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History As It Happens

Apr 4, 2024

This is the second episode in an occasional series examining influential elections in U.S. history. The first installment, The Election of 1980, was published on March 4.

A Republican incumbent faced a Democratic challenger trying to end 12 years of GOP control of the White House. A right-wing insurgent and a Texas...


Dec 12, 2023

The Israel-Hamas war has provoked an angry, bitter debate over the meaning of genocide as partisans on both sides of the conflict invoke the memory of the Nazis and the Holocaust. The new Netflix documentary "Ordinary Men" -- based on the 1992 book of the same title by historian Christopher Browning -- may help...


Dec 4, 2023

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...


Nov 2, 2023

In late 1960 the Congo crisis was front-page news. Photographers and newsreels captured the humiliating arrest and imprisonment of the newly independent country's ousted prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. In January 1961, his domestic political enemies murdered Lumumba in a remote clearing. What the world did not know at...


Oct 3, 2023

When President Bill Clinton eulogized Richard Nixon in April 1994, he briefly referred to advice he had received from the former president just the month before. “Even in the final weeks of his life, he gave me his wise counsel, especially with regard to Russia,” said Clinton at the 37th president's funeral. The...