Greenland, forest fires and presidential power: history behind the headlines

Hungry for seconds? Well, History's Greatest Dishes from History Extra is back for series two. To join us as we serve up stories of some remarkable delicacies from the past, search History's Greatest Dishes and follow the feed wherever you get your podcasts. Hungry for seconds? Well, History's Greatest Dishes from History Extra is back for series two. To join us as we serve up stories of some remarkable delicacies from the past, search History's Greatest Dishes and follow the feed wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to our monthly series History Behind the Headlines. In each episode, an expert panel will be exploring the historical news stories that have caught their eye, and the history that will help you make sense of what's going on in the world. Each month I'll be joined by our two regular panelists. I'm Hannah Skoda, I'm fellow and tutor in medieval history at St John's College in Oxford. I'm Rana Mirta. I'm ST Lee Chair in US Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School and I'm a specialist on modern Chinese history.

So Hannah and Rana, welcome back to History Behind the Headlines for our first episode of twenty twenty five. We're talking right at the end of January, and it's been a pretty packed month in terms of news stories. We'll get into some of them over the next 45 minutes or so, starting with President Trump being inaugurated for his second term as US president. We're obviously not going to talk very much about recent developments, but it is an opportunity to get into the history behind some of the discussions that have been going on about constraints on power and the extent to which he seems to be trying to remove some of those constraints. And what the historical parallels might be. Rana, did you want to lead with this? Absolutely. And I think we start as we probably should do with the American presidency on this. I know that Hannah's gonna come in later and I'm sure that there'll be an awful lot, for instance, on the monarchy in the medieval era, which in a sense have parallels and You know, people have made comments, sometimes joking, perhaps sometimes a bit less joking, about whether or not President Trump sees himself as a new kind of Louis the Fourteenth, or someone who really does have that kind of monarchical sense to him. But I think we need to think about this actually as the history of the American presidency, because

When George Washington and the founders of the American Republic were debating, they did, you know, at least for a very brief period, wonder since they were leaving a monarchy, leaving a kingdom, maybe they should have a king of their own, and fairly quickly decided no, it was going to be a president. So the US has decided that the presidential system is Is the way in which the Republican ideal will be expressed. But over the nearly 250 years that the Americ has existed, There's been huge amounts of variance. In terms of what kind of power The president has and what kind of power

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