Stay ConnectedDiscover how the past shapes the present with the best historians in the world. Everything happening today comes from something, somewhere. History As It Happens features interviews with today’s top scholars and thinkers, interwoven with audio from history’s archive.
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This episode was first published in May 2025. New episodes will resume on January 6, 2026.
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Original show notes:
President Donald Trump's invocation of the Alien Enemies Act during peacetime is unprecedented, a part of his larger effort to portray undocumented immigrants as wicked and threatening as he seeks to deport them en masse. What is not unprecedented is the federal government weaponizing the law to shred constitutional protections and civil liberties. During the Second World War, the administration of Franklin Roosevelt arrested and incarcerated Italians, Germans, and Japanese aliens under the 1798 statute, but also interned roughly 100,000 U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry — one of the most egregious violations of civil rights in U.S. history. In this episode, the eminent historian David M. Kennedy takes us back to those perilous years and their important parallels to the current crisis.
Recommended reading:
Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 by David M. Kennedy
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This episode was first published in March 2025. New episodes will resume in early January 2026.
Subscribe now to skip ads, get bonus content, and enjoy 24/7 access to the entire catalog of 500+ episodes.
Original show notes:
In late June 1973, former White House counsel John Dean delivered startling testimony before the congressional committee investigating Watergate: Richard Nixon had an enemies list. The point, as Dean had written in a 1971 memo, was to "use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies." The exposure of Nixon's dirty tricks led to his downfall. In 2024, Donald Trump openly campaigned to exact revenge on his enemies. Rather than alienating Republican voters, Trump's call for retribution rallied them. In this episode, historian Ken Hughes compares and contrasts the differences between then and now.
Recommended reading:
Nixon's official acts against his enemies list led to a bipartisan impeachment effort by Ken Hughes for The Conversation
Chasing Shadows: The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of Watergate by Ken Hughes (book)
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This is the final new episode of 2025. New episodes will resume on Tuesday, January 6.
Historians Jeremi Suri and Jeffrey Engel look back on a remarkable, distressing year in the U.S. and across the globe, from the Trump administration's lawless conduct to the wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
Jeremi Suri teaches history at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He co-hosts 'This is Democracy' podcast and co-writes 'Democracy of Hope' newsletter.
Jeffrey Engel is the founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University.
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'Red Dawn' was in many ways the perfect movie for its time. Released in 1984, it was an action flick with an exciting young cast that entertained moviegoers during a very cold period in the Cold War. The film was patriotic propaganda, depicting innocent American teenagers as fearless freedom fighters resisting the foreign occupation of their hometown. 'Red Dawn' was also a form of "imperial projection," mirroring the anti-Communist anxieties shaping the Reagan administration's rollback policy. In this episode, historian Alex Aviña, an expert on Latin America, reveals the crazy politics of a classic '80s action movie. Wolverines!
'Red Dawn' soundtrack was composed by Basil Poledouris.
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Subscribe now to listen to the entire episode. It's a common argument in the Age of Trump: Neoliberal economic policies that hollowed out the middle class while enriching the Wall Street class caused the populist backlash. Low taxes, deregulation, austerity budgets, free trade, the unfettered flow of capital into and out of emerging markets, and the privatization of public assets – all fall under the rubric of neoliberal globalization. But is the term too loaded to help us understand what's going on? In this episode, historians Phil Magness and Daniel Bessner attempt to define neoliberalism over time and place. Daniel Bessner is an associate Professor in American Foreign Policy at the University of Washington. He is the co-host of American Prestige podcast. Historian Phil Magness is a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute and the David J. Theroux Chair in Political Economy.
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He's been called the world's most important prisoner, or the Palestinian "Nelson Mandela." Convicted on terrorism-related charges in 2004 during the Second Intifada, Marwan Barghouti is serving a life sentence in Israeli prison. However, his name continues to surface in negotiations over prisoner exchanges, and President Donald Trump has also mentioned that Barghouti's case was brought to his attention. This is because Barghouti is by far the most popular Palestinian political figure today, at a time when his people are desperate for unifying leadership. In this episode, the scholar Khaled Elgindy of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft discusses Barghouti's life story, which traces the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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Rob Reiner was an actor, director, and political activist who left an enduring mark on American culture. Reiner, 78, and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, were found stabbed to death in their Hollywood home on Dec. 14. Their son has been arrested and charged with murder. In this episode, historian Benjamin Louis Rolsky reflects on Reiner's remarkable show business career, as well as his political activism, which followed in the footsteps of his role model, Norman Lear.
Recommended reading:
The Rise and Fall of the Religious Left: Politics, Television, and Popular Culture in the 1970s and Beyond by Benjamin Louis Rolsky
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The Netflix mini-series "Death By Lightning" brings to life a largely overlooked — and troubled — period in American history and one of its admirable figures, a minor president named James Garfield. The Republican Garfield was assassinated by a delusional patronage-seeker named Charles Guiteau only months into his term. The series makes for entertaining television with a terrific cast, but is it sound history? Historian Jeremi Suri is our guest.
Excerpts are courtesy Netflix. Music in this episode is from the soundtrack for "Death by Lightning," composed by Ramin Djawadi.
Recommended reading:
Civil War By Other Means by Jeremi Suri
Democracy of Hope newsletter
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Since the nation's founding, American leaders, journalists, and ordinary citizens have used words to describe enemies designed not only to dehumanize them, but also to delegitimize. Whether bandits, savages, guerrillas, or terrorists, if our foes are beyond the pale, then the U.S. government doesn't have to follow the law either, a pattern that has been repeated in many overseas military interventions up to and including the global war on terrorism. This pattern is important to recognize as the Trump administration blows up alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean while threatening regime change in Venezuela. Historian Michael Neagle says we can see how we got to this point by looking to the past, in the Philippines, Mexico, and Nicaragua, to name three examples. Through a historical lens, we can question the necessity and costs of the GWOT.
Recommended reading:
Chasing Bandits: America's Long War on Terror by Michael Neagle
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Keep the narrative flow going! Subscribe to skip ads, get bonus content, and enjoy access to the entire catalog of 500 episodes.
Robert McNamara may have been the most consequential secretary of defense in U.S. history. The managerial genius who helped sink the country in the Vietnam quagmire is the subject of a new biography (see below), a political-psychological portrait that takes us inside the mind of the man tabbed by JFK in 1960 to run the Pentagon. Robert McNamara escalated the war and misled the American people about imaginary progress on the battlefield, despite serious personal doubts the war could be won. He never formally apologized, but admitted "we were wrong, terribly wrong" in the hope future policy-makers would avoid his intractable mistakes. Historian Fredrik Logevall is our guest.
Recommended reading:
McNamara at War: A New History by William Taubman and Philip Taubman (2025)
Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam by Fredrik Logevall (1999)
Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam by Fredrik Logevall (2012)
Further listening:
Defeat in Vietnam: Origins (podcast)
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