History As It Happens

What will work look like in 2022, or 2032? Will your job still exist? Will you ever have to leave your home for the office again? Or will the robots leave you unemployed? The pandemic has fueled any number of utopian or dystopian visions about the American workplace. In this episode, the second part of a two-part series, futurist Brian David Johnson offers a vision grounded in reality and suffused with optimism. Your job may change or even become obsolete, but that does not mean you will be robbed of a livelihood.

As millions of Americans workers join the "Great Resignation," expectations are changing for pay, benefits, on-the-job treatment, work-life balance, and the relationship between capital and labor. The coronavirus pandemic has thrown into relief long-running problems with American capitalism, and many workers are responding, at least for now, by quitting or demanding more from their employers. The pandemic has also accelerated technology-driven changes affecting the very nature of the workplace. Will the future of work look dramatically different than the present? In part one of a two-part series, labor economist Sylvia Allegretto tells us the truth about the "Great Resignation."

Born of revolution in 1917, the Soviet Union dominated Eurasia for more than 70 years until its dramatic, though largely peaceful, collapse in 1991. On Christmas Day that year, Mikhail Gorbachev in a televised address announced his resignation as Soviet president, completing the dissolution of the Soviet state that he had tried to avoid. Also gone was the Communist economic system that failed generations of people in Russia and Eastern Europe. In this episode, Archie Brown discusses the reasons why Soviet Communism which had faced no existential crisis in 1985, the year Gorbachev took power, disintegrated in a matter of years. Hailed as a historic victory in the West, the death of the USSR is lamented by many Russians today because they feel betrayed by their country's experiment with democracy and market economy in the 1990s. 

Young activists in the U.K. do not view Winston Churchill as a hero. Older generations revere Churchill as the greatest Englishman of the 20th century because he stood up to Nazism during the darkest days of the Second World War, when the U.K. fought the Axis alone in 1940. But as Black Lives Matter protests roiled American cities in 2020, activists in Britain began defacing Churchill statues. Leftist academics are also questioning whether the Last Lion still deserves reverence given his racist attitudes toward Indian and Africans, epitomized by his failure to respond to the Bengal famine in 1943. In this episode, world-renowned military historian Max Hastings challenges us to embrace a balanced view of Churchill's accomplishments and failures. If we do not need heroes, we might also resist ransacking history to satisfy our present-day political causes.   

This is the second episode in a two-part series, Let’s Rank the Presidents! Part one covered the most successful presidents in U.S. history. This episode will discuss the worst presidents (and those who fall somewhere in the middle).  We've been lucky to have had some special leaders during difficult times. But our country has also elected some awful presidents, as well as men who might have succeeded if not for unforeseen crises which they wound up badly mismanaging. In this episode, scholars Jeremi Suri of the University of Texas at Austin and Jeffrey Engel of Southern Methodist University return to share their views on the presidents who occupy the bottom rungs of the White House rankings. They also discuss presidents who defy easy judgment, leaders who excelled in one area while catastrophically failing in another.

This is the first episode in a two-part series, Let’s Rank the Presidents! Part one covers the most successful presidents in U.S. history. What makes a great president? Americans may agree that intelligence, influence, integrity, communication skills, vision, and successful domestic and foreign policies are among the right qualities to measure a presidential administration. But determining which presidents rate highly in these categories is a matter of endless debate, one that often reflects our own political biases rather than the actual accomplishments (or failings) of an individual leader. In this episode, scholars Jeremi Suri of the University of Texas at Austin and Jeffrey Engel of Southern Methodist University share their views on the presidents who sit at or near the top. FWIW, in its most recent survey, the Siena College Research Institute had George Washington at the top, followed by FDR and Abraham Lincoln. 

Is majoritarian rule -- the bedrock of democracy -- in trouble? In this episode, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz discusses the tension between the imperative of majority rule and the necessity of protecting minority rights. The tension dates to our founding in the battle between federalists and anti-federalists. Our current problems also have antecedents in the controversy over nullification in the early 1830s and in the secession crisis of 1860-61. Today, Wilentz warns, Republican officials loyal to former President Donald Trump are deliberately eroding public confidence in the election system. They are falsely claiming the 2020 election was rigged, thereby rendering Joseph R. Biden’s electoral majority "invalid." Moreover, the combination of gerrymandering and restrictive voting laws passed in several battleground states, and the threat of the filibuster to thwart voting rights legislation in the Senate, threatens to make permanent a “rule of the minority,” according to the Princeton scholar.

The Japanese attack on U.S. forces at Pearl Harbor 80 years ago, the date which will live in infamy in the stirring oratory of President Franklin Roosevelt, brought the United States into a world war from which it would emerge four years later as an unrivaled economic and military power. This new global status achieved in 1945 stood in stark contrast to the state of the nation in the prewar years. In 1940 Americans were still in the throes of the Great Depression, having suffered through a decade of economic and social paralysis. In this episode, military historian Ron Milam discusses the events that placed Japan and the U.S. on the road to war. Conflict was not inevitable, and it would have seemed unnecessary in the 1930s that a dispute over China, where the U.S. had no vital strategic or material interest, should culminate in the events of Dec. 7, 1941.

Amid a national debate over history curricula and the importance of racism and slavery in shaping the American past, The 1619 Project has returned in expanded book form as an immediate bestseller. With its new and longer essays packing sweeping claims about the character of our national origins, the book expands upon the project’s initial, central argument: a transhistorical white supremacy defines American society. But this is pseudo-history, according to James Oakes, a preeminent scholar of slavery and nineteenth century U.S. politics. Upon reading the new 1619 Project book, Oakes explains its errors and distortions as well as its larger purpose, which is to advance an interpretation of American history through a cynical, racial lens. This lens distorts the very issues the project purports to shine light upon, namely slavery and its relationship to capitalism.

The massing of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border is raising the specter of war between two countries that share a complex history of ethnic, linguistic, and political conflict and coexistence. Seven years after annexing Crimea and instigating a separatist revolt in eastern Ukraine, Russian president Vladimir Putin may be gambling that he can easily annex further territory -- or he might be bluffing about war to win concessions elsewhere. Whatever Mr. Putin’s motivation, the possible incursion is exposing the failure of NATO’s post-Cold War eastward expansion. In this episode, the Quincy Institute's Anatol Lieven discusses the deep historical roots of the Russia-Ukraine dispute -- a history lost on U.S. military analysts who advocated pushing NATO into Russia’s historic backyard.