider supporting me and this program. It's easy. Just click the support link below. ⁠⁠⁠⁠ SUPPORT ⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ Your financial support helps and motivates me t...

From Walter Cronkite to Tucker Carlson. And Dominion v. Fox News. The history of defamation suits against journalists is quite colorful. More than mere legal standards of proof for litigants, it goes to the core of our country's liberty and freedom of the press. In this episode, Dr. Aimee Edmondson explains how the US Supreme Court's Sullivan decision in 1964 liberated journalists to do their jobs...

Resurrecting & reinterpreting the 2nd Amendment. Kansas City shooting of a Black teenager who was at the wrong address, New York woman in the wrong driveway shot dead, Alabama birthday party mass shooting, Nashville school mass shooting, Half Moon Bay mass shooting, Monterey Park Lunar New Year mass shooting, and many, many more! How did we get here?!? I don't remember it being this bad before...

Mass protests in Israel against Mr. Netanyahu's judiciary overhaul plan virtually brought the country to a standstill and threatened to split the military and drag it into the current political conflict. My guest for this episode, Dr. Gideon Rahat, explains that this is one of the direst crises in Israel's history. This assessment was recently confirmed by Mr. Netanyahu's speech, in wh...

King Charles canceled his much anticipated official visit to France that was scheduled for the end of Mach, because the French President, Emanuel Macron, told him don't come - we have mass protests here in France! France is now approaching three months of mass protests against President Marcon's pension reform bill, which increased the retirement age from 62 to 64. Polls show that 65% of t...

Hey there News Peelers, We have a great lineup of episodes starting this Fri., Apr. 7, through all of April and then into May. Listen to this brief trailer to find out more about them. And click the following link for our series on the history of the US economy: HbN US Econ Series . Also, if you are not already supporting the History Behind News podcast, please consider supporting me and this prog...

Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank are the two midsize banks that just collapsed. But... how can we have major bank failures, with billions of dollars at stake. Didn't we learn how to regulate banks during the financial crisis of the Great Recession? That was barely 15 years ago! In this episode, my guest, Dr. Lawrence White, explains that almost always when a bank run occurs, it's on...

Although news about Iran doesn't deluge our headlines any longer, as it did the days and weeks after Ms. Mahsa Amini's murder, we continue to hear and see trickles of news about Iran and Iranians. And it's a good time to talk about it, because it's the Persian New Year on March 20th - just 3 days from now.  In this episode, my guest, Dr. Khodadad Rezakhani of Leiden University, tak...

History of America's electric grid and blackouts in heatwaves, freezes and storms. After WWII, Americans assumed that electric power would always be available. So no wonder that when we experienced our first massive power outage back in the 1960s... Americans were shocked! But as our grids become ever more complex, we experience more power outages caused by storms or cascading blackouts that s...

My guest in this episode is Dr. Naomi Lamoreaux. She explains how antitrust enforcement has changed since its lax era of the 1980s. She adds that it's not just antitrust, patent law, which is seemingly a highly technical field of law, is also a product of our political system.  Dr. Lamoreaux takes us back to John D. Rockefeller, to the days of Standard Oil, to how the term antitrust was adopte...

As the one-year anniversary of Ukraine's war with Russia approached this week, President Biden made a surprise visit to Ukraine, and gave a rousing speech in Warsaw, doubling down on America's commitment to supporting Ukraine. The same day, President Putin gave his State of the Nation speech in Moscow, promising to double down on Russia's attacks on Ukraine with fresh troops and a new...

Although China won't admit it, its huge balloon hovering over the United States, in plain view of ordinary Americans, was a huge geopolitical blunder. To boot, that we shot it down and were able to confirm it was equipped with spying equipment, which negated their claim that it was just a weather balloon, internationally undermined their credibility.  But we have had our own share of blunders....

Western countries, mainly the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany, are supposed to be sending tanks to Ukraine, to help its valiant fight against Russia. There are two points to consider here. The first is that despite the original enthusiasm and the display of a united front to help Ukraine, these Western may not be arriving anytime soon - save for Germany. The second is that if and whe...

From favelas to beachfront properties. From democracies to dictatorships. From economic booms to busts. From Catholicism to evangelical Christianity. And from white to many shades of colors. Brazil's January 8th insurrection occurred two years and two days after our own January 6th insurrection. While our news media has covered the many similarities between these two events, such as false clai...

Now that Mr. Biden is halfway through his presidential term, we want to find his place in US history. In other words, we want to weigh his presidency against prior US presidents.  For example, how do Mr. Biden's successes or failures stack up against his predecessors? How does his age compare to prior US presidents? I know that's a big concern for lots of people. And related to that, here...

It's the two-year anniversary of the History Behind News podcast. Given this news, we decided to look into the history behind podcasting. For example, how did podcasting become a thing? How and when did podcasting morph out of its super geeky & techy origins, into this huge, supercool, mainstream phenomenon? And how is a podcast different than, say, a radio program that’s just uploaded ont...

The B-21 Raider is a new Air Force superweapon - a stealth bomber that has taken the Northrop Grumman close to a decade to develop on time and under budget. But the US Air Force has been shrinking its bomber fleet since the collapse of the USSR - the Soviet Union. So why develop the B-21 Raider now? Why embark on a huge and highly costly new bomber project now?  To dig deeper into this history, I...

The 118th Congress convened this week, on Tuesday, Jan. 3, 2023. But the Republican-dominated U.S. House of Representatives has failed to show even a semblance of proper function. No business has been conducted for the last three days, because we have no Speaker of the House. And as of this recording, the two-year anniversary of the Jan. 6th attack on Congress, Mr. Kevin McCarthy has Failed to win...

Was Iran's 1979 Revolution an Islamic revolution? Many people say no, it was not. So if that's the case, then why did Iranians vote to transform Iran into an Islamic republic shortly after the revolution? And how can an Islamic state also operate as a republic? These are two opposing ideas - one represents the rule of the people and the other rule of the divine.  My guest for this episode is...

How does his 2024 comeback attempt compare to other US presidents? And can Trump Be Disqualified From Running In 2024?  Barely a week after this year's midterm elections, in which the much anticipated Republican Red Wave never materialized, former President Trump announced his candidacy for the 2024 presidential election.  The only president who succeeded in occupying the White House in two non-co...

Why was OPEC formed? Who were the Seven Sisters that ruled the world? How were oil prices determined in the past? And How are they determined now? Will oil and gas prices decrease more anytime soon?  For answers to these questions, I spoke with Ms. Jacqueline L. Weaver, a Professor of Law at the University of Houston Law Center. Her teaching and research interests cover oil and gas law, energ...

The "Red Wave" that was trumped up as a red tsunami never materialized... it barely lapped the shore (I am keeping with the wave analogy here).  So what happened? Did we Americans essentially fear the instability that election deniers pose to our democratic systems? If so, we must have feared this so much that we voted for the very party that most of us seem to blame for high inflation, which...