History As It Happens

This is the first episode in a two-part series marking the anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022. One year ago, Russian president Vladimir Putin may have believed he was on the precipice of a legacy-defining victory. His superior troops and tanks would roll into neighboring Ukraine – in a "special military operation" – beyond the areas of the eastern Donbas region, where Russian forces had been backing separatist groups in a stalemated conflict since 2014. Mr. Putin's armies would reach Kyiv in days, decapitate the Ukrainian government, and be greeted as liberators. Within weeks, Mr. Putin's war aims were exposed as a fantasy. In this episode, The Washington Times national security team leader Guy Taylor and Catholic University historian Michael Kimmage discuss what to expect in the coming year as well as the origins of the war, still a hotly debated topic on both sides of the Atlantic. Also, Mr. Kimmage, who worked on the Russia-Ukraine portfolio for the U.S. State Department in 2014-16, discusses the ways in which U.S. leaders talk about national interests, as Congress has approved billions in military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine.

No publication in recent memory has provoked more debate and political hand-wringing than the New York Times' 1619 Project. Much of the attention has focused on its specious claims that "some colonists" broke with the crown to defend slavery and its slighting of Abraham Lincoln. The 1619 Project is now a major Hulu docuseries, but it continues to present a distorted view of slavery and capitalism in an effort to showcase the importance of Black people in fighting for American democracy. In this episode, one of the project's most vocal critics, economic historian Phil Magness of the conservative American Institute for Economic Research, discusses what the New York Times' award-winning project still gets wrong.

Most Americans hadn't seen or heard the name of former Pakistani military ruler Pervez Musharraf for many years before news broke of his death earlier this month. Musharraf had been ill, living a quiet existence in self-imposed exile in Dubai, a long way in space and time from his once esteemed position as an important U.S. ally in the war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Musharraf's reluctant embrace of the U.S. war helped lead to his downfall, as it riled segments of Pakistan's population of fundamentalist Islamists who opposed helping the U.S. oust the Taliban from Kabul. As the backlash to his policies escalated, Musharraf became increasingly despotic, ultimately suspending the Pakistani constitution and imposing emergency rule in 2007. In this episode, New America national security expert Peter Bergen discusses the legacy of a ruler who, after coming to power in a bloodless coup in 1999, relented to U.S. "with us or against us" ultimatums. In the end, American interests could never align with Pakistan's strategy of backing a Pashtun force in Afghanistan for strategic depth against India.

Seventy-three years ago today, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy delivered a watershed speech in his young political career in Wheeling, West Virginia. He told the Republican Women's Club that he knew of more than 200 known Communists who had infiltrated the U.S. government. "Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity. The modern champions of communism have selected this as the time. And, ladies and gentlemen, the chips are down—they are truly down," the Republican demagogue warned his audience. In this episode, historian and McCarthy biographer Rick Fried discusses his new book, "A Genius for Confusion," which illuminates the destructive power of lying in an atmosphere of heightened national angst and anti-communist paranoia. In our age of disinformation, McCarthyism has enduring relevance.

China's decision to fly a surveillance balloon over the United States led Secretary of State Antony Blinken to postpone his trip to Beijing at a time when U.S.-China relations are at a historic low point. But neither the balloon incident nor other recent controversies, such as Covid or the trade war, are solely responsible for wrecking once promising ties. The seeds of this burgeoning Great Power rivalry were planted decades ago, when U.S. policymakers believed helping China along its path to prosperity would lead to a more stable and peaceful world. It hasn't exactly turned out that way. In this episode, The Washington Times' Guy Taylor and Andrew Scobell of the U.S. Institute of Peace discuss the increasingly antagonistic relationship between two powers contending for primacy in the Pacific and beyond.

After weeks of criticism for refusing to send its tanks to Ukraine, Germany relented. Chancellor Olaf Schultz had hesitated in approving shipments of the Leopard 2 battle tank, although Germans citizens have steadfastly supported Ukraine in its war against Russia, and despite the fact that Schultz's government already delivered more than $1 billion in aid and arms to Ukraine the prior year. But the tank issue caused a rift in German politics over whether the country was going too far in its support for Ukraine in a war with no end in sight against a nuclear-armed foe. Germany, while not a pacifist nation, still has prominent pacifist or anti-interventionist voices in its politics who point to the country's history as the reason for avoiding deep involvement in foreign wars: Hitler, genocide, and catastrophic defeat in 1945. In this episode, historian Chris Browning brings his expertise on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust to a discussion about the burden of the German past on current politics.

When Ukraine acceded to Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1994, the country's leaders fulfilled a vow they had made as soon as Ukraine became an independent state in 1991. Ukraine would relinquish the thousands of nuclear warheads and intercontinental ballistic missiles on its territory – it's "nuclear inheritance" after the collapse of the USSR. Looking back at that decision through the lens of Russia's invasion one year ago, some observers now contend that Ukraine made a mistake by voluntarily ceding its potential nuclear deterrence, although Ukraine never had independent operational command and control over the weapons. Moreover, as political scientist and nuclear historian Mariana Budjeryn demonstrates in her new book, "Inheriting the Bomb," the majority of Ukrainian political and military leaders in the early 1990s viewed holding onto the nukes as more dangerous than it might be worth. In this episode, Budjeryn discusses the momentous events and decisions that resulted in Ukraine transferring all its nuclear weapons to Russia to be dismantled. She illuminates an important chapter in international relations that left Ukraine in a diplomatic and political no man's land from which it could not completely extract itself over the next 30 years.

In these politically polarized times, Americans have a partisan media that suits the circumstances. Or do biased news and information sources drive the polarization? Whatever the case, public trust in the mass media to accurately report the news is about as low as pollsters have ever found it. The marked ebbing of trust comes as people consume information, credible or not, from more sources than ever before: social media, blogs, podcasts, web sites, YouTube channels, etc., etc. But before you pine for the good ol' days of a neutral press, the notion that journalism should be professional and independent rather than partisan, is relatively new in U.S. history. In fact, from the start of the republic, newspapers and pamphlets were openly partisan and often supported by political patronage. In this episode, historian Jeff Pasley talks about the ways in which the early partisan newspapers bolstered democracy, and how today's media landscape is corroding it.

One of the first moves House Republicans made upon assuming the chamber's majority was to create, in a party-line vote of 221-211, the "Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government." But rather than use that unwieldy moniker, GOP leaders appropriated the name of an iconic investigative committee from a bygone era. In 1975, in an 82-4 vote, the Senate created the Church committee, which was chaired by Idaho Democratic Sen. Frank Church, to investigate the FBI, CIA, and NSA. (Its official title was the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities). Church's panel examined decades of egregious abuses, which were brought to light as Americans recovered from the traumas of Vietnam and Watergate. In this episode, historian Sam Martin, the Frank and Bethine Church Endowed Chair of Public Affairs at Boise State University in Idaho, compares and contrasts the historically important work of the original Church committee with the aims of today's House GOP.

What if the U.S. had taken a more active and constructive role in international affairs after the First World War, rather than reject the Treaty of Versailles and refuse to join the League of Nations? In the view of historian Robert Kagan, another global conflict would have been avoided, and Adolph Hitler might never have been appointed German chancellor as he was in January 1933. This is the subject of Kagan's latest book, "The Ghost at the Feast," and in this episode, he defends his thesis concerning the importance of U.S. leadership, or its absence, after the seismic shifts in global power caused by the war of 1914-18. As Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, put it in a recent essay in Foreign Affairs about U.S. support for Ukraine, "Only American power can keep the natural forces of history at bay." Is that true today? Was it true between 1919 and 1939?

For all the legitimate concern about the fate of American democracy and our governing institutions, relatively little attention is paid to Congress' inability or unwillingness to check the war powers of the "imperial presidency." The War Powers Resolution of 1973, passed in the aftermath of the Johnson and Nixon administrations' abuses during the Vietnam War, was supposed to empower Congress to end endless wars, but a half century later we can see that the U.S. still intervened in many crises often with disastrous consequences. And the most recent attempt to use the war powers ended in failure, when Senator Bernie Sanders withdrew his resolution to stop U.S. support for Saudi Arabia's cruel war in Yemen, which has left thousands of civilians dead while producing an epic humanitarian crisis. In this episode, historians Jeremi Suri and Jeffrey Engel reveal the reasons why the War Powers Resolution has never been used to end a U.S. military adventure, and what might be done to end "endless American war".

As politics grew increasingly violent in the 1850s, Americans understood that unresolvable conflicts over the extension of slavery and the disproportionate political power of the slaveholders could lead to disunion and war. In the view of some historians, activism outside Congress, driven by radical abolitionists as well as pro-slavery ruffians, forced the major parties to seek compromises to hold the country together, only to fall short because of the immensity of the problem and intransigence of the Slave Power. This political turmoil produced prolonged and acrimonious contests for House speaker, a history that suddenly became relevant again when the House needed 15 ballots over five days to elect California Rep. Kevin McCarthy. In this episode, University of Connecticut historian Manisha Sinha, a leading authority on the history of slavery and abolition, talks about the parallels between past and present as Americans witness today's political polarization worsening.

The election of California Rep. Kevin McCarthy as House speaker after five days and 15 ballots exposed divisions within the Republican Party that may not portend well for the immediate future of his party, the chamber, or the country. With one exception (1923), no speakership election since the Civil War needed more than one ballot. And in the antebellum U.S. is where we might find parallels to today's political turmoil. Before the Civil War, speakership fights were often acrimonious, extended affairs reflecting the nation's violent, deep political divisions over slavery. The 1855-56 speakership election took 133 ballots! In this episode, historian Sean Wilentz, author of The Rise of American Democracy, discusses which lessons from those long-ago fights apply to today's crisis of democracy.

As President Biden enters the third year of his presidency, his only obvious foreign policy success lies in Ukraine, where U.S. and NATO support has proved decisive in stopping -- at least so far -- Russia's war of aggression. Mr. Biden has framed his foreign policy by saying the U.S. is in a global contest pitting democracies versus autocracies. Is that a Biden Doctrine? In this episode, we examine the history of presidential doctrines, and The Washington Times' reporters Guy Taylor and Ben Wolfgang talk about the foreign policy challenges that lie ahead for the Biden administration as 2023 unfolds.

January 1 marked the 160th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, a major step in a process of world historical importance, the abolition of slavery in the United States. Yet nowadays some historians argue that the proclamation was illegal, unconstitutional, or without important consequences for the enslaved. Others contend that the antislavery amendment that followed in 1865 was a betrayal of Black Americans, because it allowed for their "re-enslavement" in prisons. In this episode, historian James Oakes reminds us of the real meaning of Lincoln's proclamation, as it was part of a decades-long effort to rid the U.S. of human chattel slavery and fulfill the promise of our founding documents.

Note: This is the final episode of 2022. History As It Happens will be back with new episodes the first week of January, 2023. Enjoy the holidays! In his misguided drive to reassert Russian power by trying (and failing) to turn Ukraine into a vassal state, Vladimir Putin has exposed his country's weakness while doing incalculable damage to his neighbor. Yet despite his epic miscalculation, Putin retains the support of Russia's elites, some of whom fear that defeat in Ukraine will lead to state collapse in Moscow. In this episode, Russia expert Thomas Graham of the Council on Foreign Relations explains how history informs the Russian imagination about its place in the world and its relationship to Eastern Europe.

Since British prime minister Neville Chamberlain attempted to avoid war with Hitler in 1938 by agreeing to carve up Czechoslovakia, the word appeasement has been synonymous with moral weakness and wishful thinking. While the failure to appease the Nazi dictator offers important lessons, politicians -- and even some historians -- often invoke the infamous Munich Conference as a political cudgel with which to bash their foes. It happened during Vietnam, the wars in Iraq, and it's happening again as the West supports Ukraine. In this episode, military historian Cathal Nolan differentiates propaganda from history.

Since September thousands of ordinary Iranian citizens have risked their lives -- and hundreds have lost their lives -- protesting the ayatollahs' rule after the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini. The 22-year-old woman had been arrested by the clerical regimes' morality police for not wearing her hijab the way the clerics have prescribed. The street protests are said to be the biggest challenge for the regime since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, but it remains unclear if the demonstrators can compel their government to embrace fundamental change. In this episode, historian John Ghazvinian explains why the Islamic Republic's power has endured despite widespread domestic discontent and international isolation.

Merry Christmas! Or is it Happy Holidays?! Either way, the most intense shopping season of the year is underway. American consumers' senses are being assaulted by non-stop commercials for Christmas gifts. Songs, movies, and other forms of pop culture lend a secular element to what is for many Christians a religious celebration, too. There's also Santa Claus and Christmas trees and yule logs and more. Our modern version of Christmas is an amalgam of traditions that developed over many centuries with input from an array of cultures. And as historian Ruth McClelland-Nugent tells us in this episode, the commercialization that took off in the 19th century is what made Christmas so popular.

Remarkable scenes are unfolding across China. Ordinary citizens are taking to the streets to protest the regime's "Zero Covid" strategy that has locked millions of people in their homes and disrupted the country's economic output. The demonstrations are the largest show of resistance to the Communist Party's power since the pro-democracy movement that flowered in Tiananmen Square in 1989. In this episode, China analyst Weifeng Zhong of the Mercatus Center explains the roots of the regime's missteps under president Xi Jinping and whether the protests might coalesce into a movement for change.

It's a small group no one wants to be a member of. Since the dawn of the republic only 10 elected presidents have been rejected by voters in their bids for a second term. Only one of those, Grover Cleveland, was able to win a non-consecutive term after losing his first re-election campaign. This is another way of saying that history doesn't offer many guides to help us understand our turbulent politics today, as Donald Trump seeks another shot at the White House after his bitter 2020 defeat. And the man who unseated him, Joe Biden, has left open the door to stepping aside come 2024 -- another rarity in presidential politics. In this episode, historian Jeffrey Engel focuses our attention on the election of 1912 when a popular former president tried to win another term after four years away from the White House.

This conversation with George Washington University historian David Silverman was featured on C-SPAN's 'American History TV.' Silverman talks about the history of Thanksgiving and the importance of mythic origin stories in American society and culture.

After some of the coldest years of the Cold War came a thaw in U.S.-Soviet relations that witnessed historic summits and the signing of groundbreaking disarmament pacts. In this episode, historian William Inboden discusses the pillars of Ronald Reagan's foreign policy and why, in his view, his strategy of "peace through strength" brought about a peaceful end to the Cold War and a world without Soviet Communism. By bolstering U.S. alliances and supporting anti-Communist insurgencies throughout the Third World, Inboden contends the Reagan administration's statecraft pressured the USSR to produce a reform-minded leader willing to negotiate. In 1985, that was Mikhail Gorbachev. In Inboden's work is an argument that Republicans today would be wise to reclaim Reagan's approach of engaging with the world and embracing multilateral agreements and collective security alliances.

Donald Trump's announcement that he will seek the presidency once more has brought a renewed focus on his worldview, his vision for the U.S. role in a complicated world. 'America First' has a long lineage in our politics, reaching back to a time when isolationism was the dominant foreign policy constituency in the country. In this episode, historian Christopher McKnight Nichols explores the continuities and major differences between the America First attitudes of the interwar period and today's Trumpist populism of the post-Cold War era.

Is it possible for an individual leader to change the course of history? This question is as important today as it was in the past century, when "charismatic" rulers made an enormous impact, often with catastrophic consequences. In this episode, historian Ian Kershaw talks about how certain political leaders obtained and exercised power in 20th century Europe, in an effort to solve the question of the role of individual decision-makers in determining historical change. As Kershaw writes in his new book, "Personality and Power: Builders and Destroyers of Modern Europe," "the character traits of twentieth century authoritarian leaders and the structures that underpinned their rule… can perhaps at times be glimpsed in the rule of their twenty-first-century counterparts." This is not "Great Man Theory." Rather it is a timely conversation about the interplay between human agency and impersonal forces, the conditions and contexts that allow certain individuals -- democrats and dictators -- to play a decisive role, and the constraints holding them back.

Voters largely rejected Donald Trump's slate of favored candidates in the midterm elections, and Democrats avoided the "red wave" many pollsters and pundits expected. The surprise outcome has led to recriminations on the right, with some conservatives calling on the GOP to move on from Trump's toxic brand of populism. In this episode, political journalist Damon Linker, the author of the "Eyes on the Right" substack, says it's too early to know if Trumpism is receding from the political mainstream. Regardless what many voters may think, Trump is not going away quietly anyway.

In the late 1970s, the national mood was dark. In the words of President Carter, Americans faced a "crisis of confidence." Inflation reached double digits. Stagflation entered the lexicon. An OPEC price increase led to an energy crisis. And there was the Iran hostage fiasco of 1979. As his presidency strained to regain its footing, Carter made an appointment that would leave a lasting mark on history. He picked Paul Volcker to lead the Federal Reserve. Volcker took up his new post by taking a sledgehammer to inflation, sending interest rates soaring above 20 percent and tipping the economy into recession in the election year of 1980. Volcker's policies loom large today as Federal Reserve chairman Jay Powell struggles to curb the worst inflation since the early 1980s. In this episode, economist and Volcker biographer William Silber talks about the towering legacy of the Federal Reserve chairman, as well as the historical lessons Powell might heed.

In Vladimir Putin's warped view of the past, Ukraine was only able to seek independence in 1991 because of a mistake made by another Vladimir nearly 70 years before. In his zeal to obscure Ukrainian national identity, Russia's dictator blames the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin for "creating" an independent Ukraine in 1922 "by separating, severing what is historically Russian land." These two events – the Bolshevik revolution and Russia's invasion of Ukraine – are not connected only in Putin's imagination. They are linked through a history of appalling violence and destruction. The place names of battles of the Russian civil war a century ago are familiar to anyone following today's news of Russia's military fiasco in Ukraine. In this episode, the esteemed military historian Antony Beevor discusses the parallels between the civil war that birthed the Soviet Union and Putin's drive to turn Ukraine into a client state – a plan that has, thus far, failed. Moreover, the Bolshevik coup d'etat of October, 1917, far from an obscure bit of history, shaped the course of the twentieth century as few other events did. Antony Beevor is the author of "Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921."

On April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson asked a joint session of Congress for a declaration of war against Germany. Wilson declared, "The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty." In the century since, most U.S. presidents have echoed Wilson to one degree or another. And, especially in the years after the Cold War, Americans took it for granted that their nation must promote or defend democracy across the globe because, with Soviet Communism relegated to the dustbin of history, people everywhere would naturally gravitate to freedom and capitalism. Today, it has become an axiom among many public intellectuals and political figures that fundamental freedoms are on the line at home and abroad, from Ukraine to Taiwan. President Joseph R. Biden frequently frames U.S. foreign policy in terms of a global confrontation between democracy and autocracy. In this episode, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David M. Kennedy explores the origins of the Wilsonian idea that now permeates our basic political thinking. We may be getting Wilson wrong in one important respect. Declaring that the "world must be made safe for democracy" is not the same as saying "we must make the world democratic."

As China escalates its intimidation of Taiwan, provoking speculation that President Xi Jinping wants the People's Liberation Army to invade the island sometime in the next few years, Taiwan's government is preparing the population of nearly 24 million for the possibility of war while calling on the world's democracies for assistance. In this cauldron of international tension, The Washington Times' national security reporter Guy Taylor visited Taiwan to interview government officials and business leaders about the future of the island's de facto independence. In this episode, Taylor discusses how the outcome of the Chinese civil war in 1949, followed by the normalization of U.S.-China relations in the 1970s, laid the groundwork for today's dispute. Beyond the historic or ideological reasons behind Xi's vow to absorb Taiwan, the presence of advanced semiconductor manufacturers makes Taiwan an enticing geopolitical target which President Biden has vowed to defend in the case of attack.

A generation before Donald Trump triumphed over the detested "establishment," a pugnacious media personality sensed that conservative Americans were ready to move the Republican Party to the right. Pat Buchanan didn't succeed in his insurgent campaign to defeat President Bush in the 1992 GOP primaries, but he may have set the stage for Trumpism nonetheless. By railing against illegal immigration, free trade, and cultural liberalism -- and by appealing to racial grievances -- Pat Buchanan began splintering the far right from the party of Reagan. Historian Nicole Hemmer, an expert of the rise of the New Right, discusses Buchanan's enduring, illiberal influence.

Sixty Octobers ago the world narrowly avoided nuclear conflict. After 13 tense days, the Cuban Missile Crisis ended with a compromise deal rather than war. President Joseph R. Biden's remark that the war in Ukraine represents humanity's closest brush with nuclear Armageddon since the 1962 crisis may at first seem overwrought, but there's nothing like an anniversary to focus our minds on such a dreadful possibility. The war in Eastern Europe is escalating, and there is no sign it will come to a decisive conclusion before the onset of winter. Hanging over all of this is Vladimir Putin's threat to use tactical nuclear weapons inside Ukraine. In this episode, military historian Max Hastings, author of "The Abyss: Nuclear Crisis Cuba 1962", discusses the critical parallels between the two conflicts.

Years before Adolph Hitler obtained power, and in the decades before the Third Reich brought "the manufacture of mass death to its pitiless consummation" in the words of the late military historian John Keegan, the seeds were planted of America's callous and ineffective response to the Nazi persecution of Europe's Jews. As the filmmakers Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein show in their searing new documentary "The U.S. and the Holocaust," hostility to immigration coexisted with America's reputation as a land of opportunity during an era that saw millions of Europeans make their way to Ellis Island. But a long-simmering nativist backlash combined with the junk science of eugenics to produce federal legislation in 1924 severely restricting emigration to the United States based on nation of origin. These quotas, which enjoyed widespread public and political support, would prevent hundreds of thousands of Jews from escaping Europe when they had a chance. In this episode, author and historian Rebecca Erbelding, an expert on the U.S. response to the Nazi genocide at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and an independent scholarly advisor to the Burns documentary, discusses the ways in which antisemitism, nativism, and isolationism contributed to the failure to save more Jewish lives. Americans expressed revulsion at Nazi violence, but the outrage did not lead to a more welcoming attitude toward refugees.

One-hundred fifty-seven years after Appomattox, Americans are still grappling with a question that hung over the post-Civil War period: what kind of democracy are we going to be? That is the central question of historian Jeremi Suri's new book, "Civil War By Other Means," which traces the violent controversies of Reconstruction over voting and citizenship to our current dilemmas. It was no accident that one of the Jan. 6, 2021, rioters carried a Confederate flag into the U.S. Capitol as his fellow "patriots" marauded the halls. The flag remains a powerful symbol of rebellion and the racism underpinning the notion that the "wrong people" voted in the 2020 election. Wars do not end; they migrate to our minds.

This is the second in a two-part series of conversations recorded at George Washington's Mount Vernon as History As It Happens goes on location, with special guests historian Joseph Ellis and Doug Bradburn, Mount Vernon's president and chief executive. Is it possible to talk too much about slavery at a historic plantation? How does an institution as popular and important as Mount Vernon interpret the past to hundreds of thousands of Americans who visit each year, many of whom revere George Washington as a hero? Listen to Joseph Ellis and Doug Bradburn discuss the problems with the "history wars" -- the endless conflict over who owns the past.

This is the first in a two-part series of conversations recorded at George Washington's Mount Vernon as History As It Happens goes on location, with special guests historian Joseph Ellis and Doug Bradburn, Mount Vernon's president and chief executive. If you read George Washington's 1796 Farewell Address, you might sense our first president could foresee our current troubles. As he prepared to retire to his plantation, Washington warned the young republic about the dangers of faction, or what we might call hyper-partisan passions. He cautioned against getting entangled in Europe's affairs, passing onerous debt onto future generations, and the dangers of foreign meddling in our domestic affairs. And when he died in 1799, Washington left behind a nation that would not solve the problem of racial slavery for another 65 years. Listen to Joseph Ellis and Doug Bradburn place Washington's complicated legacy and enduring wisdom in their proper historical contexts -- a necessary task if we are to seek guidance from our most famous founder.

Why would a U.S. senator pen a polemical attack against a history professor? Florida Senator Marco Rubio labeled Princeton's Sean Wilentz a "cisgender white male" who "reeks of privilege" after Wilentz wrote an op-ed accusing Rubio of standing "in the sorry tradition of the great propagandists" who are guilty of "the deliberate manipulation and falsification of events for political purposes." In early August Wilentz had been among a handful of esteemed scholars invited to the White House to talk to President Biden privately about threats to democracy at home and abroad. Rubio was not at that meeting, but he claimed to know -- without evidence -- that the historians told the president to ignore "working everyday people and their common sense." In this episode, Wilentz, a preeminent scholar of American democracy, discusses what he describes as the "fake populism" espoused by many right-wing politicians. Unlike the genuine populists of the past, who fought for the economic rights of ordinary Americans against powerful interests such as monopolistic railroads, today's "fake populists" are concerned with vilifying "elites" and "snobs" from the halls of academia to "deep state" bureaucrats.

The Italian elections went in favor of a right-wing coalition led by Giorgia Meloni and her party, Brothers of Italy. After winning only four percent of the vote in 2018, Brothers of Italy earned enough votes to lead what will be the most right-wing Italian government since 1945. In fact, Meloni's party has a historic connection to post-war fascists, and she praised Mussolini as a teenage neo-fascist activist. Does this mean fascism is on the march in Italy again? If not fascism, what is it? In this episode, Roger Griffin, a foremost expert on the history of fascism at Oxford Brookes University, explains why right-wing populism is winning at the ballot box not just in Italy but across much of Europe.

War has been the rule in the former Soviet domains. The collapse of the USSR unleashed previously bottled-up ethnic and territorial conflicts. Some countries were rocked by revolution. The Russian Federation, meanwhile, sought to dominate slices of the old Soviet empire with the aim of creating Novorossiya, literally "New Russia." In this episode, Catholic University historian Michael Kimmage argues Putin's hot wars and frozen conflicts in Moldova, Georgia, Crimea, and the Donbas are part of a larger strategy to reassert Russian dominance in its backyard after the humiliations of the 1990s. The collapse of the USSR was not only an event; it triggered a process still unfolding in violent ways today.

Russia is trying to accomplish in a sham process what it can't achieve on the battlefield, which is to conquer eastern Ukraine. In Kremlin-engineered referenda, Ukrainian citizens of four southern and eastern regions are being forced to vote to join Russia so that Vladimir Putin may formally annex them. Should he announce the regions as part of Russia, the window for any peace negotiations will close. That is because no Ukrainian government would recognize the results of the voting, and therefore could see no alternative to trying to regain the annexed regions by military force. In this episode, the Quincy Institute's Anatol Lieven discusses this frightening escalation of a war that Ukraine appeared to be winning after retaking more than 2,000 square miles of territory.

By design the United Nations cannot stop the war in Ukraine. The world body chartered in 1945 to promote peace and cooperation has a decidedly mixed record in those areas, but that is mostly because the great powers from the start kept for themselves the authority to sanction or veto international efforts to prevent war. In this episode, Karen Mingst, an expert on diplomacy and global governance, explains where the U.N. has been effective in building a better world, and where it has failed to live up to its principles.

The death of Queen Elizabeth II provoked in her home country an outpouring of grief and pride while in other parts of the world – the independent nations of the former British Empire – her passing prompted a more ambivalent reflection on the imperial aspects of her legacy. That is because the queen was a symbol not only of stability and monarchical grace. Elizabeth II was also a symbol of empire and colonialism, and a reluctance on the part of some of her subjects to fully reckon with that bloody, rapacious history. In this episode, historian Dane Kennedy discusses the reasons for the mixed reactions to the death of the United Kingdom's longest-serving monarch. Not everyone is feeling nostalgic for the world in which Elizabeth became monarch, which was in the throes of violent struggles for national liberation.

President Biden told supporters at a reception for the Democratic National Committee that Donald Trump and his loyalists within the GOP -- "MAGA Republicans" -- subscribe to an extreme philosophy that Mr. Biden described as "semi-fascism." If you spend any amount of time on social media, you'll see fascism everywhere. Pundits, political scientists, historians, anyone with a Twitter account -- are offering their takes on whether Republicans are steering the United States toward fascism. In this episode, the scholars Jeffrey Bale and Tamir Bar-On argue Trump's critics are dangerously distorting history. Fascism is a distinct ideology from other forms of populism or illiberalism or ultra-nationalism, whatever one thinks of Trumpism. Moreover, they contend the threat to democracy posed by right-wing fringe groups has been egregiously exaggerated for cynical political purposes.

Inflation, high gas prices, foreign policy failures, and the deep mistrust of leadership by American citizens -- these problems and more dogged President Jimmy Carter throughout his one term in the White House. Although faced with difficulties not entirely within his control, Carter committed plenty of unforced errors, none more defining than his address on live TV on June 15, 1979 -- the "malaise" speech. A half century later, President Biden's first two years in office are evoking memories of Carter's struggles. Democrats are said to be whispering that they would prefer someone else run for president in 2024 because Biden's approval ratings are so poor. Is the comparison fair? In this episode, historian and Carter biographer Scott Kaufman takes us back to the late 1970s to see if Biden might be following in Carter's footsteps as a one-term president.

Americans not only expect more political violence. Polls show that a growing number of Americans, though still a minority, believe violence against the government is acceptable in certain circumstances. Ours is a country simmering with rage and mistrust toward wrongs real and perceived. In late 1859, a fanatical abolitionist believed in the righteousness of his cause so deeply that he sought war against the government by inciting a slave revolt in the Virginia mountains. John Brown's raid at Harpers Ferry accomplished nothing, but Brown became a symbol meaning different things to different people over time. But in our post-January 6 climate, Brown may serve as a cautionary tale of the dangers of unhinged belief in a crusade against injustice, real or imagined.

When Mikhail Gorbachev died on August 30, obituaries and remembrances lauded his legacy of reform that ended Communism and the peaceful means that allowed the Eastern Bloc to go its own way without bloodshed. But the last Soviet leader is still often misunderstood, because his most important reforms eroded the very foundations of his power, leading ultimately to the dissolution of the state. In this episode, Oxford's Archie Brown, who has studied Soviet Communism for a half century, takes us inside the mind of Mikhail Gorbachev, who was unique among leaders of the USSR.

It's been said that history does not repeat but it does rhyme. A generation after seizing power for the first time in an Afghanistan destroyed by war, the Taliban returned to Kabul last August after enduring another long conflict with foreign invaders. As ever, the Taliban mystify observers who do not understand how these fanatical holy warriors prevailed against a militarily superior opponent and over a population that disapproves of its authoritarian edicts and brutal repression. In this episode, Andrew Watkins, a senior expert on Afghanistan at the U.S. Institute of Peace who has conducted extensive field research in Taliban country, discusses the group's origins in the early 1990s and the reasons for their staying power.

The man who succeeded Osama bin Laden at the top of al-Qaeda, the Egyptian jihadist Ayman al-Zawahiri, was not a driving force or key planner in the group's early days, despite reports that made him out to be the brains behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That is according to Peter Bergen, an expert on international terrorism at New America and one of a handful of Western journalists who interviewed bin Laden. In this episode, Bergen discusses the assassination of al-Zawahiri by a U.S. drone; the future of al-Qaeda after 21 years of global war; whether the wave of Islamic fundamentalism that swept the Muslim world in the 1970s is waning; and Afghanistan one year after the U.S. completed its withdrawal. Men like bin Laden and al-Zawahiri wanted to change the world, but they reaped the whirlwind from their indiscriminate ferocity and violent fanaticism.

The FBI investigation into possible Espionage Act violations by former president Donald J. Trump for keeping top-secret documents at his Florida resort, has sparked curiosity in a WWI-era law rarely used to prosecute actual spies. In the 1950s, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were tried, convicted, and executed under the Espionage Act for sharing top-secret information about the atomic bomb with the Soviet Union. They were the only American citizens ever executed as spies during peacetime, and their case remains controversial to this day. But, for the most part, the Espionage Act has rarely been used to punish espionage. In this episode, historian Christopher Capozzola discusses the law's sordid origins. Congress passed it in a climate of xenophobia and anti-Red hysteria in 1917, the year the U.S. entered the First World War. But because many Americans opposed fighting in what they viewed as a war between European colonial powers, Congress included provisions allowing the federal government to crack down on dissent. Socialists, immigrants, peace activists, newspapers, and early filmmakers were targeted in this shameful chapter of American history.

Unprecedented may be the most overused word in political discourse, but it applies to the post-presidency of Donald J. Trump. More than a year and a half since he left office, Trump's legal problems, political ambitions, and unrelenting grievances command the headlines and even overshadow the legislative accomplishments of the current occupant of the White House. In this episode, historian Jeremi Suri discusses why there's never been anything like it in American history. Many former presidents maintained a public profile after leaving the White House, but none dominated his party and held onto the loyalty of his base despite being embroiled in so many allegations of corruption as Trump.