History As It Happens

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Scientists sequenced Thomas Jefferson’s genome from three strands of his hair for a project led by the Smithsonian Institution to prove that Jefferson fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings.
According to The New York Times, researchers used cutting-edge techniques to extract and sequence the DNA, then compared it with DNA samples from 13 living Hemings and Jefferson family descendants.
This story is, in some ways, old news. The allegations that Jefferson had an enslaved mistress appeared when he was president in 1802. Books written decades ago by Fawn Brodie and Annette Gordon-Reed delved into their relationship. Yet the story still fascinates, and now has a new chapter for us to talk about.
Our guest is Alan Taylor, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Chair, Emeritus, in the Department of History at the University of Virginia.
He’s the author of Thomas Jefferson’s Education and the new Tower Hill: A Plantation on the Edge of Rebellion.

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In leafy Meridian Hill Park in Washington, D.C., there stands a bronze statue of the fifteenth president of the United States. Only an inscription etched in the surrounding marble identifies its subject: BUCHANAN.
Yes, a statue to the terrible James Buchanan, who interfered in a notorious Supreme Court ruling, consistently took the side of the Southern Slave Power, and barely lifted a finger to save the Union after seven states seceded on his watch.
Is it fair to lambast this hapless figure? What could Buchanan have done differently to avert the Civil War? Historian James Oakes is our guest.
Recommended reading:
Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865 by James Oakes

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As some Israeli government ministers call for the "voluntary migration" of all Palestinians from Gaza, the term ethnic cleansing is back in the news. Before the 1990s, international institutions and mainstream political figures seldom used the term. Then came the Serb atrocities in Croatia and Bosnia, and ethnic cleansing gained wide acceptance.
What does it mean? Does it have a legal grounding? Or is it a euphemism for genocide? Our guest is sociologist Martin Shaw, a leading genocide scholar and professor emeritus of International Relations and Politics at the University of Sussex.
Further reading:
The Genocide that Changed the World by Martin Shaw (Journal of Genocide Research)

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A special tribunal in The Hague convicted a hero of Kosovo's independence struggle of war crimes. Hashim Thaci was sentenced to 25 years for the crimes of arbitrary detention, torture, and murder. Three other former Kosovo Liberation Army figures were also convicted for targeting ethnic Albanians whom they suspected of collaborating with the Serbian invaders in the late 1990s.
The wheels of justice turn slowly, and in the arena of international law, successful war crimes prosecutions are difficult. So, what happened in Kosovo as the U.S. bombed Serbian targets — as ethnic Albanians were expelled by the hundreds of thousands?
Alex Whiting is our guest. He teaches at Harvard Law School and is an expert on international criminal law. He worked at the Kosovo Specialist Prosecutor’s Office in The Hague and once interviewed Hashim Thaci as part of an investigation.

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Vladimir Putin and the Russian foreign policy establishment's goal is not to outlast the West only in Ukraine, but to create an alternate world order of anti-Western countries, a world where Russia can evade sanctions, throw around its influence, and disseminate its propaganda to receptive audiences. This is according to political scientist Hanna Notte, the author of 'We Shall Outlast Them: Putin's Global Campaign to Defeat the West.'
Is it working? Moscow's global efforts have produced mixed results while, says Notte, doing long-term damage to Russia itself. For starters, the war in Ukraine remains a grinding stalemate.
Hanna Notte is the director of the Eurasia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. Her expertise is in Russian foreign policy, the Middle East, and arms control.

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