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History As It Happens

May 16, 2023

This is the fourth episode in a multiple-part series marking the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War, which began on March 20, 2003. Earlier episodes were published in March.

From 1990 to 2003 the United States, through the U.N. Security Council, imposed the most punishing sanctions on a sovereign state in modern history....


May 9, 2023

Can the 14th Amendment save the U.S. from defaulting on its debts if Congress fails to raise the federal government's borrowing limit? That may depend on who you ask. Like so much else in the Constitution, Section 4 of the 14th Amendment means different things to different people today as it did in the 1860s when it...


Apr 13, 2023

The 1990s began with the collapse of the Soviet Union and expulsion of Saddam Hussein’s armies from Kuwait. As the world’s only superpower, the U.S. would intervene militarily – on humanitarian grounds – in countries most Americans knew little about: Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo (but not Rwanda). President...


Mar 25, 2023

This is the third in a multi-part series of episodes examining the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which began on March 20, 2003. The video version of this episode will air on C-SPAN 2's American History TV on April 1.

Melvin Leffler, an eminent historian of U.S. foreign policy, joins Martin Di Caro in a...


Mar 20, 2023

This is the first in a multi-part series of episodes marking the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which began on March 20, 2003.

Have Americans truly learned the lessons of the failed war in Iraq? Catherine Lutz at Brown University's Costs of War Project and historian Andrew Bacevich of the Quincy...