In the midst of a migration crisis in Europe and strident talk by some American politicians about Mexican immigrants coming to the United States, people around the world are resorting to an old strategy: building walls. Historically, walls have a decidedly mixed record in achieving their goals to keep some people in and other out. While good fences may make good neighbors, as the old cliché has it, neighborliness has not been the reason behind most of history’s major wall projects. Here is a look at some of the most famous of these insular architectural projects.

An in-text version of this episode can be found at: https://origins.osu.edu/index.php/connecting-history/top-ten-origins-walls

The Normandy Invasion (June 6, 1944) was the supreme joint effort of the Western Allies in Europe in World War II and remains today one of the best known campaigns of the war. (Written by Greg Hope.)

An in-text version of this can be found at: https://origins.osu.edu/index.php/watch/top-10-best-things-know-about-d-day

Written by Elizabeth Bond. The execution of King Louis XVI was a turning point in the history of France.

An in-text version of this episode can be found at: https://origins.osu.edu/index.php/milestones/january-2018-execution-louis-xvi

In November 2018, a report commissioned by French President Emannuel Macron called for artifacts taken to France during the heyday of European imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries be returned to Africa, sending shock waves throughout the museum world. “I cannot accept,” said Macron, “that a large part of the cultural heritage of several African countries is in France.” The expropriation of material culture has proven controversial in a variety of contexts, from the acquisition of Native American remains by American museums to the complicated provenance of Greek and Roman antiquities held by such major art institutions as the Getty Villa in Los Angeles and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This month, History Talk speaks with two experts in material culture and museum studies — Professor Sarah Van Beurden and Origins editor Professor Steven Conn — about how cultural heritage repatriation debates have played out differently around the world, as well as what these debates reveal about the very nature of cultural heritage itself.

An in-text version of this episode can be found at: https://origins.osu.edu/index.php/historytalk/museums-cultural-heritage-repatriation-restitution-african-art

In the West, many think of HIV/AIDS as a phenomenon that began in the 1980s, when news first broke of a mysterious and highly deadly disease. In reality, however, the history of HIV/AIDS stretches back more than a hundred years, and has been shaped by some of the most important trends of the 20th century: from European colonialism in Africa, to the proxy conflicts fought between allies of the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, to the globalization and economic neoliberalism that transformed the global economy in the late twentieth century. On this episode of History Talk, hosts Eric Michael Rhodes and Lauren Henry speak with three experts — Thomas F. McDow, Kathy Lancaster, and Jesse Kwiek— about the origins, spread, and future of HIV/AIDS in both the United States and around the world.

An in-text version of this episode can be found at: https://origins.osu.edu/index.php/history-talk-hiv-aids-history-africa-lgbt

In October 2018, Brazil elected far-right ideologue Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency. Bolsonaro, a retired military officer often called the "Trump of the Tropics," campaigned on a platform that mixed anti-corruption with open nostalgia for the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985. On this month's History Talk podcast, your new hosts Eric Michael Rhodes and Lauren Henry speak with two experts — Jennifer Eaglin and Pedro Cantisano — about the rise of Bolsonaro, his place in the longer history of Brazilian politics, and what his success means for the future of the world's fourth-largest democracy.

An in-text version of this article can be found at: https://origins.osu.edu/index.php/historytalk/brazil-election-jair-bolsonaro-politics-nostalgia

With the release of Marvel's "Black Panther" film, historian Thomas F. McDow explores the real historical origins of the fictional country of Wakanda and its roots in a Cold War crisis and an African mine.

An in-text version of this episode can be found at: https://origins.osu.edu/connecting-history/searching-wakanda-african-roots-black-panther-story

Existential fears of “losing” what is seen as “Western Civilization” have animated many within what is considered the alt-right. However, the valorization of “western civilization” is often rooted in romanticized notions of ancient Greece and Rome, which alt-right groups have appropriated and promoted in recent propaganda. Why and how do nationalists in Europe and the U.S. draw contemporary connections to ancient Greece and Rome? What are the consequences of this for our understandings of the ancient era? And what should scholars in the Classics and History do about it? On this episode of History Talk, we speak with three classists to discuss the alt-right’s appropriation of classical history: Denise Eileen McCoskey, Donna Zuckerberg, and Curtis Dozier.

An in-text version of this episode can be found at: https://origins.osu.edu/historytalk/classicists-and-white-supremacists%20alt-right%20trump%20western%20civilization%20culture

The September 11thattacks put terrorism in the forefront of American consciousness. Since then, the U.S. has waged a nearly ubiquitous global war on terror, that now reaches 76 countries and seems far from over. Although American thought on terrorism persistently goes back to 9/11 and 2001, U.S. interest and rhetoric on terrorism dates back well into the Cold War. How did terrorism become a focal point of U.S. foreign policy? How did earlier precedents shape how the U.S. fights terrorism and its response to 9/11? And what does this deeper history tell us about what terrorism is, how our common assumptions about it might be wrong, and how we should rethink it? On this episode of History Talk, hosts Brenna Miller and Jessica Viñas-Nelson speak with Drs. Philip Travis and Adrian Hänni to discuss the historical context for today’s war on terror and the Cold War precedents that help explain where we're at today.

An in-text version of this episode can be found at: https://origins.osu.edu/historytalk/cold-war-war-terror

In the last year, tensions between the U.S. and North Korea, a false nuclear missile alert in Hawaii, and debates over the Iran nuclear deal have renewed public attention to the development of nuclear weapons and armament and the potential for war. But from the Cold War, to the Cuban Missile Crisis, to Chinese nuclear tests in the 1960s, the U.S. and the world have frequently faced these fears, and attempted to place particular countries’ access to nuclear weapons technology under international control. So how concerned should we be about nuclear weapons and who has them? How did the U.S. become so central in efforts to control them? And how can past attempts to limit nuclear proliferation inform how we address these questions today? On this episode of History Talk, hosts Brenna Miller and Jessica Viñas-Nelson speak with experts Christopher Gelpi, Dakota Rudesill, and Matt Ambrose to discuss the history of nuclear armament and control.

An in-text version of the episode can be found at: https://origins.osu.edu/historytalk/nuclear-tensions-nuclear-weapons-and-long-history-nuclear-war