History As It Happens

Subscribe now to skip ads, get early access, and enjoy all of our bonus content. Nicaragua has a dictator for life. President Daniel Ortega , 80, announced the country won’t hold elections anytime soon, underscoring his effort to extend his nearly 20-year rule and dashing the opposition's hopes that he might allow a modicum of democracy, according to the Associated Press. Few expected next year's...

Subscribe now to listen to the full 18-minute episode (or preview the first 6 minutes). Iran's new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei remains invisible more than 7 months into an existential war for the regime's survival. He's yet to be seen in public and was reportedly seriously wounded on the war's first day in an air strike that killed his father. So, who is running Iran? Who is directing the war...

Subscribe now to skip ads, get early access, and listen to all of our bonus content. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt entered the White House in 1933, the country was paralyzed by the Great Depression and fascist jackboots were trampling democracy in Europe. As the 1930s wore on, the president and the American people came to see fascism as not only a threat to societies on the other side of the Atla...

Subscribe now to skip ads, get early access, and listen to all of our bonus content. The Middle East is undergoing transformative changes. It's difficult, if not impossible, to see where things will end up. What is clear, however, is that political Islam — what the scholar Mohammed Ayoob says was "the dominant ideological challenger to the region’s authoritarian political systems" — is declining....

Subscribe to listen to the full 28-minute episode (or preview the first 9 minutes). Scientists sequenced Thomas Jefferson’s genome from three strands of his hair for a project led by the Smithsonian Institution to prove that Jefferson fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings. According to The New York Times , researchers used cutting-edge techniques to extract and sequence the DNA, then comp...

Subscribe for ad-free listening, early access, and all of our bonus content! In leafy Meridian Hill Park in Washington, D.C., there stands a bronze statue of the fifteenth president of the United States. Only an inscription etched in the surrounding marble identifies its subject: BUCHANAN. Yes, a statue to the terrible James Buchanan, who interfered in a notorious Supreme Court ruling, consistentl...

Subscribe today to skip ads and get all of our bonus content. Help the podcast survive and thrive! As some Israeli government ministers call for the "voluntary migration" of all Palestinians from Gaza, the term  ethnic cleansing is back in the news. Before the 1990s, international institutions and mainstream political figures seldom used the term. Then came the Serb atrocities in Croatia and...

Subscribe to skip ads and get all of our bonus content. A special tribunal in The Hague convicted a hero of Kosovo's independence struggle of war crimes. Hashim Thaci was sentenced to 25 years for the crimes of arbitrary detention, torture, and murder. Three other former Kosovo Liberation Army figures were also convicted for targeting ethnic Albanians whom they suspected of collaborating with the...

Subscribe now for ad-free listening, early access, and all of our bonus content. Vladimir Putin and the Russian foreign policy establishment's goal is not to outlast the West only in Ukraine, but to create an alternate world order of anti-Western countries, a world where Russia can evade sanctions, throw around its influence, and disseminate its propaganda to receptive audiences. This is according...

Subscribe for ad-free listening, early access, and all of our bonus content! The Constitution created what were supposed to be three coequal branches, and only Congress was given the authority to declare war. Yet we are living in the age of the imperial presidency — of endless war, executive orders, government secrecy, and a lack of accountability. These are all fit for a monarchy instead of a rep...

Subscribe to listen to the entire 22-minute episode (or preview 8 minutes). New developments in Yemen bode poorly for global oil flows or a peaceful settlement of the Greater Middle East's raging conflicts. The Associated Press reports the Houthi rebels have seized two strategic islands in the southern Red Sea, bolstering their ability to control a critical maritime shipping route. The Houthis’ la...

Subscribe today to support the show and enjoy ad-free listening! History As It Happens is "on location" in this episode. Host Martin Di Caro visits Thomas Jefferson's historic Monticello estate in Virginia to talk to Brandon Dillard, its director of historic interpretation and audience engagement. Their conversation covers Monticello's new America250-related exhibits and the challenge of interpret...

Subscribe today to skip ads and get all of our bonus content! Twenty-five years ago, on September 11, 2001, nineteen al-Qaeda hijackers working for Osama bin Laden killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington, and a Pennsylvania field. The U.S. responded by launching a poorly defined war across the Greater Middle East that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, the displace...

Subscribe to enjoy ad-free episodes and early access, plus all our bonus content. Maybe U.S. presidents need to read a how-to manual on avoiding quagmires. Or maybe it wouldn't make much difference anyway. To understand why the United States keeps being sucked into protracted conflicts in the Greater Middle East, we must look beyond individual decision-making, says Emma Ashford of the Stimson Cent...

Subscribe now to skip ads and get all of our bonus content. Since the aftermath of the Second World War and the establishment of an independent Jewish state of Israel in 1948, U.S. foreign policy has been in the "grip of a foreign power," according to the authors of " Israel's Lobby ." Authors Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick contend that the lobby has successfully pressured generations of U.S. leaders...

Subscribe today to skip ads and get all of our bonus content! Since the New York real estate developer-turned-realty TV star Donald Trump entered politics a decade ago, his personality has dominated Americans' lives. Where did Trump's malignant charisma come from? Where did he learn the art of the deal and how to master the media? And what about the ways of the liar, the cheat, and the bully? From...

Subscribe to get ad-free listening, early access, and all of our bonus content! Sixty years ago, in late August 1966, a remarkable film premiered at the Venice Film Festival. The Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo's 'The Battle of Algiers' portrayed the brutal realities of the Algerian war for independence against colonial France. It has inspired revolutionaries fighting for national liberation eve...

Subscribe today to listen to this entire 20-minute episode (or preview 6 minutes). Subscribers enjoy all of our bonus content, early access, and ad-free listening. Some 23 years after the U.S. invaded Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein, the country's stability and sovereignty remain compromised. Washington continues to demand that Baghdad disarm powerful, Iran-backed Shia militias — a promise the new I...

Subscribe today for ad-free listening, early access, and all of our bonus content. Myanmar is not a country. It is a place of endless violence and ethnic strife, with its 50 million people trapped in another civil war, now in its fifth year, with no end in sight. Since its independence from Great Britain after the Second World War, Burma (now Myanmar) has been ruled mostly by military juntas. Ever...

Subscribe today for ad-free listening and early access! Since returning to the White House in 2025, President Trump has threatened to annex Greenland by force, mused about making Canada the 51st state, claimed he was ready to retake the Panama Canal, and turned Venezuela into a vassal by kidnapping its leader. Trump is trying to turn the clock back to a time when annexation (or territorial expansi...

Subscribe today for ad-free listening! The Oslo Peace Process seems like ancient history. Today, a truly just and durable peace between Israel and the Palestinians appears impossible, as Gaza has been destroyed and Jewish settler-terrorists rampage through the West Bank with the support of their state. President Trump's vision for Gaza may render any surviving Palestinians as second-class citizens...

This special episode features an exclusive interview with United States Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat and potential 2028 presidential candidate. Congress' attempts to end the Trump administration's Iran war fiasco have thus far come up short. The same goes for the movement to end U.S. weapons and bulldozer shipments to the Israeli government, which has used American military hardwa...

Subscribe to enjoy ad-free listening, early access, and all of our bonus content! The American way of war is broken. Like many of his White House predecessors, Donald Trump is stuck in a stalemate of his own making. In Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq — to name four major wars — the president who went to war was unable to extricate the U.S. from the morass. It was up to his successor to salva...

Subscribe for ad-free listening and early access! The Trump administration is attempting to topple Cuba's government through economic warfare. An oil embargo and other punitive measures have led to severe consequences, including massive blackouts and water shortages. Ordinary Cubans are suffering, yet both they and their communist government are persevering — at least for now. The New York Times r...

The world is aflame with endless wars and racial strife. Some societies are tearing themselves apart as mass migration fuels a nationalist backlash. Since the nineteenth century, ethnic nationalism has been a potent force, galvanizing peoples — imagined nations — around shared myths and historical truths. Our guest is Sune Haugbølle, an expert on global political sociology. He specializes in socia...