History As It Happens Martin Di Caro

The death of Henry Kissinger at 100 reignited the debate over the foreign policy record of a man who embodied U.S. power and influence. Revered or despised, the former Secretary of State to Presidents Nixon and Ford was one of the most impactful statesman of the American century, maintaining influence as a private consultant and informal presidential counselor up until his death. While in government, Kissinger backed dictators and was a central figure in the secret bombing of Cambodia. He helped open the door to Mao's China, re-establishing the U.S. relationship with the world's most populous country. In this episode, historian and Kissinger biographer Jeremi Suri examines the ideas behind the policies that shaped world history.

This is the second episode in an occasional series examining major counterfactual scenarios in history. The first, published in September, asked whether President Kennedy would have withdrawn the U.S. from Vietnam had he lived to serve a second term.
The destruction of human chattel slavery in the United States was a process of world historical importance. It took a terrible civil war and the passage of a constitutional amendment to bring about its complete demise. Could slavery have been ended peacefully? If so, how long would it have taken, had the Civil War not broken out in 1861? In this episode, historian Jim Oakes, an expert on slavery and antebellum U.S. politics, takes on this counter-factual question.

If the era of Trump has brought on a crisis of liberalism, liberals have failed to fully reckon with their "failure to establish a liberal society at home, to say nothing of how their acts and outlook set back the globalization of liberalism abroad as the toll of neoconservative and neoliberal policy continued to mount," according to Yale University historian Samuel Moyn in his provocative book, "Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times." In this episode, Moyn discusses how, in his view, Cold War liberals betrayed liberalism by rejecting its relationship to emancipation and reason in order to confront Soviet communism, with consequences that continue to ripple to this day.

This conversation with University of Virginia Miller Center historian Ken Hughes aired on C-SPAN's American History TV on Nov. 25. Hughes discusses his new research into President John F. Kennedy's role in the coup d'état and assassination of South Vietnam's president Ngo Dinh Diem in early Nov. 1963, just three weeks before JFK was assassinated in Dallas. 

Millions of Americans devour roasted turkey for their Thanksgiving dinner. It's the traditional centerpiece of this quintessential American feast. But how did this big o'l bird migrate to our dinner tables? It has less to do with the Pilgrims than Sarah Josepha Hale. In this episode, historian Ruth McClelland-Nugent traces the origins of our modern Thanksgiving traditions and discusses why such cultural touchstones matter, even if we don't always precisely understand where they come from.

Partisans and activists on either side of the Israel-Hamas war are lobbing allegations of genocide against the other. Some respected legal scholars and historians are also weighing in, however, in an effort to elevate a debate that can easily turn ugly. After all, there's no more serious crime than genocide, which is "the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." The memory and history of the Holocaust also are being invoked, as Israel's critics accuse the Jewish state of committing the same crime the Nazis perpetrated against the Jews during the Second World War. In this episode, historian Dirk Moses delves into the thorny moral and legal questions surrounding genocide. He offers a counter argument: the genocide debate obscures the development in modern warfare of the legalized killing of civilians as states pursue "permanent security."