Can a U.S. president declassify a document by merely thinking it? 

My guest is Heidi Kitrosser, Professor of Law at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. Professor Kitrosser is an expert on the constitutional law of federal government secrecy and on separation of powers and free speech law… more broadly. She is the author of the following book: Reclaiming Accountability: Transparency, Executive Power, and the U.S. Constitution, which was awarded the 2014 Chicago-Kent College of Law / Roy C. Palmer Civil Liberties Prize.

She is on the steering committee of a new initiative – the Free Expression Legal Network (FELN) spearheaded by Yale’s Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic and the Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press

She not only tackles the above question head-on, but she also gets into the history of classified information (e.g., Nixon's executive orders), and analyzes the culpability of the Judicial and Legislative branches of our government in giving the Executive branch more or less a free rein when it comes to classified information. 

To learn more about Professor Kitrosser, you can visit her academic homepage.

In addition, below is a link to a recent podcast that is relevant to our current news: 

S2E27: U.S. Election Violence, Electoral College & Minority Winners, Professor Edward Foley 

I hope you enjoy these episodes.

Adel

Host of the History Behind News podcast

Click to follow us on Twitter

ThePeel.news is available wherever you get your podcast.

Xi Jinping - a  third unprecedented term!  

As China flexes its military muscles against Taiwan, Japan and its other neighbors, the world has come to doubt its peaceful intentions. And as its economy falters, for example in the real estate sector and beyond, the world is no longer spellbound by China's economic might. 

All of this begs the following question: what happened to China's peaceful rise? 

To answer that question, I spoke with Dr. Susan Shirk, who first visited China in 1971 and has been teaching, researching and engaging China diplomatically ever since. From 1997-2000, Dr. Shirk served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs, with responsibility for China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mongolia. Dr. Shirk is the chair of the 21st Century China Center in UC San Diego, and director emeritus of the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC). She also co-chairs a task force of China experts that issued its second report in 2019, “Course Correction: Toward an Effective and Sustainable China Policy.” In addition, Dr. Shirk is the co-chair of the UC San Diego Forum on U.S.-China Relations, the first ongoing high-level forum focused entirely on the U.S.-China relationship. In this episode, I will speak to her about her most recent book… "Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise".

To learn more about Dr. Shirk, including a list of her many publications, you can visit her academic homepage. 

In addition, below are links to other episodes about Caribbean nations:

S1E12: China's One-Child Policy, Dr. Wang

I hope you enjoy these episodes.

Adel

Host of the History Behind News podcast

Click to follow us on Twitter

ThePeel.news is available wherever you get your podcast.

Hurricane Fiona devastated Puerto Rico last month, but it also brought focus, once more, to Puerto Rico's peculiar status within the United States... that it is a territory, not a state, despite the fact that more than 9 million Americans identify themselves as Puerto Rican.

To better understand Puerto Rico's rich history, I spoke with Dr. Jorge Duany, who was born in Cuba and raised in Panama and Puerto Rico. Dr. Duany is the Director of the Cuban Research Institute and Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Global & Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University. And prior to that, he served as Acting Dean of the College of Social Sciences and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Puerto Rico. 

Dr. Duany is the author, coauthor, editor, or coeditor of twenty-two books, including the following 4 that I am identifying here:

In addition, below are links to other episodes about Caribbean nations: 

S1E24: Cuba's History, Dr. Lillian Guerra 

S1E23: Haiti's History, Dr. Robert Fatton 

I hope you enjoy these episodes.

Adel

Host of the History Behind News podcast

Click to follow us on Twitter

ThePeel.news is available wherever you get your podcast.

Women. Life. Liberty. 

This chant has become the slogan of the current protests in Iran, which started with the murder of Ms. Mahsa Amini by the so-called 'morality police'. And to be sure, this time in Iran is all about women's rights. 

My guest is an expert in the history of hijab and women's rights in Iran. In this episode, Dr. Janet Afary talks about the plight of Iranian women in the context of Iran's rigid class hierarchy, going back all to the pre-Islamic Persian Empire.  We talk about love, love poems and marriage, and polygamy. She talks about the Shah's White Revolution, the liberations it brought for women and the enemies he made amongst the clergy because of it. From there, she explains Iran's progressive family planning laws (e.g., abortion up to 4 months), all of which were abrogated recently, causing more frustration among Iranians. 

Dr. Afary is the author of many books on the history of Iran, women's rights there, and modern romance and sexual politics. Click here to learn more about her books.  

In addition, below are links to other episodes about Iran:

S2E33: Iranians of the 1979 Revolution, Dr. Naghmeh Sohrabi

S2E25: Iran-U.S. Diplomacy, Dr. Vali Nasr

S1E25: Iran's Leadership, Government Structure & Religion, Dr. Vali Nasr 

And here is the link to Ms. Amanpour's interview with Ms. Ebadi:

I hope you enjoy these episodes.

Adel

Host of the History Behind News podcast

Click to follow us on Twitter

ThePeel.news is available wherever you get your podcast.

Hey there Newspeelers,

Tune in this Friday for my conversation with Dr. Janet Afary, in which she talks to me about Iran's history of hijab, women's rights and sexual politics. 

This episode will be available on Friday, Oct. 14, at 6 am ET.

Talk to you guys then.

Adel

Host of the History Behind News podcast

Click to follow us on Twitter

HistoryBehindNews is available wherever you get your podcast.

Mahsa Amini! 

We know her name. Tragically, there are many more names like hers... many more Mahsa Aminis. 

We have seen images and watched videos of brave Iranian women, and men, protest in the streets of Iran. Although we experience it from the safety of our homes, far away from the brutality of Iran's regime, it is still daunting to watch a young Iranian woman take off her hijab in public, cut her hair in protest and chant against Iran's Supreme Leader, its president and the Islamic Republic as a whole. What will happen to her? Will she be arrested? Will she become another Mahsa Amini? 

We don't know if this is or will become a revolution. But we do know how the movements of the 1970s and street protests in 1978 culminated in the 1979 Revolution. And in this episode, we will learn a lot more about the people who brought about that cataclysmic revolution that changed everything... for the people of Iran. 

My guest, Dr. Naghmeh Sohrabi, will take us through this history and also talk about her forthcoming book, which is tentatively titled "The Intimate Lives of a Revolution: Iran 1979.” 

Also, here are two publications that Dr. Sohrabi recommends in this episode :

Charles Kurzman: The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran.

Ervand Abrahamian: “Structural Causes of the Iranian Revolution”.

In addition, below are links to other episodes about Iran: 

S2E25: Iran-U.S. Diplomacy, Dr. Vali Nasr

S1E25: Iran's Leadership, Government Structure & Religion, Dr. Vali Nasr

S2E34: Iran's History of Hijab, Women's Rights & Sexual Politics 

I hope you enjoy these episodes.

Adel

Host of the History Behind News podcast

Click to follow us on Twitter

ThePeel.news is available wherever you get your podcast.

Hey there Newspeelers,

Tune in this Friday for my conversation with Dr. Naghmeh Sohrabi, in which she talks to me about the Iranians who brought about the 1979 Revolution, a revolution that changed everything for the people of Iran. 

This episode will be available this Friday, Oct. 7, at 6 am ET.

Talk to you guys then.

Adel

Host of the History Behind News podcast

Click to follow us on Twitter

HistoryBehindNews is available wherever you get your podcast.

Home mortgage interest rates are going up, and home sales rates and even prices are going down. 

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Price Fishback, of Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona, about America's history of real estate booms and busts and the history of home loans. 

Of course, we can't talk about homes and home mortgages without getting into the history of governments' involvement. As it turns out, the U.S. government has been involved in U.S. real estate since the very beginning. 

As the Great Depression wreaked havoc on our economy, causing a huge number of farm and family home foreclosures, the US government got involved in regulating, buying and backstopping mortgages. Of course, we are all familiar with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These two agencies were supposedly not government programs and were supposedly not backed by the U.S. government. The trouble was, no one believed it. Americans associated these corporations with the US government, and rightfully so! As evidence, both corporations had to bend to popular demand and Congressional pressure, by both parties, to extend their lending policy from high-quality loans to include lower-quality loans that carried significant risk. Well, we know what happened eventually, because all lived through the Great Recession, to which the subprime loan crisis was significantly the cause. 

In the Perspective segment of our conversation, Dr. Fishback talked about housing segregation. For more than a century, Black home ownership has consistently been about 20% below White home ownership. Many blame the Home Owner's Loan Corporation (HOLC), for institutionalizing housing segregation in America by creating maps that highlighted neighborhoods' racial and ethnic compositions. I had heard the term redlining and brought it up as well. Dr. Fishback is conducting an extensive and ongoing research on this topic. He believes that the history of HOLC, which is quite controversial, is misunderstood and he explained why. 

Below, are links to other episodes about the U.S. economy: 

S2E26: A Strong U.S. Dollar, Dr. Eichengreen

S2E11: Inflation, Dr. White

S1E18: Fed's History, Mr. Lowenstein

I hope you enjoy these episodes.

Adel

Host of the History Behind News podcast

Click to follow us on Twitter

ThePeel.news is available wherever you get your podcast.

Hey there Newspeelers,

Tune in this Friday for my conversation with Dr. Price Fishback, in which he takes us through the history of housing booms and busts, and where our housing market stands now - from a historical perspective. We also talk about the history of home loans. Imagine a 15% interest rate on your home mortgage! Or having only five years to pay off your entire home loan? 

Dr. Fishback and his team are researching the controversial history of HOLC, a US government agency that is blamed for institutionalizing housing segregation. He disagrees with this assessment of HOLC's history and, of course, we talk about it in detail. 

This episode will be available at 6 am ET, this Friday, Sept. 30th.

Talk to you guys then.

Adel

Host of the History Behind News podcast

Click to follow us on Twitter

HistoryBehindNews is available wherever you get your podcast.

The year 1814 not only marks the end of the Napoleonic Wars, but also ushers in the era of constitutional monarchies. No longer could Kings and Queens of Britain, or emperors of France, wield absolute power. This drastic transformation forced monarchs to come to terms with their diminished powers, and to reign rather than to rule. This much is intuitive. And much of it is even codified in the constitutional laws of Britain. 

But what is not so intuitive is the power left to constitutional monarchs, such as Queen Victoria or Queen Elizabeth II. 

My guest is Dr. Heidi Mehrkens of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. She explains that constitutional monarchs have been practicing the fine art of soft power. It's a balancing act to be accessible to the people - but not too accessible. So monarchs show their normalness, like their normal families. This practice dates back to 1837 in Britain, the year Queen Victoria began her reign. The surprising aspect of this power, though less than absolute power, is that it has connected the monarchs to their people. This was not at all the case prior to the 1789 French Revolution.  

Dr. Mehrkens has many stories to share with us in this episode, such as tourism of monarchy and a prince who thought he would never die - because he was the heir to the throne. 

To learn more about Dr. Mehrkens, listen to this podcast and also visit his academic homepage.

Below, are links to other episodes about climate:

S2E19: Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Dr. Frost

S2E22: Finland's Wars With Russia, Dr. Lavery

S2E28: Hungary's History, Dr. Nemes

I hope you enjoy these episodes.

Adel

Host of the History Behind News podcast

Click to follow us on Twitter

ThePeel.news is available wherever you get your podcast.