History As It Happens Martin Di Caro

This is the fourth episode in an occasional series examining influential elections in U.S. history. The most recent episode, The Elections of 1860 and 1864, was published on May 7.
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the oath of office in March 1933, the American people faced a paralyzing national emergency of historic proportions. The unemployment rate was 25 percent and much of the nation's wealth had evaporated with astonishing speed. It was a moment of high drama, unlike the election that put Roosevelt in the White House. When voters went to the polls in Nov. 1932, there was little doubt FDR would defeat the hapless Herbert Hoover by a wide margin. Unclear was whether Roosevelt's promised New Deal would pull the country out of the Great Depression. In this episode, historian David M. Kennedy explains how Roosevelt's economic vision made him a transformational figure.
Recommended reading:

Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945.

American public opinion is increasingly intolerant of migrants, given the record numbers who have illegally crossed the southern border over the past several years. The U.S. immigration system is broken, as harsher enforcement in the name of deterrence has not magically fixed the root causes of human migration from Central and South America. Under election year pressure, President Joseph Biden signed an executive order to bar most asylum seekers, but comprehensive immigration reform remains out of reach. The asylum system, codified in 1980, was never designed to handle so many people. In this episode, New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer, the author of "Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here," explains the ins and outs of asylum and the human costs of failing to reform a broken system.

Future historians who write about the 2024 campaign might puzzle over how the Republican nominee, four years earlier, egged on a mob to attack Congress, the futile culmination of a months-long scheme to steal the 2020 election. But rather than end his political career, he would survive to champion the rioters as victims of the same nefarious forces arrayed against him and, by extension, the American people. So it should come as no surprise that the felony conviction against Donald J. Trump for falsifying business records in a hush-money scheme with a porn star may not dent his support very much. What is Trumpism today? Is there more to it than the man's grievances against prosecutors, judges, and his political foes? In this episode, the National Review's Dan McLaughlin discusses the sources of Trump's ongoing dominance of the Republican Party. 

Today marks the 80th anniversary of the Allied invasion of Normandy, a massive military campaign to begin liberating Western Europe from Nazi occupation on the way to victory in the Second World War. American memories are filled with heroism and sacrifice, as D-Day remains a touchstone in the U.S. self-image as a global superpower and defender of freedom and democracy. For the people of France, memories are more complicated, even painful, because the liberation came at a cost of thousands of French civilians. Moreover, the French defeat of 1940 continued to loom large in collective memory as a source of shame. In this episode, the Smithsonian's Kate Clarke Lemay discusses her work studying the war cemeteries in France, which stand as monuments to U.S. military and cultural primacy. Lemay is the author of "Triumph of the Dead: American World War II Cemeteries, Monuments, and Diplomacy in France." 

Before U.S. leaders would compare Saddam Hussein to Hitler, they cynically helped him in his war against Iran. Before the U.S. would wage a decades-long war on Iraq in the form of sanctions and a pre-emptive invasion, multiple White House administrations sought better relations between Washington and Baghdad. During periods of cooperation and conflict, each side misread the other. Yet "forever war" was avoidable. In this episode, investigative journalist Steve Coll, the author of "The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq," discusses new source materials, including audio tapes of Saddam's internal deliberations, that allow us to understand the dictator's decision-making in illuminating ways.

Collective memory -- what our society chooses to remember, honor, or erase from our past -- is perpetually mediated. For generations Confederate statues and monuments stood in public squares until a new racial reckoning compelled cities and towns to remove them. But that wasn't the end of the story -- at least not in Shenandoah County, Virginia. Its school board voted to restore the names of Confederate Generals Lee, Jackson, and Ashby to a pair of schools which had been renamed (Honey Run and Mountain View) in 2020. In Tennessee, the caretakers of the Franklin Battlefield just dedicated a new monument honoring the Texas soldiers who fought there for the Confederacy in 1864. In this episode, historian and Substack writer Kevin Levin discusses the grip Lost Cause mythology continues to hold on the minds of some Americans today, and the difficult task of acknowledging important historical events and actors without glorifying their causes.