History As It Happens

In these politically polarized times, Americans have a partisan media that suits the circumstances. Or do biased news and information sources drive the polarization? Whatever the case, public trust in the mass media to accurately report the news is about as low as pollsters have ever found it. The marked ebbing of trust comes as people consume information, credible or not, from more sources than ever before: social media, blogs, podcasts, web sites, YouTube channels, etc., etc. But before you pine for the good ol' days of a neutral press, the notion that journalism should be professional and independent rather than partisan, is relatively new in U.S. history. In fact, from the start of the republic, newspapers and pamphlets were openly partisan and often supported by political patronage. In this episode, historian Jeff Pasley talks about the ways in which the early partisan newspapers bolstered democracy, and how today's media landscape is corroding it.

One of the first moves House Republicans made upon assuming the chamber's majority was to create, in a party-line vote of 221-211, the "Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government." But rather than use that unwieldy moniker, GOP leaders appropriated the name of an iconic investigative committee from a bygone era. In 1975, in an 82-4 vote, the Senate created the Church committee, which was chaired by Idaho Democratic Sen. Frank Church, to investigate the FBI, CIA, and NSA. (Its official title was the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities). Church's panel examined decades of egregious abuses, which were brought to light as Americans recovered from the traumas of Vietnam and Watergate. In this episode, historian Sam Martin, the Frank and Bethine Church Endowed Chair of Public Affairs at Boise State University in Idaho, compares and contrasts the historically important work of the original Church committee with the aims of today's House GOP.

What if the U.S. had taken a more active and constructive role in international affairs after the First World War, rather than reject the Treaty of Versailles and refuse to join the League of Nations? In the view of historian Robert Kagan, another global conflict would have been avoided, and Adolph Hitler might never have been appointed German chancellor as he was in January 1933. This is the subject of Kagan's latest book, "The Ghost at the Feast," and in this episode, he defends his thesis concerning the importance of U.S. leadership, or its absence, after the seismic shifts in global power caused by the war of 1914-18. As Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, put it in a recent essay in Foreign Affairs about U.S. support for Ukraine, "Only American power can keep the natural forces of history at bay." Is that true today? Was it true between 1919 and 1939?

For all the legitimate concern about the fate of American democracy and our governing institutions, relatively little attention is paid to Congress' inability or unwillingness to check the war powers of the "imperial presidency." The War Powers Resolution of 1973, passed in the aftermath of the Johnson and Nixon administrations' abuses during the Vietnam War, was supposed to empower Congress to end endless wars, but a half century later we can see that the U.S. still intervened in many crises often with disastrous consequences. And the most recent attempt to use the war powers ended in failure, when Senator Bernie Sanders withdrew his resolution to stop U.S. support for Saudi Arabia's cruel war in Yemen, which has left thousands of civilians dead while producing an epic humanitarian crisis. In this episode, historians Jeremi Suri and Jeffrey Engel reveal the reasons why the War Powers Resolution has never been used to end a U.S. military adventure, and what might be done to end "endless American war".

As politics grew increasingly violent in the 1850s, Americans understood that unresolvable conflicts over the extension of slavery and the disproportionate political power of the slaveholders could lead to disunion and war. In the view of some historians, activism outside Congress, driven by radical abolitionists as well as pro-slavery ruffians, forced the major parties to seek compromises to hold the country together, only to fall short because of the immensity of the problem and intransigence of the Slave Power. This political turmoil produced prolonged and acrimonious contests for House speaker, a history that suddenly became relevant again when the House needed 15 ballots over five days to elect California Rep. Kevin McCarthy. In this episode, University of Connecticut historian Manisha Sinha, a leading authority on the history of slavery and abolition, talks about the parallels between past and present as Americans witness today's political polarization worsening.

The election of California Rep. Kevin McCarthy as House speaker after five days and 15 ballots exposed divisions within the Republican Party that may not portend well for the immediate future of his party, the chamber, or the country. With one exception (1923), no speakership election since the Civil War needed more than one ballot. And in the antebellum U.S. is where we might find parallels to today's political turmoil. Before the Civil War, speakership fights were often acrimonious, extended affairs reflecting the nation's violent, deep political divisions over slavery. The 1855-56 speakership election took 133 ballots! In this episode, historian Sean Wilentz, author of The Rise of American Democracy, discusses which lessons from those long-ago fights apply to today's crisis of democracy.

As President Biden enters the third year of his presidency, his only obvious foreign policy success lies in Ukraine, where U.S. and NATO support has proved decisive in stopping -- at least so far -- Russia's war of aggression. Mr. Biden has framed his foreign policy by saying the U.S. is in a global contest pitting democracies versus autocracies. Is that a Biden Doctrine? In this episode, we examine the history of presidential doctrines, and The Washington Times' reporters Guy Taylor and Ben Wolfgang talk about the foreign policy challenges that lie ahead for the Biden administration as 2023 unfolds.

January 1 marked the 160th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, a major step in a process of world historical importance, the abolition of slavery in the United States. Yet nowadays some historians argue that the proclamation was illegal, unconstitutional, or without important consequences for the enslaved. Others contend that the antislavery amendment that followed in 1865 was a betrayal of Black Americans, because it allowed for their "re-enslavement" in prisons. In this episode, historian James Oakes reminds us of the real meaning of Lincoln's proclamation, as it was part of a decades-long effort to rid the U.S. of human chattel slavery and fulfill the promise of our founding documents.

Note: This is the final episode of 2022. History As It Happens will be back with new episodes the first week of January, 2023. Enjoy the holidays! In his misguided drive to reassert Russian power by trying (and failing) to turn Ukraine into a vassal state, Vladimir Putin has exposed his country's weakness while doing incalculable damage to his neighbor. Yet despite his epic miscalculation, Putin retains the support of Russia's elites, some of whom fear that defeat in Ukraine will lead to state collapse in Moscow. In this episode, Russia expert Thomas Graham of the Council on Foreign Relations explains how history informs the Russian imagination about its place in the world and its relationship to Eastern Europe.

Since British prime minister Neville Chamberlain attempted to avoid war with Hitler in 1938 by agreeing to carve up Czechoslovakia, the word appeasement has been synonymous with moral weakness and wishful thinking. While the failure to appease the Nazi dictator offers important lessons, politicians -- and even some historians -- often invoke the infamous Munich Conference as a political cudgel with which to bash their foes. It happened during Vietnam, the wars in Iraq, and it's happening again as the West supports Ukraine. In this episode, military historian Cathal Nolan differentiates propaganda from history.