History As It Happens

Note: Kate Clarke Lemay is now the Director of the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center at the Army War College. Original show notes: Today marks the 80th anniversary of the Allied invasion of Normandy, a massive military campaign to begin liberating Western Europe from Nazi occupation on the way to victory in the Second World War. American memories are filled with heroism and sacrifice, as D-Day remains a touchstone in the U.S. self-image as a global superpower and defender of freedom and democracy. For the people of France, memories are more complicated, even painful, because the liberation came at a cost of thousands of French civilians. Moreover, the French defeat of 1940 continued to loom large in collective memory as a source of shame. In this episode, the Smithsonian's Kate Clarke Lemay discusses her work studying the war cemeteries in France, which stand as monuments to U.S. military and cultural primacy. Lemay is the author of "Triumph of the Dead: American World War II Cemeteries, Monuments, and Diplomacy in France." 

Before U.S. leaders would compare Saddam Hussein to Hitler, they cynically helped him in his war against Iran. Before the U.S. would wage a decades-long war on Iraq in the form of sanctions and a pre-emptive invasion, multiple White House administrations sought better relations between Washington and Baghdad. During periods of cooperation and conflict, each side misread the other. Yet "forever war" was avoidable. In this episode, investigative journalist Steve Coll, the author of "The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq," discusses new source materials, including audio tapes of Saddam's internal deliberations, that allow us to understand the dictator's decision-making in illuminating ways.

Collective memory -- what our society chooses to remember, honor, or erase from our past -- is perpetually mediated. For generations Confederate statues and monuments stood in public squares until a new racial reckoning compelled cities and towns to remove them. But that wasn't the end of the story -- at least not in Shenandoah County, Virginia. Its school board voted to restore the names of Confederate Generals Lee, Jackson, and Ashby to a pair of schools which had been renamed (Honey Run and Mountain View) in 2020. In Tennessee, the caretakers of the Franklin Battlefield just dedicated a new monument honoring the Texas soldiers who fought there for the Confederacy in 1864. In this episode, historian and Substack writer Kevin Levin discusses the grip Lost Cause mythology continues to hold on the minds of some Americans today, and the difficult task of acknowledging important historical events and actors without glorifying their causes.

The death of Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi has left a power vacuum to be filled in snap elections in less than 50 days. The death of the man once called the "butcher of Tehran" comes at low point in U.S.-Iran relations, and as the theocratic regime's legitimacy at home is under severe stress. In this episode, historians Gregory Brew of Eurasia Group and John Ghazvinian of the University of Pennsylvania discuss Raisi's legacy and how his death may influence the regime's stance on nuclear weapons development.

In the United States and in capitals across the world, liberal democracy is under pressure. We are told that fascism is on the rise. Commentators rummage through the past on the hunt for analogies to explain our current predicament. How does democracy die? What does creeping fascism really look like? Maybe there are solid analogies to examine, if only to confirm that rising fascism is not a real problem today -- or is it? In this episode, political scientist Andreas Umland discusses the crushing of democratic experiments in Weimar Germany and post-Soviet Russia, and the triumph of fascism in the former. 

In an essay for Foreign Affairs, the Israeli historian Tom Segev argues that a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is impossible. As early as 1919, the future prime minister David Ben-Gurion observed that both nations' competing claims to the land created an unbridgeable abyss. In this episode, Segev traces the origins of today's war to the era of the British mandate. By facilitating the creation of a Jewish homeland in what was then an Arab-majority country, the British laid the groundwork for decades of bloodshed and grievances. (Foreign Affairs is the official publication of the Council on Foreign Relations).

President Joseph Biden's decision to pause bomb shipments to Israel over its planned invasion of Rafah provoked a curious charge from Republican legislators. They accused Biden of "abandoning" Israel despite his steadfast support of the Jewish state not only for much of the past seven months (since the 10/7 Hamas attack) but also for most of his decades-long career in Washington. The truth is that every U.S. administration since 1948 has supported Israel, but rarely has the support come without any conditions or criticisms. In this episode, historian Jeremi Suri discusses the deep historical roots of the "special relationship" between the two countries. In the context of the past 75 years, President Biden's move to withhold certain weapons because they may be used to kill Palestinian civilians is the kind of politics that has often tested, but not severed, the bilateral bond.

The American diplomat George Kennan was the architect of the Cold War "containment" policy toward the Soviet Union. Writing in the late 1940s, Kennan viewed the USSR as a hostile expansionist enemy, but one that would be willing to compromise if checked by the United States. Containment did not mean the U.S. could or should militarily crush the Soviets. Can Kennan's ideas be applied to Vladimir Putin's Russia? In this episode, historians Michael Kimmage and Frank Costigliola discuss the enduring influence of Kennan's ideas on American policy-makers.

Campus antiwar protests are disturbing some Jewish students, administrators, and politicians by chanting an Arabic word meaning uprising, intifada. Since Israel began its military occupation of Palestinian territories in 1967, Palestinians have waged two uprisings: in 1987 and 2000. Both were crushed by the IDF. In this episode, Khaled Elgindy of the Middle East Institute delves into the history and meanings of intifada, as some Israel supporters say the word is antisemitic and threatening.   

This is the third episode in an occasional series examining influential elections in U.S. history. The most recent episode, The Election of 1992, was published on April 4. Audio excerpts of "Civil War" are courtesy A24 Films. Democracy and the Constitution are on the ballot. The fate of the republican is at stake. The potential for violence festers as Americans view their political foes as existential enemies. This was the United States in 1860. Abraham Lincoln's victory as the first antislavery president was met with Southern secession and war. In 1864, Lincoln expected to lose before major Union victories propelled him to a landslide victory, thereby keeping alive the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery forever. In this episode, two of the premier historians of nineteenth century American politics, Sean Wilentz and James Oakes, delve into the enduring consequences of these two "revolutionary" elections.