The History Onion

Today we are re-releasing our interview with Melat Kiros, a progressive candidate for Congress in Colorado’s 1st District. Originally published in October of 2025, our interview broaches topics including how to get money out of politics and fix corruption, why Democratic resistance to Trump thus far has been largely ineffective, and how Democrats have failed on the genocide in Gaza and what to do...

Víctor Jara, sometimes referred to as the “Bob Dylan of South America,” was a Chilean folk singer who rose to prominence in the 1960s as part of the nueva canción movement. His songs were often deeply political in nature, providing a voice for the Chilean working class and peasantry. In 1970, his recording of “Venceremos” (We Will Win) became the anthem of the left-wing Popular Unity coalition led...

For our 50th episode (!!), we are excited to present our January interview with Marc Cooper. Marc Cooper is the former associate professor and director of Annenberg Digital News at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. His writing has appeared in a variety of publications, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, and the Washington Post . Currently, he is...

We are excited to share our interview with Juliana DeVaan, a PhD candidate in US history at Columbia University, where she studies 20th-century cultural and intellectual history. Her work has been supported by the New York State Archives, New York Public Library, Getty Research Institute, and the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, among other institutions. You can read Juliana’...

We are excited today to share our interview with Ariel Dorfman, an Argentine-Chilean-American novelist, playwright, essayist, academic, and human rights activist. Professor Dorfman served as a cultural adviser to Chilean President Salvador Allende’s Chief of Staff during the last months of Allende’s presidency, and wrote a seminal critique of US cultural imperialism, How to Read Donald Duck , duri...

We are excited to be joined on today’s show by investigative reporter and writer John Dinges. John Dinges has decades of experience covering Latin America, including as a foreign correspondent in Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua in the 1970s and 1980s. He has worked for such publications as The Washington Post and NPR. While living in Chile between 1972 and 1978, he helped create three...

We are excited to be joined today by Alex Williams, the principal US economist at Common Wealth , a progressive think tank operating across the US and UK, as well as a policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and the Editor-in-Chief of the Substack newsletter Continuous Variation . Previously, Alex worked at Employ America , where he advocated for full employment polici...

Today, we are joined once again by Jack Meyer (check out our previous episode with him here: “ Abundance, with Jack Meyer ”). Jack is an economics masters student at Oxford, as well as an aspiring political economist and economic historian. His current areas of study include innovation, development and inequality. You can find him on Twitter/X @jackbmeyer and on Substack, where he publishes the ne...

The Pinochet dictatorship in Chile was defined in large part by its brutally repressive nature. Its centralization of repression in the DINA (Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional) and the centrality of repressive tactics even after the junta consolidated power made Pinochet’s Chile stick out in comparison to other contemporary Latin American dictatorships. In today’s episode, we discuss how to best...

After a few months off, we are returning to our Modern Chile series with today’s episode. For our next episodes in this series, we will be covering the Pinochet years, defined primarily as the years between 1973 and 1990 in which General Augusto Pinochet ruled Chile as a brutal, bloody dictator. We will also investigate the efforts to bring Pinochet to justice following his ousting by a popular pl...

This episode is the second installation in our series on the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Our first episode covered the very recent history of the conflict, looking at the round of violence that began in October of 2023 with a Hamas-led attack on Israel. The primary focus for that episode was the genocide that Israel has perpetrated against Palestinians in Gaza since the fall of 2023....

Today we are excited to release our excellent conversation with Professor Kristoffer Smemo, author of Making Republicans Liberal: Social Struggle and the Politics of Compromise. Professor Smemo is a historian of labor, politics, and popular culture in the United States at the University of California - Los Angeles. Both hosts of the show were incredibly lucky to have been taught by Professor Smemo...

This episode marks the first installation of a new mini-series for the podcast. The series will cover the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and will take as a central text guiding us through this history a book titled The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine , which was written by the Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi. But before getting into the book, we wanted to start with an epi...

For today’s episode, we spoke with Michael Foley, author of Citizen Cash: The Political Life and Times of Johnny Cash , for a wide-ranging discussion about Cash’s politics. We dissect Foley’s framework of a “politics of empathy” to describe how Cash navigated a complex political environment marked primarily by the various civil rights movements and the Vietnam War. Crucially, we consider the relev...

In this episode, we dig deep into the slop of AI discourse. We start by looking at the culture of hype that’s sprouted in Silicon Valley, then turn to the strange world that this hype has produced, and finally present a more sober view of AI, one that’s deeply historically grounded. Show Notes Silicon Valley Braces for Chaos — The Atlantic , 5/13/2025 Sam Altman, Tim Cook, and other tech leaders l...

Today we are thrilled to release our interview with Melat Kiros, a progressive candidate for Congress in Colorado’s 1st District. Kiros is running to unseat the longest-serving representative of Colorado’s current congressional delegation, Democrat Diana DeGette, and she is doing so with an unabashedly progressive platform. She has centered issues of affordable housing, healthcare, and money in po...

Today we are joined by Jack Meyer, an economics masters student at Oxford, as well as an aspiring political economist and economic historian. His current areas of study include innovation, development and inequality. You can find him on Twitter/X @jackbmeyer and on Substack, where he publishes the newsletter Public Works . On this episode, we take on Abundance , a bestselling book published earlie...

Today we are joined by Ross Barkan, an award-winning journalist, novelist, and essayist. Ross is the Editor-in-Chief of The Metropolitan Review , a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine , and a columnist for New York Magazine . He is also active on Substack, where he publishes his newsletter Political Currents . And he has a new novel, titled Glass Century , that is out now. On this e...

We are happy to announce our first interview episode, featuring friend of show Spencer Hacker! Spencer is a social worker, an activist, and a political content creator. He is based out of Denver, Colorado, and he is making waves with his show Spencer on the Street, which you can find on Instagram and TikTok ! On this episode, we talk with Spencer about his political journey and about the case for...

We ended our last episode with the United States contemplating its next move against the Chilean left. The socialist Salvador Allende had just won the Chilean presidency in the 1970 election in spite of the US’s covert actions throughout the decade prior and its “Spoiling Operation” in the 1970 election. In today’s Part 2 of “The US in Chile,” we discuss how the US maneuvered to try to prevent All...

In the first of two episodes on the subject, we investigate the United States’s role in undermining the left wing in Chilean politics throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Drawing extensively from the Senate Church Committee’s 1975 report, “Covert Action in Chile, 1963-1973 ,” we show just how much money, time, and effort the United States spent on Chile in order to not just incapacitate the country’s l...

This episode continues our coverage of modern Chile, focusing on the economics of the period of 1970-1973, during which Salvador Allende governed as president and his administration attempted to transition Chile towards a socialist economic system. We begin with a discussion of sources — who has written about the economics of the Allende years, and whose work will we be drawing upon. We then descr...

On our last episode, we gave an introduction to the history of Chile and a preview of the issues and themes we will be exploring throughout this series. Episode 2 will focus on the political life and evolution of Salvador Allende, perhaps the single most important person to this story. Allende’s legacy in Chilean politics and society is difficult to overstate, and he didn’t come out of nowhere; in...

Chile is a country whose history cannot be disentangled from our own; one of history’s great coincidences reminds us of this. On September 11th, 1973, 28 years before the terror attack on the United States, the democratically elected government of socialist leader Salvador Allende was overthrown in a violent coup that left Allende himself dead. The ensuing 17 years of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorsh...

In this episode, we delve into John Maynard Keynes’s seminal essay, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” Published in 1930, the essay envisioned a future of prosperity and leisure for all. We explore his predictions, his optimism for the future, and the challenges that have prevented his utopian vision from becoming reality. Show Notes The New Yorker : “ No Time ” Economic Possibilities...