Collapse of the USSR, Revisited
As Americans opened their Christmas gifts 32 years ago, the beleaguered president of a superpower on the other side of the world endured a unique humiliation. Mikhail Gorbachev, whose open mind and ma...
21 Dec 20231h 16min
Saving Napoleon
Audio excerpts of Napoleon courtesy Sony Pictures and Apple Original Films. Many historians have skewered Ridley Scott's Napoleon for inaccuracies and for failing to convey the monumental historical s...
19 Dec 202343min
Recovering Rustin
Bayard Rustin was born a Quaker in Pennsylvania and became an advocate of non-violent resistance in the civil rights movement. He was openly gay at a time when most people in his position would have k...
14 Dec 202341min
Ordinary Men / Extraordinary Crimes
The Israel-Hamas war has provoked an angry, bitter debate over the meaning of genocide as partisans on both sides of the conflict invoke the memory of the Nazis and the Holocaust. The new Netflix docu...
12 Dec 202353min
From Beirut to Gaza City
Urban warfare, an appalling civilian death toll, and international outcry: Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza shares parallels with its failed invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which was also meant to dest...
7 Dec 202353min
Diplomat / Intellectual / War Criminal?
The death of Henry Kissinger at 100 reignited the debate over the foreign policy record of a man who embodied U.S. power and influence. Revered or despised, the former Secretary of State to Presidents...
4 Dec 202343min
What If? Slavery Without the Civil War
This is the second episode in an occasional series examining major counterfactual scenarios in history. The first, published in September, asked whether President Kennedy would have withdrawn the U.S....
30 Nov 202357min
The Cold War Liberals
If the era of Trump has brought on a crisis of liberalism, liberals have failed to fully reckon with their "failure to establish a liberal society at home, to say nothing of how their acts and outlook...
28 Nov 20231h 4min
