History As It Happens

The defeat in Afghanistan, punctuated by the chaotic evacuation from Kabul and sudden collapse to the Taliban, is also an opportunity for American leaders to reassess the fundamental assumptions underlying U.S. interventionism. Instead of asking how the nation-building project could have been prolonged or how it might have succeeded, the real question may be why did anyone think it could work at all? After twenty years of war and occupation, at the cost of more than $2 trillion and many thousands of American and Afghan lives, it may be time to face an uncomfortable truth: the project was doomed from the start. In this episode, former U.S. Marine Adam Weinstein, a research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, discusses the root causes of the dramatic failures to defeat the Taliban and build a democracy in Afghanistan.

Four summers after white nationalists and neo-Nazis marched on Charlottesville, the Confederate statues that they sought to defend were quietly removed. On a Saturday in July, in front of a small, supportive crowd, workers used a crane to remove the figures of Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, a scene dramatically different than the one that unfolded on August 12, 2017. On that day, a ‘Unite the Right’ rally sparked violent clashes with counter-protesters. It was a defining moment of Donald Trump's early presidency, a source of deepening political division and racial awareness in a nation yet to fully reckon with the legacy of the Civil War and slavery. But on July 10 there were no Confederate flags or swastikas on display in Charlottesville. Instead, city leaders claimed a small victory over racism. Is this progress? James Grossman, the executive director of the American Historical Association, discusses why statues matter, when and why they were erected decades after the Civil War, and whether new state laws banning the teaching of critical race theory make sense.

Fox News' host Tucker Carlson's weeklong visit to Hungary to tout the rule of prime minister Viktor Orbán raised some pressing questions. What is it about this right-wing authoritarian that so enthralls some Americans on the right? Since returning to power in 2010, Orbán and his ruling Fidesz party have changed election laws to their own benefit, clamped down on press freedom, rejected Muslim immigrants, enraged the E.U., and -- arguably most unsettling of all -- invoked not the country’s escape from Communist authoritarianism in 1989 but its fascist past under Miklos Horthy, an antisemite and Christian nationalist who was directly complicit in Hungary's role in the Holocaust. In this episode, we examine how Orbán uses and misuses history to build a narrative about "true Hungarians." And we discuss where Hungary fits in what is perceived as a larger pattern of backsliding democracy in Central and Eastern Europe.

Seventy-six years ago, in August, 1945, President Harry Truman made one of the most consequential decisions in history. He ordered U.S. warplanes to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and, three days later, Nagasaki, instantly incinerating tens of thousands of civilians. The bombings ended the Second World War while ushering in a new age, where human beings harnessed science and technology to create weapons of previously unimaginable power. In this episode, world-renowned war historian Sir Antony Beevor answers one of the most difficult questions to arise in the aftermath of the war: was it necessary to drop the bomb?

As the Delta variant rages across the United States, hospitals are filling up with unvaccinated patients. Americans are suffering and dying needlessly, because the country has enough doses to vaccinate every eligible person. But the pathogen has allies: right-wing fanatics on cable TV who sow mistrust in life-saving inoculations, social media charlatans pushing quack cures, and plain old stubbornness, laziness, ignorance, or complacency among the citizenry. Historian John Barry, author of 'The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History,' returns to the podcast to talk about Delta and the variants to come, the politics of pandemics, and reasons to be optimistic. Yes, optimistic!

Six years after President Obama tried to usher U.S.-Cuba relations into the 21st century, the two nations -- one a superpower, the other a small, weak island -- seem moored in a bygone era when international Communism consumed Cold Warriors on both sides of the ideological divide. The Biden administration is slapping another round of sanctions on Cuban leaders after they cracked down on protesters who filled the streets in early July, angered by food and power shortages and a botched Covid-19 inoculation program. Moreover, the U.S. embargo remains in place, a punitive measure perpetuated by domestic political pressures. Can the U.S. and Cuba move on from their ugly history? Ivan Eland of the Independent Institute, a scholar of U.S. foreign policy and critic of sanctions, joins the podcast to discuss why Communism endures in Cuba.  

The violent decade before the Civil War serves as a warning about the perils of political polarization and the ways we may rationalize violence when it fits our purposes. Americans in 2021 are not careening toward another civil war with armies on battlefields, but the congressional investigation, now underway in the House, into the Jan. 6 Capitol riot is a battle over the truth. Emerging narratives are becoming detached from reality, perpetuating a cycle of zero-sum polarization that is further dividing people into opposing camps. Are we reliving the 1850s? Paul Quigley, the director of the Center for Civil War Studies at Virginia Tech, returns to the podcast to discuss how Trumpist narratives about Jan. 6 are distorting reality, a day that evokes the history of the sack of Lawrence, Kansas, in 1856.

Few aspects of the American Revolution are as misunderstood as the role of religion. Current debates usually focus on whether the United States was founded as a Christian nation and, if true, what that would mean for public policy today. The founding documents have become a battlefield for competing claims about the faith, or lack thereof, of their authors, replete with cherry-picked quotes purporting to show that our early leaders did or did not want to privilege one religion over another. It's time to take a fresh a look at this debate. Historian Katherine Carté, author of Religion and the American Revolution reconstructs “the religious world into which the American Revolution intruded,” pitting protestant against protestant in what was an “empire of imperial protestantism.”

Similar to fascism or socialism, the political ideology of populism has meant different things to different people at different times in history. Figures as diverse as Huey Long, William Jennings Bryan, George Wallace, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump have been described as populists, which may explain why populism defies easy explanation on the right and left. With its American roots planted in the nineteenth century, populism coalesced around the notion that powerful, even conspiratorial, forces were pitted against ordinary people, fueling grievances against elites and outsiders -- cultural, economic, and political elites as well as immigrants. Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin, an expert on social and political movements, joins the podcast to explain one of the most vexing issues of our day.

If a key lesson of the Vietnam War was the United States should avoid fighting guerrilla wars in faraway countries of little strategic importance, whose people, histories, and cultures we do not understand, then the U.S. failed to heed that lesson in Afghanistan. As the final American and NATO troops prepare to exit Afghanistan after 20 years of war and nation-building, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Fredrik Logevall of the Harvard Kennedy School joins the podcast to discuss the similarities and differences between the two lost conflicts. Logevall is a preeminent scholar of the French and U.S. wars in Southeast Asia.