Show Notes
Hey again everybody. I know I just dropped a big essay on all of you adapted from my final research paper in grad school, and many of you might still be working through it, but I wanted to give everyone another little bonus for all of your patience waiting for the proper big historical episodes of History Impossible. It’s been a while since I’ve done an episode based purely on historiographical analysis, but the paper/essay I wrote a couple of years ago that covers the trajectory of Holocaust scholarship in the late 20th and early 21st centuries seemed thematically appropriate with what I’ve been doing lately.
I will spare you the TL;DR on this one since it’s not a very long episode, but I think it’s important to map this out so no one is mistaken in thinking that Holocaust scholarship is purely one-dimensional, moralistic, and remaining static since 1945. It’s a constantly-changing field, with historians still trying to puzzle out certain aspects of one of modern history’s most unthinkable crimes. It only scratches the surface of the literature that exists out there, but it broadly reflects the thematic shifts that have occurred over the last thirty five years of study. We seem to be entering a new phase of that scholarship, so consider this a (hopefully) handy primer.
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More from History Impossible
Hey everyone. No preamble here. Just a nice bonus as a thank you for your continued support. As the title suggests, this is an audio adaptation of an essay I wrote about the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and how it led me to reflect on my generation, that is millennials, seems to believe about itself regarding trauma, adversity, and the future.
We often hear about how the Second World War was more morally nuanced and complex than we have been led to believe. This is, to a certain extent, very true. The Axis powers meted out a level of genocidal destruction and suffering upon tens of millions of people across the world, decimating generations in places as far flung as Poland and the Philippines, and Croatia and China. To call their actions existential by their very nature is to arguably undersell the threat they posed. The Allies realized these were the stakes and were eventually faced with a very real question: what would it take to stop such a threat? It required what many have come to believe was the unthinkable: meeting destruction with destruction. And in meeting the Axis violence with more violence did indeed bring the war to its ultimate end.
In this newest episode of History Impossible we’re joined a second time by Richard Lim, host of the This American President podcast, who last appeared on this program a couple years ago to discuss the insane, contentious election of 1876. He is also the author of a new book, Refusing a Crown: How George Washington Changed the World, which releases on October 13, 2026, and covers the most significant aspect of America’s first president: his restraint from seizing power that almost certainly would have remained his.
“Because remember: Russia is a religious experience.” Those are the oft-repeated and well-said words by the host of The Eastern Border podcast, my good friend Kristaps Andrejsons. They are well-said because there are very few alternatives for explaining Russian actions, rhetoric, and political culture over the past near half-decade in its World War I-style conflict with Ukraine. The Russian religious experience, made emblematic by Kristaps’ and my favorite shared punching bag Aleksandr Dugin, is a phenomenon best understood as a more formalized and colossal version of what ISIS was ten years ago, and it helps explain why Kristaps believes the spiral of the Russian state as we currently know it is beginning in 2026.
Antizionism, as it has become, has been having a bit of a moment for going on three years. It is a tough nut to crack, given its various claims of varying legitimacy and, as we have covered more than once on History Impossible, its increasing tendency to veer into outright antisemitism, especially by those looking for a supposedly intellectual and moral veneer for their racial and geopolitical fixations. Part of the reason for this confusion is the complex intellectual history of the position, which, after 1948, became more complicated than the relatively straightforward debate over Jewish statehood before, during, and after the Holocaust.