History As It Happens

This episode was recorded live, featuring a conversation between History As It Happens host Martin Di Caro and American Historical Association executive director James Grossman at the Washington Times studios. It will appear on C-SPAN's American History TV in November. They discussed the current controversies over history curricula at America's schools: are children really being indoctrinated? Why did certain historical narratives come to dominant scholarship, such as the Dunning school's interpretation of Reconstruction? Di Caro and Grossman also covered the state of civics education in the U.S.

The death of the soldier-statesman Colin Powell threw into relief his remarkable public career and historic times, from his humble origins in the Bronx to his place in the halls of power at the transformative close of the Cold War era. When a major figure dies, historians have to weigh the person’s influence on events, or how events shaped the individual. They must also weigh accomplishments against failures. In this episode, historian Jeffrey Engel reflects on the legacy of a man who once was one of the most respected, admired, and trusted figures in American life. Powell's legacy, however, was marred by his false and misleading presentation to the United Nations in 2003 about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction -- weapons that did not exist.

Today the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps is considered an important pillar of the U.S. military establishment. ROTC programs are offered at approximately 1,700 colleges, providing enrollees a path of upward mobility in exchange for their military service and good citizenship. Yet its prosaic presence in American life hides its controversial origins. In this episode, a sliver of an important story -- the rise of militarism in early 20th century America -- illuminates a larger dilemma. For when the ROTC was proposed as part of the National Defense Act of 1916, antiwar activists joined critics of imperialism in what would amount to a failed attempt to convince Congress to kill the bill. An organized and vocal peace movement once existed in the U.S. It warned that "Prussianism" would harm the country’s youth and the education system. In extensive congressional hearings, these voices clashed with powerful forces behind the Preparedness Movement, who argued the U.S. was unready to join combat in Europe because of the desultory state of its armed forces. In this maelstrom was born the ROTC and with it a marriage between two great American institutions: the military and academia.

In 1990 the U.S. possessed one military base in the Middle East, a small naval installation in Bahrain. In August of that year Iraq invaded Kuwait, and the U.S.-led response in the Gulf War would lay the foundation for the “forever wars” of our own time. The United States would establish dozens of permanent army, air, and naval bases from which it would launch attacks across the region over the next three decades. The U.S. military presence in the Greater Middle East is now so prosaic that it is easy to forget the time when our leaders avoided sending large forces into that volatile region, which was viewed as strategically less important than Europe and Asia in the early years of the Cold War. But that started changing in the late 1970s and culminated in a key decision by the Reagan administration in 1983: to establish CENTCOM. Andrew Bacevich, the president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, discusses the importance of creating CENTCOM, whose imperium covers 21 nations from Egypt east to Afghanistan.

China’s wave of military exercises over Taiwan, which is raising the possibility of armed conflict, is overshadowing the development of the Biden administration’s soft power approach to confronting China’s coercive economic measures in the Indo-Pacific. In late September the White House hosted the first in-person meeting of “the Quad” leaders, where the prime ministers of Australia, Japan, and India met President Biden to coordinate action on a number of fronts. Vaccine diplomacy, climate change, infrastructure, and education were on the agenda; notably absent was any talk of military action or agreements. Following the humiliating U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the alignment of the Quad is signaling a different approach to global power dynamics, at least in East Asia, even as China’s posturing toward Taiwan threatens to suck the U.S. into a potentially calamitous military confrontation. The U.S. Institute of Peace's Daniel Markey and Andrew Scobell, experts on U.S.-China relations, discuss why the U.S. cannot escape the past when it comes to Taiwan.

Christopher Columbus, a Genoese navigator, never knew America existed. He did not step foot in North America; until his death he believed he had reached the outskirts of China. Yet Columbus became an American hero, the story of his voyages woven into the U.S. origin story by historians in the early nineteenth century. Today, his public image may be at its lowest point since Americans began celebrating the anniversary of his first trans-Atlantic voyage. Since the summer of 2020, dozens of Columbus statues were removed by local officials in cities and towns nationwide. This anti-Columbus sentiment flowed from the massive protests against racism and police brutality that broke out after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Thus, if the story of America were one of racial oppression and genocide, then it began with Columbus in 1492. His history-changing accomplishments now seem to matter little in light of his failures and faults, especially at a time of highly racialized politics and Woke culture wars. In this episode, acclaimed biographer and historian Laurence Bergreen discusses the many faces of Christopher Columbus as well as the myths, good and bad, that continue to cloud our modern understanding of his life.

What comes to mind when you think of the 1770s? The Revolutionary War, probably. As the war for independence from Great Britain raged, so did the worst epidemic in colonial American history. From 1775 through the early 1780s, more than 130,000 people -- European colonists, enslaved African-Americans, Native American tribes -- died from smallpox as the virus spread across the continent. The outbreak was so terrible it compelled General George Washington to require inoculations of all Continental Army soldiers, even though inoculations carried their own risks. In this episode historian Elizabeth Fenn, the author of Pox Americana, discusses how people coped with the ravages of the disease, and why most people know so little about it today. 

In his farewell address 60 years ago, President Eisenhower delivered a warning about the risks of war and the dangers of runaway military and intelligence budgets. Eisenhower himself had overseen the enormous buildup of the nation’s nuclear arsenal from fewer than 300 atomic bombs in 1950 to more than 27,000 nuclear weapons by the early 1960s. The former Supreme Allied commander had become a Cold Warrior, and had given the okay for two covert operations by the CIA to topple democratically elected leaders in Iran and Guatemala. But as he prepared to exit public life in January, 1961, Eisenhower lamented some of the consequences of America’s rise to global superpower because they threatened the health of democracy. “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist,” said the 70-year-old statesman in his oft-quoted speech. Why did we ignore Eisenhower? Historian Jeremi Suri discusses Ike's complicated legacy and the forces underpinning the militaristic approach to world affairs.

In the summer of 1971 President Richard Nixon declared “drug use public enemy number one,” signaling the dramatic escalation of punitive measures against users, peddlers, and makers of narcotics at home and abroad. Fifty years later, the toll of the all-out effort to criminalize narcotics is staggering. It has cost more than a trillion taxpayer dollars, yet over the past quarter-century more than 700,000 Americans have died of drug overdoses, according to Davidson College scholar Russell Crandall, a specialist in Latin American studies and author of “Drugs and Thugs: The History and Future of America’s War on Drugs.” In this episode Crandall, who served as a national security aide to Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, discusses the drug war’s failures at a time when Americans are having an overdue reckoning on a number of fronts, from the war on terrorism to massive income inequality. Yet the drug war drags on without accountability or course correction.

Is it possible for society to forget the Holocaust? As the war during which 6 million European Jews were murdered slowly recedes into history, survivors and their death-camp liberators are dying off. The world is losing its last remaining witnesses. And as far-right leaders in some of the nations where the Holocaust was perpetrated rewrite their national histories, there is an ugly and not unrelated resurgence of anti-Semitism. So although public surveys show most Americans and Europeans know at least something about the Holocaust, this knowledge is often superficial. Moreover, school curricula on both sides of the Atlantic face an array of challenges when education the younger generations about the Nazi persecution of the Jews. In this episode, a former educator in South Carolina, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, and a political scientist based in Europe share their views about the state of Holocaust studies and the never-ending fight against anti-Semitism.