Last Gasp of the Lost Cause
Collective memory -- what our society chooses to remember, honor, or erase from our past -- is perpetually mediated. For generations Confederate statues and monuments stood in public squares until a n...
30 Maj 202438min
Death of Raisi / Future of Iran
The death of Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi has left a power vacuum to be filled in snap elections in less than 50 days. The death of the man once called the "butcher of Tehran" comes at low point in...
28 Maj 202443min
Defeating Democracy, Searching For Fascism
In the United States and in capitals across the world, liberal democracy is under pressure. We are told that fascism is on the rise. Commentators rummage through the past on the hunt for analogies to ...
23 Maj 202441min
The British Mandate
In an essay for Foreign Affairs, the Israeli historian Tom Segev argues that a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is impossible. As early as 1919, the future prime minister David...
21 Maj 202443min
Special Relationship: Why the U.S. Chose Israel
President Joseph Biden's decision to pause bomb shipments to Israel over its planned invasion of Rafah provoked a curious charge from Republican legislators. They accused Biden of "abandoning" Israel ...
16 Maj 20241h 1min
Recovering Kennan
The American diplomat George Kennan was the architect of the Cold War "containment" policy toward the Soviet Union. Writing in the late 1940s, Kennan viewed the USSR as a hostile expansionist enemy, b...
14 Maj 20241h 1min
What Is Intifada?
Campus antiwar protests are disturbing some Jewish students, administrators, and politicians by chanting an Arabic word meaning uprising, intifada. Since Israel began its military occupation of Palest...
9 Maj 20241h 2min
Elections of 1860 and 1864
This is the third episode in an occasional series examining influential elections in U.S. history. The most recent episode, The Election of 1992, was published on April 4. Audio excerpts of "Civil War...
7 Maj 20241h 5min
