Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchSusan Tate Ankeny, "American Flygirl" (Citadel Press, 2024)
Episode 112
In 1931, Hazel Ying Lee, a nineteen-year-old American daughter of Chinese immigrants, sat in on a friend’s flight lesson. It changed her life. In les…
1 year, 8 months ago
Marek Kohn, "The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey Through Cities at the Heart of Europe" (Yale UP, 2023)
Episode 41
Historic quarters in cities and towns across the middle of Europe were devastated during the Second World War—some, like those of Warsaw and Frankfur…
1 year, 8 months ago
Samar Al-Bulushi, "War-Making as Worldmaking: Kenya, the United States, and the War on Terror" (Stanford UP, 2024)
Episode 121
Since Kenya's invasion of Somalia in 2011, the Kenyan state has been engaged in direct combat with the Somali militant group Al-Shabaab, conducting a…
1 year, 8 months ago
Saulius Suziedelis, "Crisis, War, and the Holocaust in Lithuania" (Academic Studies Press, 2025)
Episode 608
Crisis, War, and the Holocaust in Lithuania is the first scholarly English-language study of Lithuania during World War II which utilizes previously …
1 year, 8 months ago
Rebecca Davis Gibbons, "The Hegemon's Tool Kit: US Leadership and the Politics of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime" (Cornell UP, 2022)
Episode 120
At a moment when the nuclear nonproliferation regime is under duress, Rebecca Davis Gibbons provides a trenchant analysis of the international system…
1 year, 8 months ago
Bruce Robbins, "Atrocity: A Literary History" (Stanford UP, 2025)
Episode 334
Mass violence did not always have a name. Like conquest, atrocity was not always seen as violating a moral norm or inviting indignation. Could the co…
1 year, 8 months ago
Peter Whitewood, "The Red Army and the Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Soviet Military" (UP of Kansas, 2015)
Episode 294
On June 11, 1937, a closed military court ordered the execution of a group of the Soviet Union's most talented and experienced army officers, includi…
1 year, 8 months ago
Jonathan Haslam, "Hubris: The American Origins of Russia's War against Ukraine" (Harvard UP, 2025)
Episode 1541
Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 should not have taken the world by surprise. The attack escalated a war that began in 2014 w…
1 year, 8 months ago
Hal Brands, "The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern World" (Norton, 2025)
Episode 119
We often think of the modern era as the age of American power. In reality, we’re living in a long, violent Eurasian century. That giant, resource-ric…
1 year, 8 months ago
Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War" (Princeton UP, 2024)
Episode 292
When World War II ended, about one million people whom the Soviet Union claimed as its citizens were outside the borders of the USSR, mostly in the W…
1 year, 8 months ago