History As It Happens

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.