History As It Happens

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When Franklin Delano Roosevelt entered the White House in 1933, the country was paralyzed by the Great Depression and fascist jackboots were trampling democracy in Europe. As the 1930s wore on, the president and the American people came to see fascism as not only a threat to societies on the other side of the Atlantic, but as a danger to the American way of life, too. But what to do about it?
How did FDR prepare the country for what he correctly foresaw as an inevitable war against the fascist powers? How did public opinion compel the president to leave neutrality behind?
Americans then tangled with the same questions we’re grappling with today, although under a dramatically different set of circumstances. When do problems in faraway places necessitate U.S. involvement? Does our democracy depend on the survival of other democracies?
Our guest is University of Virginia historian William Hitchcock, the author of "A Shadow Over the World: Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Rise of Fascism, and the Making of America's World War II."

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The Middle East is undergoing transformative changes. It's difficult, if not impossible, to see where things will end up. What is clear, however, is that political Islam — what the scholar Mohammed Ayoob says was "the dominant ideological challenger to the region’s authoritarian political systems" — is declining. Public confidence that Islamist movements, whether radical or pragmatic, can affect positive change for their societies is low. What might emerge instead?
Our guest is Nathan Brown, who teaches political science and international affairs at George Washington University. He's an expert on religion and politics, authoritarianism, constitutionalism, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Further reading:
The End of Political Islam? Not Quite by Mohammad Ayoob (The National Interest)

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Scientists sequenced Thomas Jefferson’s genome from three strands of his hair for a project led by the Smithsonian Institution to prove that Jefferson fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings.
According to The New York Times, researchers used cutting-edge techniques to extract and sequence the DNA, then compared it with DNA samples from 13 living Hemings and Jefferson family descendants.
This story is, in some ways, old news. The allegations that Jefferson had an enslaved mistress appeared when he was president in 1802. Books written decades ago by Fawn Brodie and Annette Gordon-Reed delved into their relationship. Yet the story still fascinates, and now has a new chapter for us to talk about.
Our guest is Alan Taylor, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Chair, Emeritus, in the Department of History at the University of Virginia.
He’s the author of Thomas Jefferson’s Education and the new Tower Hill: A Plantation on the Edge of Rebellion.

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In leafy Meridian Hill Park in Washington, D.C., there stands a bronze statue of the fifteenth president of the United States. Only an inscription etched in the surrounding marble identifies its subject: BUCHANAN.
Yes, a statue to the terrible James Buchanan, who interfered in a notorious Supreme Court ruling, consistently took the side of the Southern Slave Power, and barely lifted a finger to save the Union after seven states seceded on his watch.
Is it fair to lambast this hapless figure? What could Buchanan have done differently to avert the Civil War? Historian James Oakes is our guest.
Recommended reading:
Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865 by James Oakes

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As some Israeli government ministers call for the "voluntary migration" of all Palestinians from Gaza, the term ethnic cleansing is back in the news. Before the 1990s, international institutions and mainstream political figures seldom used the term. Then came the Serb atrocities in Croatia and Bosnia, and ethnic cleansing gained wide acceptance.
What does it mean? Does it have a legal grounding? Or is it a euphemism for genocide? Our guest is sociologist Martin Shaw, a leading genocide scholar and professor emeritus of International Relations and Politics at the University of Sussex.
Further reading:
The Genocide that Changed the World by Martin Shaw (Journal of Genocide Research)

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