History As It Happens

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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