Aristide Returns

Reporter Amy Bracken was at the airport in Port-au-Prince when Aristide arrived home. Here’s her conversation with Lisa Mullins on  The World today. And here’s a little backgrounder I did on Aristide that followed and a longer conversation with Robert Fatton on The World’s history podcast is here.

Libya: The Italian Occupation

Marco Werman interviews historian Ronald Bruce St John about the Italian colonial encounter with Libya on this week’s episode of How We Got Here.

How We Got Here #63 – Jean-Bertrand Aristide

This week’s history podcast is an interview with Robert Fatton of the University of Virginia looking back at Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s role in Haiti’s recent history and politics. I went to Haiti for the first time this year to do some reporting and have been trying to fill in some of the political context ever since. This interview is a good start for thinking about the life and times and impact of Aristide and what his return to Haiti might mean.

Egypt on How We Got Here

As promised, we’ve started rolling out history pods on Egypt–in the first one (Feb 2) I interview Michael Wahid Hanna of the Century Foundation about the historical context for Mubarak’s rule. In the second one (Feb 7), Lisa Mullins interviews Robert Springborg of the Naval Postgraduate School specifically about the Egyptian military and its place in the Egyptian state and it’s probable role in any transition. He squelches the notion that the military is somehow on the side of “the people.”  If you’re not familiar with my/The World’s history podcast, How We Got Here, here’s the HWGH webpage.

Reporting on history and memory in Germany

How We Got Here #55 is a conversation with journalist and radio producer Daniel Estrin about the backstories to some features he filed for PRI’s The World from Germany in 2010. Enjoy.

The Trouble with the Congo

I interviewed political scientist (and former aid worker)  Severine Autesserre about her new book The Trouble with the Congo for How We Got Here #53. She’s done some really interesting work on violence in Congo and the failures of peacebuilding there.

How We Got Here #33

5 stories commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall.

How We Got Here #30

Check out the latest episode of the history podcast:  Marco Werman of PRI’s The World interviews James David Robenalt about his new book The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage during the Great War. Robenalt is a Cleveland lawyer with deep roots in Ohio. He was lucky enough to get his hands on a microfiche copy of Harding’s love letters to his mistress; the originals are still under seal in the Library of Congress. The resulting tale is full of surprises, about Harding, about his lover Carrie Phillips, and about the politics and foreign relations of the day.

Back to work

There’s a new episode of my history podcast up at The World’s website. Check it out: Moscow in 1993, revisiting the Taliban, finding out who Curtis LeMay was.

Lots on my mind–more apparent drone attacks still have me thinking about how bombing works/doesn’t work. I took out a whole pile of library books on the history of bombing which I look forward to perusing. Yesterday’s Jeffrey Gettleman NYT/IHT piece on male rape victims in Congo jolted me back to that topic too. Adam Hochschild has an overview of the Congo situation in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books which I found really helpful. It’s not getting better. I’ve got lots of news to catch up on from two weeks-plus vacation including this CNN report from last week on nursing in Malawi by Christine Gorman.

Understanding McNamara

is the subject of this week’s podcast. You can find it at http://www.theworld.org/how-we-got-here-podcast.