History As It Happens

One year has passed since Donald Trump egged on a mob to attack Congress, the violent culmination of his months-long effort to overturn the presidential election. One year later, the wound still festers. Americans remain divided, living in realities of their own creation. Reconciliation seems out of reach. It is 1860 redux, but instead of civil war, Americans are witnessing a virtual secession from one another. In this episode, historian Paul Quigley of the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies discusses the importance of the House Select Committee's investigation into the perpetrators and organizers of the Stop the Steal rally that preceded the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. But although the truth must be known, the search for it may further divide us.

President Joseph Biden is beginning his second year in office facing many of the same foreign policy problems that awaited his arrival in the White House, some with the potential to explode into full-blown conflict despite his efforts to restore calm and confidence among U.S. allies and partners in Europe and the Indo-Pacific. From China's threats to absorb Taiwan, to Russia's troop buildup on the Ukrainian border, a number of simmering conflicts are testing the strength of the United States' extensive overseas commitments after 20 years fighting a global war on terrorism to little positive effect. In this episode, The Washington Times' national security correspondent Ben Wolfgang discusses the president's approach to these foreign policy dilemmas. The world scene is dramatically different than the one Biden knew when he was elected to the Senate, or even when he served as Barack Obama's vice president. That is, the U.S. is no longer a hegemonic power that can get whatever it wants from whoever it wants, if that were ever the case.

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.