History As It Happens

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This is the fourth episode in an occasional series for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, America's semiquincentennial.
What if we approached this coming Fourth of July not as a single day to celebrate a special national birthday, but as the start of a decade-long commitment to a "civic renaissance"? The story of the founding of the United States didn't end on July 4, 1776 — it remains a work in progress (with plenty of setbacks, too). Indeed, a question people pondered at the time remains important today: What does it mean to be a republican citizen? Historian Lindsay Chervinsky, the executive director of the George Washington Library at Mount Vernon, is our guest.
Further reading:
A Bold Civic Renaissance for America's 250th by Lindsay Chervinsky and Julie Silverbrook (National Constitution Center)
Further listening:
Episode 1 w/ Lindsay Chervinsky
Episode 2 w/ Kate Carté
Episode 3 w/ Alan Taylor

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In the history of the long, misbegotten American project in Vietnam, an episode that pulled the country deeper into the quagmire deserves more attention. In 1963, the Kennedy administration green-lit a coup to topple the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam. Diem was an ardent anti-Communist who lost U.S. support after a cascade of missteps in his war against the Viet Cong and his crackdown on the majority Buddhists. As "regime change" dominates today's headlines, the historian-journalist Jack Cheevers explains why the attempt to control South Vietnam ended in ruin — and with Diem murdered.
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President Trump is the eighth U.S. president to visit China since Richard Nixon's bold gamble to establish diplomatic relations with the Communist country in 1972. During his two-day summit with Xi Jinping last week, Trump's first China trip since 2017, the two leaders praised one another and discussed several pressing issues, but they came away with few, if any, substantive breakthroughs. Anatol Lieven of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft offers his post-summit analysis.

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The Nazis' official name was the National Socialist German Workers' Party, which may seem a strange choice given Hitler's ferocious hostility toward Marxism and Communism. Yet many right-wing pundits and politicians today argue that the Nazis were a left-wing movement opposed to capitalism, as evidenced by the party's name, rhetoric, and policies. Is it true? Historian Roger Griffin, one of the world's leading experts on fascism, is here with a nuanced take on these historical ambiguities.
Recommended reading:
Fascism: A Quick Immersion by Roger Griffin

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What emerged as a national movement to liberate Europe's Jews by establishing a Jewish homeland has become a racist, irrational, vengeful state ideology worthy of history's dustbin, contends historian Omer Bartov in his new book, "Israel: What Went Wrong?"
Bartov, an expert on the Holocaust and genocide at Brown University, was among the first major historians to warn that Israel's destruction of Gaza could turn genocidal. He argues that decades of the occupation of Palestinian territories (since 1967) had already inured most Israeli Jews to the suffering of others before the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023. Today, he says those feelings have hardened into outright hostility or utter indifference.
Where did it start going wrong? Bartov points to Israel's founding: David Ben-Gurion's opposition to writing a constitution and to defining the new state's borders.
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