One-hundred fifty-seven years after Appomattox, Americans are still grappling with a question that hung over the post-Civil War period: what kind of democracy are we going to be? That is the central question of historian Jeremi Suri's new book, "Civil War By Other Means," which traces the violent controversies of Reconstruction over voting and citizenship to our current dilemmas. It was no accident that one of the Jan. 6, 2021, rioters carried a Confederate flag into the U.S. Capitol as his fellow "patriots" marauded the halls. The flag remains a powerful symbol of rebellion and the racism underpinning the notion that the "wrong people" voted in the 2020 election. Wars do not end; they migrate to our minds.  

This is the second in a two-part series of conversations recorded at George Washington's Mount Vernon as History As It Happens goes on location, with special guests historian Joseph Ellis and Doug Bradburn, Mount Vernon's president and chief executive.

Is it possible to talk too much about slavery at a historic plantation? How does an institution as popular and important as Mount Vernon interpret the past to hundreds of thousands of Americans who visit each year, many of whom revere George Washington as a hero? Listen to Joseph Ellis and Doug Bradburn discuss the problems with the "history wars" -- the endless conflict over who owns the past. 

This is the first in a two-part series of conversations recorded at George Washington's Mount Vernon as History As It Happens goes on location, with special guests historian Joseph Ellis and Doug Bradburn, Mount Vernon's president and chief executive.

If you read George Washington's 1796 Farewell Address, you might sense our first president could foresee our current troubles. As he prepared to retire to his plantation, Washington warned the young republic about the dangers of faction, or what we might call hyper-partisan passions. He cautioned against getting entangled in Europe's affairs, passing onerous debt onto future generations, and the dangers of foreign meddling in our domestic affairs. And when he died in 1799, Washington left behind a nation that would not solve the problem of racial slavery for another 65 years. Listen to Joseph Ellis and Doug Bradburn place Washington's complicated legacy and enduring wisdom in their proper historical contexts -- a necessary task if we are to seek guidance from our most famous founder.

Why would a U.S. senator pen a polemical attack against a history professor? Florida Senator Marco Rubio labeled Princeton's Sean Wilentz a "cisgender white male" who "reeks of privilege" after Wilentz wrote an op-ed accusing Rubio of standing "in the sorry tradition of the great propagandists” who are guilty of “the deliberate manipulation and falsification of events for political purposes.” In early August Wilentz had been among a handful of esteemed scholars invited to the White House to talk to President Biden privately about threats to democracy at home and abroad. Rubio was not at that meeting, but he claimed to know -- without evidence -- that the historians told the president to ignore "working everyday people and their common sense." In this episode, Wilentz, a preeminent scholar of American democracy, discusses what he describes as the "fake populism" espoused by many right-wing politicians. Unlike the genuine populists of the past, who fought for the economic rights of ordinary Americans against powerful interests such as monopolistic railroads, today's "fake populists" are concerned with vilifying "elites" and "snobs" from the halls of academia to "deep state" bureaucrats. 

The Italian elections went in favor of a right-wing coalition led by Giorgia Meloni and her party, Brothers of Italy. After winning only four percent of the vote in 2018, Brothers of Italy earned enough votes to lead what will be the most right-wing Italian government since 1945. In fact, Meloni's party has a historic connection to post-war fascists, and she praised Mussolini as a teenage neo-fascist activist. Does this mean fascism is on the march in Italy again? If not fascism, what is it? In this episode, Roger Griffin, a foremost expert on the history of fascism at Oxford Brookes University, explains why right-wing populism is winning at the ballot box not just in Italy but across much of Europe.

War has been the rule in the former Soviet domains. The collapse of the USSR unleashed previously bottled-up ethnic and territorial conflicts. Some countries were rocked by revolution. The Russian Federation, meanwhile, sought to dominate slices of the old Soviet empire with the aim of creating Novorossiya, literally "New Russia." In this episode, Catholic University historian Michael Kimmage argues Putin's hot wars and frozen conflicts in Moldova, Georgia, Crimea, and the Donbas are part of a larger strategy to reassert Russian dominance in its backyard after the humiliations of the 1990s. The collapse of the USSR was not only an event; it triggered a process still unfolding in violent ways today.

Russia is trying to accomplish in a sham process what it can’t achieve on the battlefield, which is to conquer eastern Ukraine. In Kremlin-engineered referenda, Ukrainian citizens of four southern and eastern regions are being forced to vote to join Russia so that Vladimir Putin may formally annex them. Should he announce the regions as part of Russia, the window for any peace negotiations will close. That is because no Ukrainian government would recognize the results of the voting, and therefore could see no alternative to trying to regain the annexed regions by military force. In this episode, the Quincy Institute's Anatol Lieven discusses this frightening escalation of a war that Ukraine appeared to be winning after retaking more than 2,000 square miles of territory.

By design the United Nations cannot stop the war in Ukraine. The world body chartered in 1945 to promote peace and cooperation has a decidedly mixed record in those areas, but that is mostly because the great powers from the start kept for themselves the authority to sanction or veto international efforts to prevent war. In this episode, Karen Mingst, an expert on diplomacy and global governance, explains where the U.N. has been effective in building a better world, and where it has failed to live up to its principles.

The death of Queen Elizabeth II provoked in her home country an outpouring of grief and pride while in other parts of the world – the independent nations of the former British Empire – her passing prompted a more ambivalent reflection on the imperial aspects of her legacy. That is because the queen was a symbol not only of stability and monarchical grace. Elizabeth II was also a symbol of empire and colonialism, and a reluctance on the part of some of her subjects to fully reckon with that bloody, rapacious history. In this episode, historian Dane Kennedy discusses the reasons for the mixed reactions to the death of the United Kingdom’s longest-serving monarch. Not everyone is feeling nostalgic for the world in which Elizabeth became monarch, which was in the throes of violent struggles for national liberation.

President Biden told supporters at a reception for the Democratic National Committee that Donald Trump and his loyalists within the GOP -- "MAGA Republicans" -- subscribe to an extreme philosophy that Mr. Biden described as "semi-fascism." If you spend any amount of time on social media, you'll see fascism everywhere. Pundits, political scientists, historians, anyone with a Twitter account -- are offering their takes on whether Republicans are steering the United States toward fascism. In this episode, the scholars Jeffrey Bale and Tamir Bar-On argue Trump's critics are dangerously distorting history. Fascism is a distinct ideology from other forms of populism or illiberalism or ultra-nationalism, whatever one thinks of Trumpism. Moreover, they contend the threat to democracy posed by right-wing fringe groups has been egregiously exaggerated for cynical political purposes.