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.
46 episodes transcribedArash 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 fo...
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...
What drives someone from an ordinary background into extremism? In this Breaking History special, journalist Jay Solomon joins Eli Lake to discuss hi...
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 f...
Breaking History producer Poppy Damon sits down with Guardian security correspondent Jason Burke to unpack his new book, The Revolutionists, a sweep...
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 futur...
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 t...
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 R...
After October 7, Jews around the world were reminded of an old, unsettling truth: Governments do not always protect minorities when mobs turn violent....
Did you know the soundtrack of Americans’ Christmas was written largely by . . . Jews? Most of the composers behind the holiday canon were the childre...
We revisit the scandal-soaked 1990s—Packwood, Thomas, Clinton—and explore how failing to enforce norms around abuse of power helped create the world i...
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 episod...
For 124 years, the American socialist movement has been defined by defeat. From Eugene Debs’ doomed presidential runs to Michael Harrington’s quiet or...
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 th...
Once, Britain was the cradle of free speech- the land of Milton, Orwell, and John Stuart Mill. But in 2025, police are arresting citizens for tweets,...
James Comey isn’t a hero. But prosecuting him like this? It’s not justice—it’s political theater. In this episode, we tell the origin story of Comey,...
In a week when political violence has returned to the national stage, we revisit a moment from the 1970s when Shirley Chisholm, the first black congre...
This week Breaking History dives into a century-old mind game: Russia’s information war against America. More specifically, how it keeps driving us cr...
How did air conditioning go from a niche invention for factories to a force that reshaped cities, industries, and even human behavior? In this epis...
In our last episode, we traced the rise of the Pahlavi dynasty and the forces building toward Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. This week, we turn to...
