Last Gasp of the Lost Cause
History As It Happens
Collective memory -- what our society chooses to remember, honor, or erase from our past -- is perpetually mediated. For generations Confederate statues and monuments stood in public squares until a new racial reckoning compelled cities and towns to remove them. But that wasn't the end of the story -- at least not in Shenandoah County, Virginia. Its school board voted to restore the names of Confederate Generals Lee, Jackson, and Ashby to a pair of schools which had been renamed (Honey Run and Mountain View) in 2020. In Tennessee, the caretakers of the Franklin Battlefield just dedicated a new...
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Death of Raisi / Future of Iran
History As It Happens
The death of Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi has left a power vacuum to be filled in snap elections in less than 50 days. The death of the man once called the "butcher of Tehran" comes at low point in U.S.-Iran relations, and as the theocratic regime's legitimacy at home is under severe stress. In this episode, historians Gregory Brew of Eurasia Group and John Ghazvinian of the University of Pennsylvania discuss Raisi's legacy and how his death may influence the regime's stance on nuclear weapons development.
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Defeating Democracy, Searching For Fascism
History As It Happens
In the United States and in capitals across the world, liberal democracy is under pressure. We are told that fascism is on the rise. Commentators rummage through the past on the hunt for analogies to explain our current predicament. How does democracy die? What does creeping fascism really look like? Maybe there are solid analogies to examine, if only to confirm that rising fascism is not a real problem today -- or is it? In this episode, political scientist Andreas Umland discusses the crushing of democratic experiments in Weimar Germany and post-Soviet Russia, and the triumph of fascism in...
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The British Mandate
History As It Happens
In an for Foreign Affairs, the Israeli historian Tom Segev argues that a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is impossible. As early as 1919, the future prime minister David Ben-Gurion observed that both nations' competing claims to the land created an unbridgeable abyss. In this episode, Segev traces the origins of today's war to the era of the British mandate. By facilitating the creation of a Jewish homeland in what was then an Arab-majority country, the British laid the groundwork for decades of bloodshed and grievances. (Foreign Affairs is the official publication of...
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Special Relationship: Why the U.S. Chose Israel
History As It Happens
President Joseph Biden's decision to pause bomb shipments to Israel over its planned invasion of Rafah provoked a curious charge from Republican legislators. They accused Biden of "abandoning" Israel despite his steadfast support of the Jewish state not only for much of the past seven months (since the 10/7 Hamas attack) but also for most of his decades-long career in Washington. The truth is that every U.S. administration since 1948 has supported Israel, but rarely has the support come without any conditions or criticisms. In this episode, historian Jeremi Suri discusses the deep...
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Recovering Kennan
History As It Happens
The American diplomat George Kennan was the architect of the Cold War "containment" policy toward the Soviet Union. Writing in the late 1940s, Kennan viewed the USSR as a hostile expansionist enemy, but one that would be willing to compromise if checked by the United States. Containment did not mean the U.S. could or should militarily crush the Soviets. Can Kennan's ideas be applied to Vladimir Putin's Russia? In this episode, historians Michael Kimmage and Frank Costigliola discuss the enduring influence of Kennan's ideas on American policy-makers.
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What Is Intifada?
History As It Happens
Campus antiwar protests are disturbing some Jewish students, administrators, and politicians by chanting an Arabic word meaning uprising, intifada. Since Israel began its military occupation of Palestinian territories in 1967, Palestinians have waged two uprisings: in 1987 and 2000. Both were crushed by the IDF. In this episode, Khaled Elgindy of the Middle East Institute delves into the history and meanings of intifada, as some Israel supporters say the word is antisemitic and threatening.
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The Elections of 1860 and 1864
History As It Happens
This is the third episode in an occasional series examining influential elections in U.S. history. The most recent episode, The Election of 1992, was published on April 4. Audio excerpts of "Civil War" are courtesy A24 Films. Democracy and the Constitution are on the ballot. The fate of the republican is at stake. The potential for violence festers as Americans view their political foes as existential enemies. This was the United States in 1860. Abraham Lincoln's victory as the first antislavery president was met with Southern secession and war. In 1864, Lincoln expected to lose before major...
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The Fascism Distraction
History As It Happens
Is fascism what's ailing the American body politic today? Are Donald Trump and the Republican Party fascists or has fascism been around much longer, going back to the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow? In this episode, historian Daniel Bessner, the co-host of , discusses what has been a preoccupation among public intellectuals and commentators since Trump entered presidential politics in 2015. Bessner co-authored an essay published in a new anthology edited by the historian Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, "."
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What Is Zionism?
History As It Happens
Zionism was a national liberation movement developed by European Jews in the late nineteenth century. Their early vision of a national homeland was fulfilled about half a century later with the creation of the independent state of Israel, which turned a majority Arab land into a Jewish state. Today, pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses routinely denounce Zionism as a violent colonial project. In this episode, political scientist Ian Lustick recovers Zionism's historical origins and discusses its future, as roughly 7 million Jewish Israelis face as many Arab residents on territory...
info_outlineAlexei Navalny was Russia’s most prominent and effective opposition leader, an anti-corruption crusader and democratic politician who entered public life as a provocative blogger around the same time his future persecutor, Vladimir Putin, became Russia's president. Navalny died inside an Arctic penal colony on Feb. 16. He was 47. He leaves a legacy, setting an example of how to challenge the regime even while under constant state persecution. In this episode, Miriam Lanskoy of the National Endowment for Democracy explains who Navalny was, why his opposition movement was so effective, and what his death says about late Putinism.