History As It Happens

Replacement theory -- the racist ideology that claims elites are abetting immigrants to disempower or eliminate native white people -- has been around in one form or another for a long time. The current iteration has gone mainstream, leading to widespread condemnation of some Republican politicians and conservative commentators who have embraced the theory's central premises. Fear and suspicion of foreigners underpins nativism, and America's first nativist movement took hold in the 1850s. Who were the Know Nothings? They weren't around for long but they left their mark.

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Long before Roe v. Wade established a constitutional right to an abortion -- indeed, centuries before abortion became one of the most divisive issues in American society -- ending a pregnancy before "quickening" was commonplace in the colonial era and not very controversial, either. That began to change in the mid-nineteenth century when some medical professionals joined a campaign to criminalize all abortions, led by Dr. Horatio Storer. In this episode, historians Anna Peterson and Eric Foner discuss the history of abortion before Roe and the origins, purposes, and legacy of the Fourteenth Amendment, which laid the foundation for Roe v. Wade a century after it was ratified in the wake of the Civil War.

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This is the fourth installment in an occasional series that will focus on slavery, the Constitution, and the ongoing debate over the meaning of the American founding.

When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he invoked the historic struggle to make America a more equal society. The civil rights movement to which Johnson referred did not begin, however, in the twentieth or even the nineteenth century. The first civil rights activists emerged from the radical impulses of the American Revolution, and they employed the language in the Constitution to make their case in newspapers, courtrooms, and state houses for equal rights and full citizenship for Black people. Historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist Kate Masur, author of "Until Justice Be Done," tells us about the achievements and setbacks that marked the fight for civil rights in the antebellum U.S.

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Elon Musk's anticipated acquisition of Twitter sent a major ripple across America's endless debates over free expression. The fact is, the question of who gets to say what and where has always been thorny in American society. Not until the twentieth century did the Supreme Court embrace our current, expansive view of the First Amendment. Today the battle is being fought in the cultural space, where social media platforms -- all private companies with their own First Amendment right to moderate posts -- are under pressure to remove "offensive" content and mis- and disinformation. In this episode, Lynn Greenky, author of "When Freedom Speaks," discusses why Americans are fighting one another over this precious freedom.

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Chinese president Xi Jinping, the country's most powerful leader since Mao, is inflexibly pursuing a policy to eliminate the transmission of COVID-19. Shanghai, population 26 million, is locked down. People are virtual prisoners in their own homes and the lockdowns are crushing the economy. But world health experts say it is impossible to eradicate the highly contagious coronavirus. The Mercatus Center's Weifeng Zhong, who analyzes reams of Chinese state propaganda to discern policy shifts, explains what's behind Xi's fanatical campaign to achieve the impossible.

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History teaches us that the war in Ukraine will most likely end in a negotiated settlement. The Second World War was an anomaly insofar the Allies demanded unconditional surrender from their enemies, and then conquered Germany and Japan in total victory. Most wars fought since 1945 dragged on for years in indecisive fighting until some kind of settlement was reached, often unsatisfactory to all involved. In this episode, Texas Tech military historian Ron Milam, who is a Vietnam combat veteran, talks about the deal that ended U.S. involvement in the war he fought, as well as where the war in Ukraine may be going.

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The Biden administration's efforts to revive the 2015 nuclear accord with Iran are on the brink of collapse, leading experts to fear the two countries could enter a new era of suspicion and even outright conflict. Since 1979 the U.S. and Iran have had no formal diplomatic ties, their relationship marked by distrust and hostility. The ongoing animosity has created a self-fulfilling prophecy where Iran is now closer to having enough enriched uranium to build a bomb than it had before the U.S. pulled out of the 2015 deal. In this episode, historian John Ghazvinian and foreign policy expert Trita Parsi discuss the potential consequences for the world if the latest negotiations end in failure.

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Vladimir Putin's version of history is the foundation of his war in Ukraine. According to Russia's dictator, an independent Ukrainian state is a mistake of history and the notion of Ukrainian nationhood, with a distinct culture and language, is a fiction. In this episode, Anna Reid, a former Kyiv-based journalist and expert in Ukrainian history, takes us through Putin's distortions covering a thousand years, from the reign of Volodymyr the Great to the October Revolution and the killing fields of the Second World War. Ukraine may have achieved true statehood for the first time in 1991, but the Ukrainian nation goes back centuries.

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During the Cold War, the fear of nuclear war suffused the culture in hundreds of books and movies, in classroom "duck and cover" drills and in debates on college campuses, and in the arena of international relations. But that cultural awareness has faded over the past 30 years -- until now. As Russia's war in Ukraine grinds on, the possibility, however remote, of a nuclear exchange is more front of mind that it has been in decades. In this episode, national security expert Joe Cirincione, who has spent 40 years working on non-proliferation, discusses why the world may be closer to a nuclear crisis now than at any time since the Cold War. Calling Dr. Strangelove!

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The odds are against anyone being brought to justice for atrocities committed in Ukraine. Despite mounting evidence that Russian forces executed civilians and targeted residential neighborhoods for bombardment, a successful prosecution of the perpetrators -- from military commanders in the field all the way up to Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin -- before an international tribunal will be difficult. In the 76 years since the Nuremberg trials, which set the standard for punishing individuals for crimes against humanity, war crimes investigators have faced many obstacles. In this episode, former International Criminal Court prosecutor Alex Whiting explains the challenges confronting those seeking justice for victims of wars of aggression and atrocities.

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