History As It Happens

As Russia prepared in the opening weeks of 2022 to invade its neighbor, many observers expected a quick victory. Russia's modernized army vastly outnumbered the Ukrainian defenders, and Ukraine as a non-NATO member could not expect direct intervention from the Atlantic alliance to save it. Six months later, Russian forces find themselves in a war of attrition in southern Ukraine, having made little progress in seizing additional territory in the north and east of the country. A long stalemate looms. That is hardly what Russian president Vladimir Putin envisioned in February. In this episode, military historian Sir Lawrence Freedman discusses the reasons why war fails, from Russia in Ukraine to the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan, to France's colonial war in Algeria a half century ago. Certain kinds of conflicts, such as wars of occupation, have exposed the inadequacy of sheer military dominance, yet powerful states keep trying to make war work. Even if Russia batters its way to something it can call victory, its presence in Ukraine will never be seen as legitimate.

This is the fifth installment in an occasional series focusing on slavery, the Constitution, and the current debate over the meaning of America's founding. Visitors to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's mountaintop plantation in Virginia, are shown in exhibits and tours a skewed interpretation of his life, according to a report by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that decries the "hyper-revisionism" and "racialist agenda" emphasizing slavery at the expense of Jefferson's many enormous accomplishments. In this episode, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who is a scholar of early American history, discusses the exhibits at Monticello as well as the ongoing "history wars" over conflicting interpretations of the early republic's slavery dilemma.

For decades neither side in the abortion debate had to test its position in the democratic arena. The Supreme Court in 1973 had settled it: the Constitution guaranteed a right to an abortion. But now, in post-Roe America, opponents of abortion rights must convince public majorities that the procedure must be severely restricted or banned entirely. In conservative Kansas, the pro-life movement was decisively defeated when nearly 60 percent voted to uphold abortion rights as enumerated in the state constitution. The conflict over abortion will likely take years to play out in legislative elections or public referenda. But one important aspect is already coming into focus. That is, now that the possibility of criminalizing abortions has moved out of the abstract, ambivalent Americans may recoil at laws aimed at imprisoning doctors, or fencing women into their home states by punishing them for traveling to where abortion is legal. In this episode, Georgetown historian Michael Kazin, an expert on American political and social movements, compares today's conservative Christian movement to outlaw abortion to the temperance crusaders of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, armies of Christian evangelists who convinced a large majority of voters to outlaw booze in the Eighteenth Amendment. Prohibition, an attempt to enforce a strict moral code on millions of unwilling people, was a disaster.

On Sept. 11, 1990, President George Bush addressed a joint session of Congress to explain why the U.S. and its allies had sent their armies to the Arabian peninsula. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August of that year was an act of aggression, but the president also made clear that it was the first test for the new world order emerging from the long decades of the Cold War. "New world order" -- those words still resonate as Russia invades Ukraine and China threatens to absorb Taiwan. What do they actually mean? Are we still living in the post-war order that American leaders invoke? In this episode, historian Jeffrey Engel talks about why Bush's vision for an order built on peace and cooperation never came to be.

The U.S. Supreme Court is redrawing the boundary between church and state. In several major rulings, the court came down on the side of the free exercise clause of the First Amendment, provoking critics to charge that the conservative justices are obliterating an important foundation of American life, the separation of church and state. It is the unresolvable conflict in our politics, and today's combatants draw on the founding generation for ammunition for their arguments. In this episode, historian Katherine Carté tries to untangle the conflicting meanings of religious liberty at the center of the legal and cultural struggles.

For most of the 137 years after his death in 1885, Ulysses S. Grant was remembered by historians as a failed president who led a hopelessly corrupt administration. In recent years, however, Grant's reputation has undergone a scholarly renaissance that has set straight his record of accomplishments, not least in the area of civil rights for the newly emancipated slaves. In this year marking the bicentennial of his birthday, Grant scholars say the eighteenth president deserves a place next to Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson in the decidedly small pantheon of civil rights presidents. In this episode, constitutional lawyer and historian Frank Scaturro says generations of historians were negatively influenced by the myth of the Lost Cause and the Dunning school interpretation of Reconstruction. Scaturro is also the president of the Grant Monument Association by virtue of his work in the 1990s, while he attended college in New York City, to successfully pressure the federal government to repair the dilapidated, vandalized mausoleum on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Like the tomb, Grant's reputation has undergone a major rehabilitation. But the effort to overturn a century of tendentious scholarship must continue.

Nearly a year since the U.S. completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan, Americans' attention has long since drifted to other problems. Twenty years of failure to remake Afghanistan as a stable, democratic country have been memory-holed. The Taliban-led country remains mired in difficulties, dependent on outside aid to feed its people. Sanctions and frozen foreign exchange reserves continue to hurt an economy left in ruins by four decades of violence and foreign interference. Drug addiction is worsening and poverty is everywhere. In this episode, the Quincy Institute's Adam Weinstein joins us from Islamabad, Pakistan to discuss the consequences of forgetting Afghanistan, recalling the years after the Soviet withdrawal when the West abandoned the country.

Is America in decline? We've lost wars in the Middle East and our international standing because of the disgrace of torture. Experts believe China will soon have the world's largest economy. At home our problems seem unsolvable and our political divisions intractable. In this episode, Catholic University historian Michael Kimmage argues declinism is overrated. It's become a self-satisfying trope that thwarts real progress in solving problems. And it may be impossible to actually measure. Decline is not an event, it is a process that can play out over centuries. So, is America in decline? Kimmage looks to Edward Gibbon's history of the Roman Empire for answers.

George Wallace was a segregationist. He was a pro-union Democrat who railed against federal power and pointy-headed bureaucrats. He demanded law and order while standing up for downtrodden, working class whites. He ran for president as an independent in 1968, winning 13 percent of the popular vote and five states. George Wallace was a right-wing populist with a talent for performative politics. And at a time of frequent comparisons between the crisis of American democracy and the rise of fascism in 1930s Europe, Wallace's enduring influence is overlooked today. His inheritors have found a home in the prevailing, pro-Trump wing of the GOP. In this episode, historian and Wallace biographer Dan Carter discusses the politics of rage eating at the body politic in the age of Trump.

During his visit to the Middle East, President Biden explained the larger strategic purpose behind several agreements that he announced from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. "The bottom line is this trip is about once again positioning America and this region for the future. We are not going to leave a vacuum in the Middle East for Russia or China to fill," Mr. Biden said. In his focus on thwarting foreign influence in a region where the U.S. has spent the better part of the past two decades fighting wasteful wars, there are echoes from a bygone era of American leadership. In 1979 the Greater Middle East was rocked by two seismic events whose consequences continue to shape the region's politics and the U.S. role in it. In this episode, Bob Vitalis, an expert on Middle Eastern politics at the University of Pennsylvania, discusses the important parallels between 1979 and the geopolitical knots Mr. Biden is trying to untangle today.

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the ruling affirmed a half-century of political activism by conservative grassroots organizers, religious and legal groups, and Republican politicians and strategists. Few members of this right-wing coalition were more important than the late Phyllis Schlafly, who dedicated her formidable organizing and rhetorical talents to campaigns against cultural liberalism. In this episode, historian and Schlafly biographer Donald Critchlow discusses the crusader's legacy in light of the conservative movement's success in ending a constitutional right to an abortion. It is a timely reminder about the importance of persuasion in politics, because although young Americans have only known the Republican Party as monolithically opposed to abortion, it took decades of work by Schlafly and like-minded activists to push the GOP further to the right.

Nearly five months since Russia invaded Ukraine, the war in the eastern Donbas region appears to be a grinding stalemate. Civilians are being pummeled by Russian missiles, but little land is changing hands. Neither side seems willing to cede an inch, so a diplomatic settlement is not in the offing. But how much longer must the war grind on before the combatants are convinced further bloodshed is pointless? In this episode, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor and Quincy Institute analyst Anatol Lieven discuss what it will take to end hostilities.

Building off recent episodes concerning U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine, this conversation seeks to understand deeper patterns in U.S. foreign policy from the dawn of the Cold War. It may be possible to understand the United States' dilemma by viewing international relations as a donor-receiver dynamic, where the donor believes they possess exclusive knowledge that must be shared with others. The question to consider is why do some people think they know what's good for others? Ithaca College political theorist Naeem Inayatullah joins the conversation.

In 1987 the Senate rejected President Reagan's nominee for the Supreme Court, Robert Bork, because his views were considered dangerously outside the mainstream. Among other things, Bork believed the Constitution did not contain a right to privacy. Today, some of Bork's ideas have been validated by the conservative majority on the Supreme Court. By striking down Roe v Wade, the court killed the notion that any implied right to privacy in the Fourteenth Amendment or elsewhere in the Constitution protects access to abortion. In this episode, esteemed Yale constitutional scholar Akhil Amar traces the history of the right to privacy in the law from colonial times to the 1973 landmark ruling that the Roberts court has relegated to history.

On July 4, 1852, Frederick Douglass delivered remarks of enduring significance and American eloquence to an audience of abolitionists. He mixed condemnation of the nation's tolerance of slavery with hope and uplift. He embraced the founding fathers and defended the Constitution while attacking his fellow citizens for hypocrisy and inaction. "What, To The Slave, Is The Fourth Of July?" was quintessential Frederick Douglass. Historian James Oakes discusses the ideas behind Douglass' rhetorical tour de force, his relationship with Abraham Lincoln, and the critical importance of antislavery politics in bringing about the destruction of slavery.

As the fiftieth anniversary of the Watergate break-in crossed our calendars, the congressional committee investigating ex-President Trump's 'Stop the Steal' scheme revealed new and damaging findings. Past and present are intersecting again: the Jan. 6 hearings are painting a picture of a rogue executive willing to try almost anything to remain in power, including manipulating the Justice Department to interfere in an election. In this episode, journalist and historian Garrett Graff, the author or 'Watergate: A New History,' discusses the parallels between Nixon's crimes and Trump's effort to steal an election.

What is Vladimir Putin? Russia's dictator has been called a gangster, an autocrat, a Marxist-Leninist, an ultra-nationalist, or a fascist by different historians, political scientists, and editorialists over the past several weeks. There seems to be little agreement over what ideas and ideologies motivate the man in his crusade against the West. Fascism remains a slippery term, often used as a slur to denigrate one's political opponents. In this episode, Oxford's Roger Griffin, a leading scholar on fascism, talks about why it is mistaken to label Putin a fascist, despite some similarities to the fascist regimes of the twentieth century.

President Biden's upcoming trip to Saudi Arabia is an example of reality imposing itself on a situation Mr. Biden vowed to change. In November 2019, Democratic candidate Biden said the kingdom should be punished and treated as a pariah, because its de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, had been implicated in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. But as Middle East expert Bob Vitalis explains in this episode, the Americans and Saudis still need each other, thereby maintaining a decades-long relationship shaped by oil, war, terrorism, and political expediency.

This conversation with Catholic University historian Michael Kimmage was featured on C-SPAN's 'American History TV.' Kimmage discusses U.S.-Russia relations since the end of the Cold War, the rise of Putin, and events leading to the war in Ukraine.

It may surprise you to learn how much we have in common with Americans of the 1790s: extreme political polarization, crazy conspiracy theories, partisan news media, foreign interference, and fears of violence and disintegration. As the Jan. 6 Committee hearings refocus our attention on the day Donald Trump's effort to overturn the election reached its violent nadir, historian Joseph Ellis joins the podcast to explain why he believes the fate of the republic -- res publica, the public interest -- is in danger.

There is a pattern in U.S. history of a nation seeking redemption through war, attempting to restore its global standing and credibility after a humiliating defeat. By backing Ukraine's effort to repel the Russian invasion, some American intellectuals say the U.S. is also fighting for the fate of democracy and the world order it has led since 1945. In this reasoning, a victory by Ukraine over Russia helps erase the humiliating U.S. retreat from Afghanistan in 2021, which brought the curtain down on the failed post-9/11 project to spread democracy and U.S. hegemony. In this episode, historian and Quincy Institute president Andrew Bacevich deconstructs arguments elevating the Russia-Ukraine war to one of "cosmic importance" for the United States.

In February Russia chose war with Ukraine. In response, the U.S. chose to dramatically increase aid and arms shipments to Kyiv. But now that a frozen war is descending on the eastern Donbas region, one that is likely to drag on for months, certain questions about the U.S. commitment can no longer be ignored. How long can the U.S. support Ukraine? Can the U.S. control any escalation caused by a Russian reaction to its support? What if no amount of material or intelligence support is enough to thwart Vladimir Putin's ambitions? In this episode, historians Jeremi Suri and Jeffrey Engel discuss the potential consequences of an open-ended U.S. commitment to Ukraine's independence.

On this 78th anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Nazi-occupied France, military historian Cathal Nolan discusses the chaos and confusion that prevailed over the early hours of the largest amphibious assault in history. Yet despite mishaps and setbacks that are unavoidable in major combat, the Allied forces captured the five beaches along the Normandy coast by the end of June 6, 1944. The Germans missed their chance to repel the invaders, but was it a decisive battle on the road to victory in the Second World War? Nolan argues decisive battles are almost always a mirage.

With the midterm elections approaching and Democrats expecting to be drubbed, it's time to ask whether the party has made any progress fixing its white working-class voter problem. But something that took decades to develop, caused in part by massive structural changes in the global economy, cannot be undone in a few short years. In this episode, Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin, author of "What It Took To Win: A History of the Democratic Party," discusses the rise and fall of the Democrats' working-class dominance from the triumphs of the New Deal to emergence of Trumpism.

The U.S. Supreme Court, one of our bedrock judicial institutions, has been on the wrong side of history time and again. But as the arbiter of the Constitution, the Supreme Court is indispensable to the functioning of democracy. In this episode, esteemed constitutional scholar Akhil Amar discusses some of the court's most notorious rulings, starting with Dred Scott in 1857. And as the current court appears poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, Amar draws parallels between Roe and Dred Scott that explain why the robed justices have never been beyond the reach of criticism for, in the eyes of the critics, botching the Constitution.

Take a look at a map of the NATO countries today and compare it to one from 1989. It's a remarkable change. And what once seemed far-fetched is now close to becoming reality. That is, almost all of Europe will belong to NATO right up to Russia's borders. But Finland's and Sweden's applications to join the alliance, prompted by Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, may be blocked by NATO's only Asian member, Turkey. In this episode, historians Timothy Sayle and Howard Eissenstat break down Europe's changing geopolitics. Learn why Sweden and Finland are shedding decades of non-alignment and why Turkey, one of NATO's earliest members, is moving closer to the Kremlin.

Replacement theory -- the racist ideology that claims elites are abetting immigrants to disempower or eliminate native white people -- has been around in one form or another for a long time. The current iteration has gone mainstream, leading to widespread condemnation of some Republican politicians and conservative commentators who have embraced the theory's central premises. Fear and suspicion of foreigners underpins nativism, and America's first nativist movement took hold in the 1850s. Who were the Know Nothings? They weren't around for long but they left their mark.

Long before Roe v. Wade established a constitutional right to an abortion -- indeed, centuries before abortion became one of the most divisive issues in American society -- ending a pregnancy before "quickening" was commonplace in the colonial era and not very controversial, either. That began to change in the mid-nineteenth century when some medical professionals joined a campaign to criminalize all abortions, led by Dr. Horatio Storer. In this episode, historians Anna Peterson and Eric Foner discuss the history of abortion before Roe and the origins, purposes, and legacy of the Fourteenth Amendment, which laid the foundation for Roe v. Wade a century after it was ratified in the wake of the Civil War.

This is the fourth installment in an occasional series that will focus on slavery, the Constitution, and the ongoing debate over the meaning of the American founding. When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he invoked the historic struggle to make America a more equal society. The civil rights movement to which Johnson referred did not begin, however, in the twentieth or even the nineteenth century. The first civil rights activists emerged from the radical impulses of the American Revolution, and they employed the language in the Constitution to make their case in newspapers, courtrooms, and state houses for equal rights and full citizenship for Black people. Historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist Kate Masur, author of "Until Justice Be Done," tells us about the achievements and setbacks that marked the fight for civil rights in the antebellum U.S.

Elon Musk's anticipated acquisition of Twitter sent a major ripple across America's endless debates over free expression. The fact is, the question of who gets to say what and where has always been thorny in American society. Not until the twentieth century did the Supreme Court embrace our current, expansive view of the First Amendment. Today the battle is being fought in the cultural space, where social media platforms -- all private companies with their own First Amendment right to moderate posts -- are under pressure to remove "offensive" content and mis- and disinformation. In this episode, Lynn Greenky, author of "When Freedom Speaks," discusses why Americans are fighting one another over this precious freedom.

Chinese president Xi Jinping, the country's most powerful leader since Mao, is inflexibly pursuing a policy to eliminate the transmission of COVID-19. Shanghai, population 26 million, is locked down. People are virtual prisoners in their own homes and the lockdowns are crushing the economy. But world health experts say it is impossible to eradicate the highly contagious coronavirus. The Mercatus Center's Weifeng Zhong, who analyzes reams of Chinese state propaganda to discern policy shifts, explains what's behind Xi's fanatical campaign to achieve the impossible.

History teaches us that the war in Ukraine will most likely end in a negotiated settlement. The Second World War was an anomaly insofar the Allies demanded unconditional surrender from their enemies, and then conquered Germany and Japan in total victory. Most wars fought since 1945 dragged on for years in indecisive fighting until some kind of settlement was reached, often unsatisfactory to all involved. In this episode, Texas Tech military historian Ron Milam, who is a Vietnam combat veteran, talks about the deal that ended U.S. involvement in the war he fought, as well as where the war in Ukraine may be going.

The Biden administration's efforts to revive the 2015 nuclear accord with Iran are on the brink of collapse, leading experts to fear the two countries could enter a new era of suspicion and even outright conflict. Since 1979 the U.S. and Iran have had no formal diplomatic ties, their relationship marked by distrust and hostility. The ongoing animosity has created a self-fulfilling prophecy where Iran is now closer to having enough enriched uranium to build a bomb than it had before the U.S. pulled out of the 2015 deal. In this episode, historian John Ghazvinian and foreign policy expert Trita Parsi discuss the potential consequences for the world if the latest negotiations end in failure.

Vladimir Putin's version of history is the foundation of his war in Ukraine. According to Russia's dictator, an independent Ukrainian state is a mistake of history and the notion of Ukrainian nationhood, with a distinct culture and language, is a fiction. In this episode, Anna Reid, a former Kyiv-based journalist and expert in Ukrainian history, takes us through Putin's distortions covering a thousand years, from the reign of Volodymyr the Great to the October Revolution and the killing fields of the Second World War. Ukraine may have achieved true statehood for the first time in 1991, but the Ukrainian nation goes back centuries.

During the Cold War, the fear of nuclear war suffused the culture in hundreds of books and movies, in classroom "duck and cover" drills and in debates on college campuses, and in the arena of international relations. But that cultural awareness has faded over the past 30 years -- until now. As Russia's war in Ukraine grinds on, the possibility, however remote, of a nuclear exchange is more front of mind that it has been in decades. In this episode, national security expert Joe Cirincione, who has spent 40 years working on non-proliferation, discusses why the world may be closer to a nuclear crisis now than at any time since the Cold War. Calling Dr. Strangelove!

The odds are against anyone being brought to justice for atrocities committed in Ukraine. Despite mounting evidence that Russian forces executed civilians and targeted residential neighborhoods for bombardment, a successful prosecution of the perpetrators -- from military commanders in the field all the way up to Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin -- before an international tribunal will be difficult. In the 76 years since the Nuremberg trials, which set the standard for punishing individuals for crimes against humanity, war crimes investigators have faced many obstacles. In this episode, former International Criminal Court prosecutor Alex Whiting explains the challenges confronting those seeking justice for victims of wars of aggression and atrocities.

History is full of what-ifs. What if in 1999 Russia's fading president Boris Yeltsin had handpicked someone other than Vladimir Putin to be his successor? What we do know is that Putin and his ruling circle steered Russia toward autocracy, and 22 years later the former KBG lieutenant colonel still rules with dictatorial powers. In this episode Julie Newton, an expert on Russian history and politics at Oxford University, discusses the set of circumstances that led Yeltsin to make his fateful choice, and the many reasons why the renewal of authoritarianism under a powerful state -- at odds with liberal Western traditions -- was not inevitable.

Is Ukraine the front line in a global struggle pitting democracy versus autocracy, liberalism versus illiberal nationalism? Political scientist Francis Fukuyama, author of the famous "The End of History and the Last Man," says liberal democracy is in recession across the globe, ceding the historic gains of the post-Cold War period. His view is meant to rebuke the arguments of the foreign policy realists, who contend that Ukraine's fate is not a vital U.S. national security interest. But Fukuyama says democratic states need one another, so what happens in Ukraine matters at home.

This is the third installment in an occasional series that will focus on slavery, the Constitution, and the ongoing debate over the meaning of the American founding. Was the Constitution pro- or anti-slavery? Maybe that is the wrong question to ask, even though it remains the question at the heart of public discourse about the founding generation. In this episode, Sean Wilentz and James Oakes -- two major scholars of eighteenth and nineteenth century America -- argue the Constitution was a contested document that marked the beginning of a political conflict over the future of slavery and, therefore, the nature of American democracy. They reject race-centered interpretations that elide early political conflicts over enslavement and the hard-fought progress won by Black Americans and their white allies. The American Revolution was an event of world-historical importance, marking a turning point in the history of human enslavement because it gave life to the world's first abolitionist movement.

When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 the Obama administration responded with condemnation and sanctions. But the U.S. president refused to authorize the government sale of lethal weapons to Ukraine (although private arms exports were permitted). Obama viewed Russia as a regional power that could not be stopped from trying to military dominate Ukraine, if it so chose. He was not interested in containing Russia as if the Cold War hadn't ended. Today, some critics say Obama underestimated Vladimir Putin while failing to fully help Ukraine defend itself. In this episode, historian Jeremi Suri, the host of "This is Democracy" podcast, discusses the thorny relationship between foreign policy and domestic pressures. Obama may have misjudged Putin, but was he right about the limits of American power in Eastern Europe?

History provides some examples of what a peace settlement might look like between Russia and Ukraine. Finland's treaty with the Soviet Union in 1948 and the Austrian State Treaty of 1955 established neutrality for Finland and Austria during the Cold War. They would not join NATO or the Warsaw Pact. In this episode, Anatol Lieven of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft discusses the reasons why geopolitical realism, not idealism about democracy, must carry the day if Russia's war of aggression is to end with an agreement all sides can live with. Ukraine would agree to never join NATO in exchange for a Russian guarantee on its sovereignty.

An overwhelming majority of Americans agree the Supreme Court is an important institution, yet the confirmation process for its lifetime appointments has devolved into all-out partisan warfare and absurd political theater. Less is learned about the SCOTUS nominees than about the politics of the Senate inquisitors and the influence of outside activists. In this episode, political scientist Lawrence Baum, who has been following the high court for nearly 50 years, discusses the effects of hyper-partisanship on the credibility of the court and public perceptions. From Robert Bork in 1987 to Ketanji Brown Jackson in 2022, a confirmation process that once rarely rejected nominees now proceeds almost entirely along party lines.

If you meander through the history of the 1930s, you will find any number of possible parallels with today's crisis in Eastern Europe. Aggressive powers, namely Germany and Italy, challenged the existing order by attacking or annexing weaker nations. Today some American politicians are warning that "appeasing" Vladimir Putin -- which is meant to invoke the infamous Munich Conference of 1938 -- will only lead to more war. But such parallels are weak, says historian Ian Kershaw, the author of an unparalleled, two-volume biography of Hitler. If there is anything to learn from the 1930s, it is the importance of not drawing the wrong lessons. Still, some comparisons may work. That is, the inherent weaknesses of democracies, then and now, in facing up to the threats of dictators. And Kershaw stresses the importance of ideological motivations on the part of such figures as Hitler and Putin -- motivations that were overlooked by the West.

Military historian Max Hastings, an acclaimed chronicler of the twentieth century's terrible wars, says Ukraine's defenders are inspiring the world with their courage and resilience in the face of Russia's unprovoked onslaught. But Hastings says Russia remains enormously powerful compared to Ukraine, and therefore may batter its way to something Putin can call victory. In this episode, Hastings discusses the Russian way of war, the prospects for a negotiated settlement, the ideas motivating Putin's revanchism, and the parallels with the previous century's ethno-nationalist conflicts.

This is the second episode in an occasional series that will focus on slavery, the Constitution, and the ongoing debate over the meaning of the American founding. The first episode with historian Joseph Ellis dropped on Feb. 1. In a sense it may seem odd that Americans continue to argue over what the Constitution says about slavery. After all, the South's "peculiar institution" was forever abolished in 1865. But we know this is not merely an academic issue or legalistic debate. The racism that underpinned human chattel slavery in the antebellum United States persisted in new forms after the Civil War. New interpretations, from The 1619 Project on the left to 1776 Unites on the right, have emerged amid a tumultuous reckoning with the nation's past, forcing us to revisit the morally unresolvable contradictions of the founding generation. In this episode, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Alan Taylor weighs in on why the Constitution's compromises over (and protections for) slavery often overshadow the importance of abolition in modern discourse.

Cold War historian Mary Elise Sarotte says a new, more dangerous form of that 20th century conflict may descend upon Europe because of Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. The nuclear weapons are still around, although fewer in number, but gone are the climate of detente, mutual trust, and most of the major arms control treaties that marked the end of the Reagan years and the early 1990s. The author of "Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate," Sarotte argues the way NATO expanded to the east helped ruin U.S.-Russia relations, but it is far from the only explanation for a war launched by Russian revanchists.

What if Russia were a thriving democratic society today? Would there be war in Ukraine? Maybe these are impossible questions to answer at the moment, but important as it is to consider the factor of NATO enlargement after the Cold War, it is equally vital to understand Russian's internal dynamics when assessing the causes of Russia's unprovoked war in Ukraine. When the USSR left the historical stage, the new Russian state tried to complete the transition from Communist dictatorship and a command economy to democracy and free market capitalism. Well before Vladimir Putin rose to power, this transition, which would have been difficult under the best of circumstances, had already disastrously failed. In this episode Veronica Anghel, an expert on Eastern European politics and security, discusses the critical 1990s in Russia, as well as what the war in Eastern Europe today will mean for "strongman politics" and refugees.

This conversation with Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin was featured on C-SPAN's 'American History TV.' Kazin discusses his new book, "What It Took To Win," which is about the history of the Democratic Party from its 19th century origins to present.

"There is no room in this party for apologists for Putin," former Vice President Mike Pence is said to have told an audience of GOP donors in the days after Russia invaded Ukraine. Why would a major Republican politician need to clarify that? The de facto leader of the party, Donald Trump, had praised Putin in a radio interview, and then at CPAC Trump defended his remarks. Things have gotten so strange that Rep. Liz Cheney, stalwart conservative, says her party now has a "Putin wing." In this episode, The National Review's Charles C. W. Cooke discusses why some figures on the right have taken this illiberal lurch. Most conservatives, Cooke says, disdain Putin for a ruthless tyrant, not someone worthy of admiration.

When Nixon opened doors to China a half century ago, that country was reeling from the cascading disasters of Mao's rule. Today, China is vying to surpass the U.S. position in global leadership. If the American empire is itself in terminal decline, then what of the broader world order established by American power after 1945, an order based on the inviolability of national borders and the principle of universal human rights? In this episode, historian Alfred McCoy argues the world is witnessing a historic shift from the West to the East, and China will soon be the preeminent economic and military power on the Eurasian landmass. But will climate change upend China's ambitions? The science on rising seal levels and warming temperatures is clear: yes.