PODCAST: HISTORY UNPLUGGED
J. Edgar Hoover’s 50-Year Career of Blackmail, Entrapment, and Taking Down Communist Spies
It’s popular to assert that the Middle East has always been a bloodbath, but it’s not true. Indeed, when the 1973 Yom Kippur War ended, a period of peace set in (interrupted, of course, with bouts of violence). It lasted nearly thirty years. Israel’s relations with its neighboring Arab states…
The disappearance of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth centuries was one of the greatest political earthquakes in the modern period. The empire ruled much of the Middle East and parts of Europe for centuries. In its wake was left over two dozen countries, some with little ability to…
Saudi Arabia is the homeland of the holiest sites in Islam and has remained a locus of the Islamic religious imagination. But it became a global power player in World War I, when Saudi Arabia and the West became full intertwined, and vast reserves of oil were discovered that made…
The Arab-Israeli conflict today isn’t about borders and never was. It’s about a struggle for existence. The origins of the conflict indeed lie in the post–World War I happenings in the region, but beyond that, the commonly understood history of this conflict is riddled with myths and misconceptions. Below is…
The Iranian Revolution of 1979 is an even that is poorly understood in the West. That is because it is a complex mixture of twentieth-century Cold War politics, a modern strain of political Islam, and both these elements mixed with a Persian culture thousands of years old that predates the…
