Breaking History
Sometimes the news moves so fast, you have to look closely to know if you’ve seen it before. And that’s what this show is about. Breaking History breaks down the news, by breaking down history. We cover everything from LBJ and the Roman Republic to Donald Trump and the chaos at Columbia. This twice a month show from The Free Press delivers the best historians, authors, and reporters by mining the archives of human experience to figure out the present. George Santayana wrote, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Tune in to Breaking History to resist the repetition.
Episodes
May 27, 2026 • 78 mins
As America approaches the 250th anniversary of its founding, a quiet war is being waged over what the Declaration of Independence really means — with some on the new right dismissing it as globalist fantasy and some on the left reducing it to a document written by slaveholders. Writer and former national security official Michael Anton joins Eli Lake to examine the ideas of Harry Jaffa, a Brooklyn-born philosopher who spent his car...
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May 19, 2026 • 43 mins
Hi Breaking History listeners! My colleague Joe Nocera has launched a six part series about the Lindbergh kidnapping. Enjoy episode one here and then head on over to The Lindbergh Conspiracies feed for the rest of the season.
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EP01 | The Broken Window
One night in March 1932, the infant son of aviator Charles Lindbergh is taken from his nursery. A warped window, a ladder, and a ransom note mark the beginning of a case that ...
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May 13, 2026 • 57 mins
Robert Parkinson is a historian at SUNY Binghamton who has spent 25 years studying the American Revolutionary period. His new book, Tyrants and Rogues, arrives just in time for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence — and it argues that we’ve been reading that document wrong for most of those 250 years. In this episode, Parkinson explains why the 27 grievances that follow the famous preamble are the real heart of ...
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May 7, 2026 • 49 mins
For tickets to our live recording with Jon Meacham in Philadelphia, click here and register. Use code TFP for a 20 percent discount.
Roald Dahl gave the world Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He was also a vicious antisemite.
A Broadway play about Dahl’s legacy; the new Michael Jackson biopic; Kanye West’s attempted redemption arc; all of these have the culture asking again: How do we ap...
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May 1, 2026 • 51 mins
David Rose is the director of policy and research at the Free Speech Union (FSU), a UK-based nonpartisan organization that campaigns for freedom of speech. The FSU will publish a new report examining allegations tied to Labour Together, the political network linked to Keir Starmer.
David joins Eli Lake to explain how his investigation describes a murky ecosystem involving claims of journalists labeled as Russian assets, the circul...
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April 16, 2026 • 116 mins
Eli Lake joins Robert Wright over at his podcast NonZero, which offers “conversations with a series of people who have nothing in common except that program host Robert Wright is curious about what they’re thinking” . Robert views the U.S-Israel military campaign against Iran as a serious mistake and a clear violation of international law. Eli sees it as a necessary—if legally awkward—response to decades of Iranian aggression and d...
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April 9, 2026 • 54 mins
Arash Azizi lived through the democracy movement in Iran before he wrote about it. Now a historian at Yale, he joins Eli Lake to trace the arc from former president Mohammad Khatami’s unlikely rise to the crushed hopes of the Green Movement—and what it tells us about whether reform from within the Islamic Republic was ever really possible.
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March 31, 2026 • 87 mins
What does it actually take to break a regime built on martyrdom?
Eli Lake sits down with Haviv Rettig Gur — host of Ask Haviv Anything and one of the deepest thinkers on the Middle East — to assess week five of the Iran war. They trace the ideological DNA of Iran’'s Islamic Republic from the Algerian National Liberation Front to Frantz Fanon to Ali Shariati, and explain why this is a regime designed to treat its own destruction as...
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March 27, 2026 • 89 mins
What drives someone from an ordinary background into extremism?
In this Breaking History special, journalist Jay Solomon joins Eli Lake to discuss his investigation into American extremist Calla Walsh.
But this isn’t an isolated story. It echoes a pattern we’ve seen before.
Following the interview, we revisit our episode on “middle-class kids breaking bad,” exploring how individuals from stable, even privileged backgrounds ...
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March 19, 2026 • 130 mins
This week I joined The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan, who has generously agreed to let us share the conversation here. Andrew and I go way back, and few people are as willing as he is to really go toe-to-toe over our disagreements—especially on Israel and America’s role in the world.
In our discussion, we cover a broad range of history and politics: from the Iran-Contra affair to the Oslo Accords, and the Second Intifada to Iraq, ...
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February 25, 2026 • 51 mins
Breaking History producer Poppy Damon sits down with Guardian security correspondent Jason Burke to unpack his new book, The Revolutionists, a sweeping history of the 1970s wave of extremism that transformed global politics. From plane hijackings to hostage crises, Burke traces the radical figures and world leaders who shaped the modern age of terror. What does the 1970s tell us about 2026?
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February 10, 2026 • 47 mins
As Iran’s regime faces mounting internal pressure, one name keeps resurfacing: Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the last shah. But is he a viable future leader, or simply the most recognizable symbol of a free Iran? In this conversation, host Eli Lake and producer Poppy Damon unpack the strange political moment Pahlavi finds himself in—popular with many Iranians, yet viewed skeptically by parts of the opposition and treated cautious...
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January 14, 2026 • 88 mins
In our last episode, we traced the rise of the Pahlavi dynasty and the forces building toward Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. In Part 2, we turn to the man who brought that monarchy to an end: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. From exile in a quiet French chateau, Khomeini launched a revolution that shattered 2,500 years of Persian monarchy. But he didn’t do it alone. Liberals and leftists, both inside Iran and across the West, played ...
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January 14, 2026 • 71 mins
Breaking History dives into the paradox at the heart of modern Iran: How a nation born in revolt, from the tobacco protests of the 1890s to the 1979 Revolution, has time and again empowered autocrats in the name of democracy. This week we trace the cycles of reform and repression that still shape Iran today.
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December 22, 2025 • 50 mins
After October 7, Jews around the world were reminded of an old, unsettling truth: Governments do not always protect minorities when mobs turn violent. From Bondi Beach to New York synagogues, the promise of public order has looked increasingly fragile.
In this episode of Breaking History, Eli Lake revisits the last time Jews in America confronted that reality head-on. In the 1930s, as Nazi sympathizers rallied openly and police of...
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December 10, 2025 • 39 mins
Did you know the soundtrack of Americans’ Christmas was written largely by . . . Jews? Most of the composers behind the holiday canon were the children of immigrants who fled pogroms and conscription in Russia and Eastern Europe between 1880 and 1920.
Sammy Cahn, Frank Sinatra’s go-to lyricist, gave us “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” Mel Tormé, son of a Belarusian refugee, wrote “The Christmas Song”) (a.k.a. “Chestnuts Ro...
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November 26, 2025 • 51 mins
We revisit the scandal-soaked 1990s—Packwood, Thomas, Clinton—and explore how failing to enforce norms around abuse of power helped create the world in which the Epstein scandal could flourish. This episode traces the unraveling of political accountability from the Clinton impeachment to the Trump Access Hollywood moment, and finally the global Epstein reckoning. We show how feminists in the ’90s and evangelicals in the 2010s made ...
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November 12, 2025 • 41 mins
We are coming up on the 50th anniversary of punk, the genre that smashed the old rock gods and stripped down the music to its essence. In this episode of Breaking History, we examine the examined life of the original punk: the loudmouth philosopher who defied the authorities, refused to conform, and paid the ultimate price for speaking the truth. Yes—it can only be Socrates. Grab your leather jacket and your hemlock, we’re going h...
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October 29, 2025 • 60 mins
For 124 years, the American socialist movement has been defined by defeat. From Eugene Debs’ doomed presidential runs to Michael Harrington’s quiet organizing, it’s been a story of almosts: almost mainstream, almost powerful, almost relevant. Until now. In this episode, we look at how Zohran Mamdani’s likely mayoral victory marks the first real crack in America’s century-long resistance to socialism—and why its impact will reach fa...
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October 21, 2025 • 1 min
On October 21, 2023, beloved Detroit community leader Samantha Woll was found brutally stabbed to death outside her home—two weeks to the day after the October 7 attacks on Israel. It looks like an open-and-shut case—a hate crime. But swiftly the police rule that out. Instead they eventually find themselves with two unrelated suspects. When they charge one with murder, the case takes a turn that raises questions about antisemitism,...
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