History As It Happens

Subscribe now for ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content! Every May, Israelis celebrate the anniversary of their independence. For Palestinians, their memories are of dispossession and displacement. Beginning in late 1947, months before the official creation of the Jewish state, Jewish forces expelled Palestinian Arabs and destroyed their homes and villages. By the time the Nakba, whic...

Subscribe now for ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content! This is the fourth episode in an occasional series for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, America's semiquincentennial. What if we approached this coming Fourth of July not as a single day to celebrate a special national birthday, but as the start of a decade-long commitment to a "civic renaissance"? The s...

Keep the narrative flow going!  Subscribe now for ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content! In the history of the long, misbegotten American project in Vietnam, an episode that pulled the country deeper into the quagmire deserves more attention. In 1963, the Kennedy administration green-lit a coup to topple the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam. Diem was an ardent anti-Communist w...

Subscribe now to listen to the entire 16-minute episode (or preview 6 minutes). President Trump is the eighth U.S. president to visit China since Richard Nixon's bold gamble to establish diplomatic relations with the Communist country in 1972. During his two-day summit with Xi Jinping last week, Trump's first China trip since 2017, the two leaders praised one another and discussed several pressing...

Keep the narrative flow going!  Subscribe now for ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content! The Nazis' official name was the National Socialist German Workers' Party, which may seem a strange choice given Hitler's ferocious hostility toward Marxism and Communism. Yet many right-wing pundits and politicians today argue that the Nazis were a left-wing movement opposed to capitalism, as evi...

Keep the narrative flow going! Subscribe now for ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content! What emerged as a national movement to liberate Europe's Jews by establishing a Jewish homeland has become a racist, irrational, vengeful state ideology worthy of history's dustbin, contends historian Omer Bartov in his new book, " Israel: What Went Wrong? " Bartov, an expert on the Holocaust and g...

Subscribe now to listen to the entire 18-minute episode (or preview 6 minutes). Two and a half months after President Trump ordered U.S. forces to bomb Iran, there is no war, no peace, and the Strait of Hormuz is still closed at both ends. The global economy is staggering from the loss of energy resources (oil and natural gas) that normally traverse the strait. Iran wants to establish its sovereig...

Subscribe now for early access, ad-free listening, and bonus content! Lebanon, a small country on the Mediterranean coast that cannot defend its borders, is once again stuck in a hellacious bind, between Hezbollah fanaticism and Israeli destruction. Since its long civil war (1975-90), sectarian strife and foreign occupation have intermixed with economic mismanagement and political paralysis, leavi...

Subscribe now for early access, ad-free listening, and bonus content! A decade before the state of Israel was born, a revolt rocked the British mandate of Palestine. It was an uprising of Arab peasants directed at their colonial overlords, Zionist immigrants, and Arab elites. The Great Revolt of 1936-1939 nearly succeeded before it was crushed by overwhelming force, a setback from which the Palest...

Subscribe now  for early access, ad-free listening, and bonus content!  HAIH Premium subscribers got this episode (with no ads!) on Monday, May 4. The United States' failure to defeat Iran in an unprovoked, undeclared war is fueling the notion that the U.S. is in decline. Its security commitments cover the globe. The annual defense budget is approaching $1 trillion. But the Pentagon can neither de...

Subscribe now for early access, ad-free listening, and bonus content! Shortly after taking office in 1969, President Richard Nixon believed he might intimidate, through military threats, the Soviet Union and North Vietnam into making concessions at the peace table. In Nixon's words, it was "Madman theory." It didn't work. Today, President Trump has tried to bluster and bluff his way to victory ove...

Subscribe now for early access, ad-free listening, and bonus content! In late April 1986, what should have been a routine test at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northeastern Ukraine turned into an epic disaster, the largest ever accidental release of deadly radiation. It contaminated the earth, exposed the rot in the Soviet system, and changed the course of history. To this day, Chernobyl is...

Subscribe now  for early access, ad-free listening, and bonus content!  HAIH Premium subscribers got this episode (with no ads!) on Thursday, April 23. When he took power 25 years ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to turn his country into a Great Power again, after it had endured a decade of poverty and humiliation following the collapse of the Soviet Union. But Russia is on the sidelin...

Subscribe now  for early access, ad-free listening, and bonus content!  HAIH Premium subscribers got this episode (with no ads!) on Monday, April 20. With Gaza destroyed and Jewish settlers rampaging the West Bank, and with the IDF occupying parts of southern Lebanon and Syria, talk of achieving "Greater Israel" is now commonplace among influential political and media figures in Israel, as well as...

Subscribe now  for early access, ad-free listening, and bonus content!  HAIH Premium subscribers got this episode (with no ads!) on Thursday, April 16. There was an old idea behind President Trump's threats to annihilate Iran's bridges, power plants, and other civilian infrastructure. It's called strategic bombing, and it was devised more than a century ago by an Italian air power theorist with a...

Subscribe now to listen to the entire 20-minute episode (or preview 5 minutes). After 16 years in power, the self-described illiberal democrat Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz political party were trounced in Hungary's national elections. Critics of Orbán's authoritarian style had long become concerned that he had so tilted the electoral system in Fidesz's favor that he might never be beaten. So, what...

Subscribe now for early access, ad-free listening, and bonus content! Great Britain, France, and Israel's secret plan in 1956 to invade Egypt, regain control of the Suez Canal, and force the nationalist strongman Gamal Nasser from power ended in strategic disaster. The Eisenhower administration angrily opposed the surprise attack and pressured the aggressors to withdraw, ensuring Egypt would maint...

Keep the narrative flow going in 2026.  Subscribe now for early access, ad-free listening, and bonus content! Over eight long years in the 1980s, Iraq and Iran pulverized each other in an unwinnable, pointless war that nonetheless began as an existential threat to the new revolutionary government in Tehran. In the crucible of war, the Islamic Republic cemented hardline clerical rule, crushed disse...

Subscribe now to listen to the entire 38-minute episode (or preview 10 minutes). Can a Siberian peasant influence the course of history? In the case of Grigori Rasputin, the answer was yes. A wanderer, mystic, and spiritual healer, Rasputin was also corrupt and lecherous — and his meddling in the affairs of state helped bring down the Tsarist autocracy in the crucible of war and revolution. In thi...

Keep the narrative flow going in 2026. Subscribe now for early access, ad-free listening, and bonus content! Wars in Eastern Europe and the Greater Middle East are killing and displacing societies and roiling the global economy. There is no end in sight: despite possessing powerful military arsenals and cutting-edge tech, warring states are unable to achieve decisive victories in modern warfare. I...

Subscribe now for early access, ad-free listening, and bonus content! With the Greater Middle East on fire from Gaza to Iran, bureaucratic and administrative changes taking place inside Israel may be easy to overlook. The right-wing coalition of Benjamin Netanyahu and the country's security establishment are annexing the West Bank. Even before the Six-Day War in 1967, the West Bank, often called J...

Subscribe now to listen to the entire 22-minute episode (or preview 7 minutes). President Donald Trump is not the first president to consider seizing Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf. Forty-six years ago, Jimmy Carter and his national security team mulled deploying troops to take the oil-critical island to compel Iran's revolutionary government to free more than 50 Americans held hostage at the U....

Subscribe now for early access, ad-free listening, and bonus content! The destruction of Palestinian society in Gaza is not over. More than five months after the ceasefire, Israel continues to kill Palestinians in airstrikes while restricting food and medicine to the enclave's desperate population. Yet the world's attention has moved on to other problems. Enter historian Jean-Pierre Filiu, who tra...

Subscribe now  for early access, ad-free listening, and bonus content!  HAIH Premium subscribers got this episode (with no ads!) on Thursday, March 26. Israel is at war in Lebanon again, displacing a million Lebanese from their homes in the southern part of the country, its latest attempt to disarm Hezbollah. This new invasion continues a long pattern stretching back decades, where Israel tries an...

Subscribe now  for early access, ad-free listening, and bonus content!  HAIH Premium subscribers got this episode (with no ads!) on Monday, March 23. One of the world's longest ruling autocrats, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in an Israeli airstrike, the opening blow of a war to defeat or destroy Iran. During his 37 years in power, Ali Khamenei was a mysterious figure, forged by revolution...