Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchLindsay Rae Smith Privette, "The Surgeon's Battle: How Medicine Won the Vicksburg Campaign and Changed the Civil War" (UNC Press, 2025)
Episode 1608
Between May 1 and May 22, 1863, Union soldiers marched nearly 200 miles through the hot, humid countryside to assault and capture the fortified city …
6 months, 4 weeks ago
Isabelle Held, "Atomic Bombshells: How Plastics Shaped Postwar Bodies" (Duke UP, 2026)
Episode 1607
Bullet bras, bazookas, bombshells, bikinis. In Atomic Bombshells: How Plastics Shaped Postwar Bodies (Duke UP, 2026), Dr. Isabelle Held challenges th…
6 months, 4 weeks ago
Robert Cribb and Sandra Wilson, "Twelve Japanese War Criminals and One Who Got Away" (U Hawaiʻi Press, 2026)
Episode 1606
“Japanese war crimes are notorious. During the Second World War, as Japanese forces overran Southeast Asia and the Pacific, they massacred, murdered,…
7 months ago
Arthur W. Gullachsen, "The Defeat and Attrition of the 12. SS-Panzerdivision Hitlerjugend: Volume II: Operations Martlet, Epsom, Windsor and Charnwood 11 June-12 July 1944" (Casemate, 2026)
Episode 1605
Following the Normandy landings, Rommel rushed Heeresgruppe B reserves towards the coast in order to crush the bridgehead and drive the Allied force…
7 months ago
Peter Mauch, "Tojo: The Rise and Fall of Japan's Most Controversial World War II General" (Harvard UP, 2026)
Episode 1604
The military general who became Emperor Hirohito’s prime minister, Tojo Hideki is most often remembered as an iron-fisted leader who dragged Japan in…
7 months ago
Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, "The Battle of Manila: Poisoned Victory in the Pacific War" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Episode 1603
On Feb. 6, 1945, just three days after the U.S. army started to fight the Japanese in the city of Manila, General Douglas MacArthur declared that “Ma…
7 months ago
Susanne Vees-Gulani, 'Icon Dresden: Baroque City, Air War Symbol, Political Token" (U Michigan Press, 2026)
Episode 1602
Icon Dresden: Baroque City, Air War Symbol, Political Token (University of Michigan Press, 2026) by Dr. Susanne Vees-Gulani explores how memory and p…
7 months, 1 week ago
Sidra Hamidi, "After Fission: Recognition and Contestation in the Atomic Age" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
Episode 1601
Nuclear status is typically treated as a stable feature of a state's capacity to possess, use, or build nuclear weapons. Challenging this view, After…
7 months, 1 week ago
Timothy Manion, "Why Barbarossa Failed: Germany and Russia in the Second World War" (Helion, 2026)
Episode 1600
Why did Operation Barbarossa fail? For more than eight decades, historians have offered one dominant answer: Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Un…
7 months, 1 week ago
Our Age of War: A Discussion with Author Robert Pape
Episode 1599
Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, has been writing about war for decades, including in his book Bombing to Win: Air Po…
7 months, 2 weeks ago