History As It Happens

A slew of unsigned opinions from the Supreme Court, made from the "shadow docket" outside its normal procedures, have refocused Americans' attention on the importance of (and controversies over) whom is chosen to lead the judicial branch. With a 6-3 conservative majority after Donald Trump appointed three justices in his single term as president, the court is facing renewed allegations of excessive partisanship and ideological rigidity. SCOTUS expert Lawrence Baum, who has followed the court for more than a half century, discusses whether it is really more partisan and ideological than in past eras. That's because political battles over the federal bench go back to the dawn of the republic.

This is the final part of a three-episode series examining the post-9/11 world for the 20th anniversary of the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks. At least 335,000 civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere "died violent deaths as a direct result of the war on terror," according to Brown University researchers' Costs of War project. The total number of people killed — civilians plus U.S. and allied troops, enemy fighters, contractors, journalists, and aid workers — approaches one million. Close to 40 million humans have been displaced by the ravages of war, and the cost from the destruction of buildings and infrastructure is incalculable. This road to this misery and mayhem was paved with good intentions: after al-Qaeda struck the U.S., the Bush administration, with the assent of Congress and other key American institutions, launched the Global War on Terror with the aim of eliminating terrorists and ending tyranny, as President Bush proclaimed in his second inaugural address in January 2005. In this episode, Brown University anthropologist Catherine Lutz and Southern Methodist University presidential historian Jeffrey Engel discuss how and why U.S. foreign policy took such a disastrous turn.

This is the second part of a three-episode series examining the post-9/11 world for the 20th anniversary of the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks. The law of unintended consequences may explain why jihadists and "freedom fighters," as Ronald Reagan once referred to them, continue to haunt the U.S. in Afghanistan. Counterterrorism experts are warning Afghanistan will once again become a cradle for terrorism because of the U.S. withdrawal. But it is worth remembering how Afghanistan became a cauldron of jihadism in the first place. Anatol Lieven, who as a journalist traveled with the mujahideen during the late 1980s, discusses how foreign policy decisions under Presidents Carter and Reagan continue to cause problems today. In fact, some of the same warlords who benefited from U.S. covert support to fight the Soviets are still around. And it was Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, working with the U.S., who recruited tens of thousands of foreign jihadists to Afghanistan. One of them was Osama bin Laden.

This is the first part of a three-episode series examining the post-9/11 world for the 20th anniversary of the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks. In 1915 one of the most popular songs in America was a somber lament. "I Didn't Raise My Boy To Be a Soldier" inspired a peace movement of socialists, radicals, and civil libertarians in a nation whose people were deeply skeptical of military interventionism. It is hard to imagine such a song climbing to the top of the charts today. The modern notion that America is obligated to dispatch thousands of troops across the oceans, to paraphrase Woodrow Wilson, to make the world safe for democracy, did not drive foreign policy then. Historian Michael Kazin discusses the absence of any major peace movement in the U.S. today compared to the influential antiwar activism of the past century. Unlike the 1960s, when the nation was roiled by massive demonstrations against the Vietnam War, antiwar activism in 21st century America is quiescent, despite the fact the U.S. has been in a state of constant war in multiple countries since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Here comes Labor Day! Where are the unions? At a time when millions of Americans are unsatisfied with their jobs, when about 50 million laborers work in occupations with a median wage of less than $15 per hour (according to Brookings researchers), union membership remains low compared to its historic high reached in the quarter-century after the Second World War. In fact, the labor movement's achievements -- the reason to celebrate on this three-day weekend -- have receded as mega-companies run by billionaires, operating in a global economy, possess enough power to block their workforces from unionizing. Historian Nelson Lichtenstein discusses the economic, political, and cultural forces working against unions in the 21st century.

Thomas Jefferson was our most confounding founder. He personified the contradictions extant at the dawn of the American republic, a man capable of eloquently articulating the Enlightenment ideals of liberty and equality as the primary author of the American creed -- the Declaration of Independence -- while also owning hundreds of slaves over the course of his long life. Moreover, it is widely accepted that Jefferson fathered several children with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings, with whom he had a relationship spanning nearly four decades. In this episode, Joseph Ellis, one of the leading scholars of early American history, discusses why Jefferson's complicated legacy remains relevant today. He tackles Jefferson's governing philosophy, his political skills, his views on race and human progress, and why the man means different things to different people, just as he did during his lifetime.

In 2011 uprisings known as the Arab Spring burned across North Africa and the Middle East, toppling autocrats in four countries and igniting protests in several more. Leaders who had been fixtures in the region's political landscape, such as Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, were swept aside. Civil war exploded in Libya, Yemen, and Syria. The scenes were inspiring: public squares teemed with ordinary people demanding freedom in countries bereft of political tolerance and civil liberties during the century following the First World War and the treaties that carved up the Arab lands to the benefit of European colonial powers. With the partial exception of Tunisia, however, representative forms of government and pluralistic civil societies were stillborn, fueling additional grievances about the lack of human rights, corruption, and absence of economic opportunity and social mobility. In this episode, Dr. Elie Abouaoun, a human rights expert at the U.S. Institute of Peace's offices in Tunisia, says the Arab Spring failed to produce fundamental change because the root causes of most grievances were left unaddressed.

The defeat in Afghanistan, punctuated by the chaotic evacuation from Kabul and sudden collapse to the Taliban, is also an opportunity for American leaders to reassess the fundamental assumptions underlying U.S. interventionism. Instead of asking how the nation-building project could have been prolonged or how it might have succeeded, the real question may be why did anyone think it could work at all? After twenty years of war and occupation, at the cost of more than $2 trillion and many thousands of American and Afghan lives, it may be time to face an uncomfortable truth: the project was doomed from the start. In this episode, former U.S. Marine Adam Weinstein, a research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, discusses the root causes of the dramatic failures to defeat the Taliban and build a democracy in Afghanistan.

Four summers after white nationalists and neo-Nazis marched on Charlottesville, the Confederate statues that they sought to defend were quietly removed. On a Saturday in July, in front of a small, supportive crowd, workers used a crane to remove the figures of Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, a scene dramatically different than the one that unfolded on August 12, 2017. On that day, a 'Unite the Right' rally sparked violent clashes with counter-protesters. It was a defining moment of Donald Trump's early presidency, a source of deepening political division and racial awareness in a nation yet to fully reckon with the legacy of the Civil War and slavery. But on July 10 there were no Confederate flags or swastikas on display in Charlottesville. Instead, city leaders claimed a small victory over racism. Is this progress? James Grossman, the executive director of the American Historical Association, discusses why statues matter, when and why they were erected decades after the Civil War, and whether new state laws banning the teaching of critical race theory make sense.

Fox News' host Tucker Carlson's weeklong visit to Hungary to tout the rule of prime minister Viktor Orbán raised some pressing questions. What is it about this right-wing authoritarian that so enthralls some Americans on the right? Since returning to power in 2010, Orbán and his ruling Fidesz party have changed election laws to their own benefit, clamped down on press freedom, rejected Muslim immigrants, enraged the E.U., and -- arguably most unsettling of all -- invoked not the country's escape from Communist authoritarianism in 1989 but its fascist past under Miklos Horthy, an antisemite and Christian nationalist who was directly complicit in Hungary's role in the Holocaust. In this episode, we examine how Orbán uses and misuses history to build a narrative about "true Hungarians." And we discuss where Hungary fits in what is perceived as a larger pattern of backsliding democracy in Central and Eastern Europe.

Seventy-six years ago, in August, 1945, President Harry Truman made one of the most consequential decisions in history. He ordered U.S. warplanes to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and, three days later, Nagasaki, instantly incinerating tens of thousands of civilians. The bombings ended the Second World War while ushering in a new age, where human beings harnessed science and technology to create weapons of previously unimaginable power. In this episode, world-renowned war historian Sir Antony Beevor answers one of the most difficult questions to arise in the aftermath of the war: was it necessary to drop the bomb?

As the Delta variant rages across the United States, hospitals are filling up with unvaccinated patients. Americans are suffering and dying needlessly, because the country has enough doses to vaccinate every eligible person. But the pathogen has allies: right-wing fanatics on cable TV who sow mistrust in life-saving inoculations, social media charlatans pushing quack cures, and plain old stubbornness, laziness, ignorance, or complacency among the citizenry. Historian John Barry, author of 'The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History,' returns to the podcast to talk about Delta and the variants to come, the politics of pandemics, and reasons to be optimistic. Yes, optimistic!

Six years after President Obama tried to usher U.S.-Cuba relations into the 21st century, the two nations -- one a superpower, the other a small, weak island -- seem moored in a bygone era when international Communism consumed Cold Warriors on both sides of the ideological divide. The Biden administration is slapping another round of sanctions on Cuban leaders after they cracked down on protesters who filled the streets in early July, angered by food and power shortages and a botched Covid-19 inoculation program. Moreover, the U.S. embargo remains in place, a punitive measure perpetuated by domestic political pressures. Can the U.S. and Cuba move on from their ugly history? Ivan Eland of the Independent Institute, a scholar of U.S. foreign policy and critic of sanctions, joins the podcast to discuss why Communism endures in Cuba.

The violent decade before the Civil War serves as a warning about the perils of political polarization and the ways we may rationalize violence when it fits our purposes. Americans in 2021 are not careening toward another civil war with armies on battlefields, but the congressional investigation, now underway in the House, into the Jan. 6 Capitol riot is a battle over the truth. Emerging narratives are becoming detached from reality, perpetuating a cycle of zero-sum polarization that is further dividing people into opposing camps. Are we reliving the 1850s? Paul Quigley, the director of the Center for Civil War Studies at Virginia Tech, returns to the podcast to discuss how Trumpist narratives about Jan. 6 are distorting reality, a day that evokes the history of the sack of Lawrence, Kansas, in 1856.

Few aspects of the American Revolution are as misunderstood as the role of religion. Current debates usually focus on whether the United States was founded as a Christian nation and, if true, what that would mean for public policy today. The founding documents have become a battlefield for competing claims about the faith, or lack thereof, of their authors, replete with cherry-picked quotes purporting to show that our early leaders did or did not want to privilege one religion over another. It's time to take a fresh a look at this debate. Historian Katherine Carté, author of Religion and the American Revolution reconstructs "the religious world into which the American Revolution intruded," pitting protestant against protestant in what was an "empire of imperial protestantism."

Similar to fascism or socialism, the political ideology of populism has meant different things to different people at different times in history. Figures as diverse as Huey Long, William Jennings Bryan, George Wallace, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump have been described as populists, which may explain why populism defies easy explanation on the right and left. With its American roots planted in the nineteenth century, populism coalesced around the notion that powerful, even conspiratorial, forces were pitted against ordinary people, fueling grievances against elites and outsiders -- cultural, economic, and political elites as well as immigrants. Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin, an expert on social and political movements, joins the podcast to explain one of the most vexing issues of our day.

If a key lesson of the Vietnam War was the United States should avoid fighting guerrilla wars in faraway countries of little strategic importance, whose people, histories, and cultures we do not understand, then the U.S. failed to heed that lesson in Afghanistan. As the final American and NATO troops prepare to exit Afghanistan after 20 years of war and nation-building, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Fredrik Logevall of the Harvard Kennedy School joins the podcast to discuss the similarities and differences between the two lost conflicts. Logevall is a preeminent scholar of the French and U.S. wars in Southeast Asia.

The date upon which Americans celebrate their nation's independence helps explain a curious act of forgetting, a whitewashing of a complicated past in favor of a mythic narrative of heroism and unity. It is on the Fourth of July when we mark the Continental Congress' adoption of the Declaration of Independence, whose opening words have come to embody the American ideal. We do not gather for barbecues or fireworks on, say, October 17. On that date in 1781 Cornwallis surrendered to Washington at Yorktown, effectively ending the Revolutionary War -- a rebel victory without which the words of the Declaration would have amounted to a footnote in history. By embracing the Fourth of July and celebrating the Enlightenment ideals articulated in Jefferson's magisterial Declaration, we tend to obscure the war part of the Revolutionary War -- the internecine violence, civil war, cruelty, terror, destruction of private property, and outright misery that has accompanied most wars and revolutions. In this episode, Pulitzer Prize-winning University of Virginia historian Alan Taylor discusses why it is important to acknowledge the violence and terror that scarred the revolutionary years as well as tales of heroism and courage and the triumph of freedom and liberty.

As the Chinese Communist Party marks its 100th anniversary, its leaders are using history to explain where the nation has been and where it intends to go. President Xi Jinping, eager to consolidate his authoritarian power, is paying his respects to Mao, conveniently ignoring the decades of violent chaos Mao instigated during his terrible reign. But Chinese youth are also looking to Chairman Mao for guidance -- for different reasons. They feel alienated in a society that is leaving them behind, where economic inequality is rampant and political freedoms scarce. Mercatus Center analyst Weifeng Zhong, an expert on Chinese domestic policy, joins the podcast to discuss China's contradictions and complexities.

It is an iconic Olympic moment that resonates in our current climate of racial activism. At the summer games in Mexico City in 1968, American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner as they stood on the awards podium, the "Black Power salute." If that stands out as the most memorable act of political protest in Olympic history, it was also part of a long tradition of Black activism and sports. Politics and sports have always mixed, and the 2021 summer games in Tokyo will be no different. From Jesse Owens to Jackie Robinson, from Lew Alcindor (who would change his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) to Mohammad Ali, athletes have fought for their causes while winning medals and championships.

It is time for fresh thinking about America's place in the world and the meaning of national security. As 2021 reaches its midway point, Americans are still clearing the wreckage of the past year -- a deadly pandemic has claimed nearly 600,000 lives in the U.S., racial protest continues to simmer -- while their government struggles to extricate its military from "forever wars" in the Middle East. U.S. Army veteran and historian Andrew Bacevich, who is currently the president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, says it is long past time to question the fundamental assumptions underlying "American exceptionalism." Our collective belief in the ability to manage history has led to folly, alienation, and national drift.

In 1992 Benjamin Netanyahu, then Israel's deputy prime minister, first warned the world that Iran was "three to five years" away from developing a nuclear bomb. In the three decades since, Netanyahu has repeated similar warnings countless times in interviews and speeches, alleging that Iran is led by irrational fanatics who dream of annihilating Israel in a nuclear armageddon. Bibi is out of power now, but his legacy on Iran lives on. No foreign politician had more influence over U.S. foreign policy over the past two decades. But Iran neither has a nuclear bomb nor does it want to produce one, according to historian John Ghazvinian. Was it all a cynical bluff to maintain U.S. support after the Cold War?

From the bombing of Pearl Harbor to the JFK assassination, from Watergate to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, special commissions and select committees have investigated traumatic events and political scandals throughout the past century. Their purpose was, to the extent possible, to set aside partisan politics and establish a comprehensive, factual record for history. So why are Senate Republicans blocking the creation of a 1/6 commission to investigate the mob attack on the U.S. Capitol? Historian Alvin Felzenberg, who was the chief spokesman for the 9/11 Commission, joins the podcast to discuss why the nation deserves all the facts.

If today's Republican Party, from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump, is known for fighting the left in the Congress, courts, and culture, the Republican Party of the 1850s rose to prominence by building on "the foundational left-wing social movement of the modern era," which was the antislavery movement, according to Princeton historian Matthew Karp. Then a new party after the collapse of the Whigs, the antebellum Republicans fused social activism to end slavery with effective electoral politics. What can the the story of the abolitionists and antislavery men teach today's left-wing movements struggling to accomplish their goals? Karp joins host Martin Di Caro for a timely discussion tying the past to the present.

In this episode, we are joined by world-renowned war historian Sir Antony Beevor. When someone says the Soviet Union, not the Western allies, defeated Nazism, they can point to this date, June 22, 1941, as a pivotal moment in that narrative. Eighty years ago today, the largest invasion in history began as more than three million German soldiers attacked the USSR in Operation Barbarossa. The battle caused a cataclysm; millions of people were brutally killed, including more than a million Soviet Jews. But the USSR survived, and Barbarossa's outcome helped shape our modern world.

One summit between President Joseph Biden and Russian president Vladimir Putin will not resolve 30 years of missteps, miscalculations, and meddling by both nations. When the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union vanished in 1991, the relationship between the two states appeared hopeful, signaling a future of cooperation and peaceful coexistence. In this episode, the Quincy Institute's Anatol Lieven, a seasoned journalist and expert on international relations, discusses why U.S.-Russia relations have sunk so low: the expansion of NATO, human rights abuses, and cyber sabotage are among the issues.

In the first 24 hours of the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944, about as many French civilians were killed as Allied soldiers. From June 6 to August 25, in the areas of Northern France that saw the most fighting, "about twenty-thousand French civilians paid for liberation with their lives," says University of Virginia historian William Hitchcock, the author of The Bitter Road to Freedom. In this episode, we compare history and memory of the invasion of Normandy and the power of liberation in our political vocabulary. By acknowledging the morally complicated nature of the liberation of France, U.S. leaders and citizens today might be more careful about invoking the Second World War to justify military missions of dubious necessity.

In the words of Richard Hofstadter, "Third parties are like bees: once they have stung, they die." What Hofstadter, a towering public intellectual who died in 1970, meant was that in American politics, third parties succeeded not by winning elections, but by pushing the major parties to reform, to adopt ideas circulating on the margins and bring them into the mainstream. Whether third parties are a help or a hindrance, there is an immovable reason why they have struggled to maintain relevance in U.S. history. Two political scientists, Lee Drutman of New America and Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, discuss why third parties fail, and whether we could use some new parties today.

In the past week Americans marked the anniversaries of two major events that hold different places in the common memory. One evoked feelings of honor and pride, the other shame and revulsion. June 6 was the 77th anniversary of the D-Day invasion; May 31 was the centenary of the Tulsa race massacre, one of the most violent acts of domestic terrorism in U.S. history. But unlike D-Day, the Tulsa massacre had been largely forgotten until recent efforts succeeded in drawing attention to its relevance in a nation still grappling with a legacy of racial injustice. Northwestern University historian Leslie Harris explains why it is so difficult for Americans to reckon with the darkest chapters of our past.

Host Martin Di Caro and The Washington Times national security team leader Guy Taylor discuss President Biden's foreign policy. During the Democratic primary debates in 2020, foreign policy was largely ignored. Reality has imposed itself in the early days of the Biden presidency, as the new administration juggles geopolitical dilemmas all over the globe. But as often as American presidents try to shape events to their advantage, unforeseen events shape presidencies. And how a chief executive manages crises not of his own making can determine whether a presidency succeeds or fails.

Is Bitcoin a revolutionary currency or a speculative bubble about to pop? Depends on whom you ask! From cryptocurrencies to total return swaps to hedge fund short-sellers, the financial markets can appear a minefield loaded with dangerous bets and outright scams. In this episode, Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman discusses whether we should be worried about Bitcoin's wild gyrations, and whether it is possible to see the next crash before it hits.

The fourth war between Israel and Hamas since the latter took power in Gaza 14 years ago killed hundreds of people, mostly Palestinians, and left unresolved the historical grievances between two peoples whose national aspirations compete for the same piece of earth. What will it take to end this conflict? Two people who work for the cause of peace, Lucy Kurtzer-Ellenbogen and former Ambassador Hesham Youssef, explain why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems so intractable.

In the quarter century after the Second World War, New Deal liberalism was riding high. But after LBJ's Great Society was sacrificed on the altar of Vietnam, and after Carter's failed presidency gave way to the Reagan Revolution, Democrats were in disarray and liberal became a dirty word. A generation later, is Joe Biden leading a liberal comeback? Princeton historian Sean Wilentz returns to the podcast to talk about the possibilities and perils facing the Democratic Party after four years of Trump.

An effort by Republican lawmakers in several states to prohibit the teaching of the New York Times' 1619 Project in public schools has reignited the debate over who controls our understanding of the past. It has also refocused attention on the project's numerous factual errors about a matter of such surpassing importance as the American Revolution. University of Virginia historian Alan Taylor shares both criticism and praise of the 1619 Project's specific claims as well as its overall aim, which is to emphasize the importance of slavery and systemic racism in American history instead of the founding principles of liberty and freedom that were, as the project's opening essay argued, betrayed by the crime of human bondage.

Is the liberal democratic order in real trouble? From Donald Trump's ongoing campaign to discredit the results of the 2020 election, to the emergence of authoritarian rulers across the globe, it can appear that democracy is on the retreat. The rise of China, a coup in Myanmar, Putin's staying power, and strongmen in Hungary, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere -- all point to democracy's demise. But maybe things are not as grim as they seem. The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft analyst Kelley Beaucar Vlahos joins the podcast to tackle the subject of our time.

Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube -- the digital behemoths have more unchecked power and technological capability to silence speech than any government. But because they are all private firms, they have the right to censor or stifle whoever they wish, from former President Donald Trump to ordinary citizens. Free expression is supposed to be a cherished value in liberal societies, yet it seems more people on both sides of the political aisle are calling for more online censorship. The ACLU's Vera Eidelman and Yale's Jack Balkin join the podcast to untangle the complexities of free expression in a social media world.

Will Trumpism devour conservatism? As House GOP leaders oust Rep. Liz Cheney from her leadership post for defying ex-Pres. Donald Trump's bogus election claims, we ask National Review editor Rich Lowry to assess the future of the conservative movement. Lowry succeeded William F. Buckley as editor of a publication that helped propel conservatism to electoral success and cultural significance. Can the movement survive the personality cult enveloping the Republican Party?

Maybe we are getting the "border crisis" all wrong. If you step away from the daily headlines and avert your eyes from the border for a moment, you will see that the underlying causes of illegal migration to the United States are overlooked or ignored. In this episode, Ithaca College professor emeritus Paul McBride, a specialist in immigration history, says the way many Americans, from political leaders to ordinary citizens, view Central and South American migration misses some important realities and produces misplaced confidence in ineffective remedies, such as a border wall.

When President Biden became the first U.S. president to recognize the Armenian genocide, the massacres and deportations that took place in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 were suddenly back in the news. Past U.S. leaders refused to recognize the genocide to avoid angering Turkey, but times have changed. The relationship between the two NATO allies has turned icy. What happened in 1915 -- and why it matters -- with Middle East historian Howard Eissenstat.

Like McCarthyism during the Red Scare of the 1950s, ex-President Donald Trump's "Stop the Steal" movement seeks to vilify powerful, internal enemies who are trying to undermine American society. In this episode, McCarthyism Redux, historian Gary Gerstle identifies the reasons why such conspiracy theories take hold in the public mind. It is no surprise, when politics are so polarized, that some people are quick to believe the worst about others with whom they disagree.

Do U.S. wars ever end? Although President Biden has announced the final withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, the use of military force authorization passed by Congress 20 years ago is still on the books. In this episode of History As It Happens, The American Way of War, the Cato Institute's John Glaser explains why Congress should reassert its constitutional prerogatives over war-making and end the country's endless military commitments in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.

It is hard to believe the Cold War has been over for 30 years already, if we date its end to the final collapse of the Soviet Union on Dec. 25, 1991. The USSR lost. But what did the U.S. win? The notion that democracy and free markets were victorious, on the march, and the natural progression of human governments proved to be an illusion. In a wide-ranging interview, historian Jeffrey Engel discusses how the post-Cold War world turned out differently than many Americans assumed during those heady days of the early 1990s.

President Biden's decision to withdraw the last U.S. troops from Afghanistan in September is raising questions about the future of a country that has seen little but conflict and humanitarian crises since 1979. The U.S. war could end the way it started: with the Taliban in power. Former U.S. diplomat Johnny Walsh took part in negotiations with the Talibs at the peace table, and was a senior advisor on the Afghan peace process for 10 years during the Obama and Trump administrations. He explains what we might expect if the Taliban seizes power in Kabul again.

Will history be made in the U.S. House? The Democratic-led chamber is expected to vote to make the District of Columbia the 51st state in the Union. Although the legislation faces poor odds in the Senate, the D.C. statehood movement believes it is closer than ever to achieving its goal. Opponents say the Constitution forbids Congress from acting because new states require ratification of a constitutional amendment. But what about taxation with representation? Let's look at the issues with D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton.

Republican lawmakers in state legislatures nationwide are proposing more than 250 measures that, critics say, are designed to curb access to the ballot or open the road to partisan interference in elections. Georgia's new election laws are ground zero in the fight for voting rights, provoking a corporate backlash and comparisons to Jim Crow, the system of white supremacy that grew from the ashes of Reconstruction. Eric Foner, one of the preeminent scholars in the U.S., joins the podcast to discuss what is at stake.

Filibuster, schmilibuster! The origins of the word filibuster seem to belie any claims that the tool of partisan warfare is really a pillar of senatorial greatness, and therefore must be guarded against efforts to weaken or eliminate it. Princeton historian Sean Wilentz returns to the podcast to discuss the pros and cons of doing away with the Senate's long-lasting accident. (Blame Aaron Burr!)

University of Virginia historian Philip Zelikow says President Woodrow Wilson made the most consequential diplomatic error in U.S. history. In his new book, "The Road Less Traveled," Zelikow presents compelling evidence that Wilson could have avoided getting the U.S. involved in the First World War and brought the conflict to a negotiated end in 1916 in the process. The peace ball was in his hands, but he fumbled it. This reassessment of a critical chapter in history holds important lessons for a world troubled by enormous problems that require international cooperation.

Fifty years after Nixon's move to open the door to Mao's China, the world's most populous country is vying to become the most militarily and economically powerful one. In 1971, few Americans might have foreseen the dramatic changes China would undergo, as it began incorporating market reforms into its one-party, Communist state. Is the door now open to conflict, competition, or cooperation? The Washington Times' Guy Taylor and Johns Hopkins University SAIS scholar Carla Freeman join the conversation.

Facing the biggest migrant surge in 20 years, the Biden administration is struggling to cope with the influx. Beyond its immediate causes tied to the president's new policies, however, the wave of unaccompanied children is part of a larger historical pattern fueled by varying "push" and "pull" factors and created by decades of political corruption, U.S. interventionism, civil war, and economic dislocations. The Washington Times' Stephen Dinan and Catholic University historian Julia Young join the discussion.

Is American capitalism broken? The 2020 presidential campaign, in the midst of an economy-shattering pandemic, reignited the debate over whether our version of capitalism needs some socialism to survive. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders offered a full-throated defense of democratic socialism, for instance, while his opponents on the Republican side warned against tilting too far to the left. Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman, author of 'Religion and the Rise of Capitalism,' joins the podcast for a nuanced discussion about these competing economic systems.