Kori Schake, "The State and the Soldier: A History of Civil-Military Relations in the United States" (Wiley, 2025)
One of the biggest worries of the US Constitution's Framers was the danger of a standing army to a democracy, so they designed a system to ensure civilian control over the state's armed forces. In The...
21 Touko 1h 4min
Nathan K. Finney, "Orchestrating Power: The American Associational State in the First World War" (Cornell UP, 2025)
Orchestrating Power: The American Associational State in the First World War (Cornell University Press, 2025) explores how the expansion of the American state for the First World War reshaped the nat...
21 Touko 33min
Evelyn Iritani, "Safe Passage: The Untold Story of Diplomatic Intrigue, Betrayal, and the Exchange of American and Japanese Civilians by Sea During World War II" (FSG, 2026)
In October 1943, the Gripsholm—a Swedish ocean liner—and the Teia Maru—a Japanese troop ship—sat in Mormugao, a port in Portuguese India. There, the two ships exchanged their passengers: Allied civili...
21 Touko 51min
David Eisler, "Writing Wars: Authorship and American War Fiction, WWI to Present" (U Iowa Press, 2022)
In Writing Wars: Authorship and American War Fiction, WWI to Present (U Iowa Press, 2022) David Eisler looks at how American literary fiction about war has changed as the nature of civil-military rela...
17 Touko 1h 16min
Silvia Danielak, "Peace Infrastructures: How UN Peace Operations Build Roads, Bridges, and Solar Farms in the Pursuit of Sustainability" (MIT Press, 2026)
Roads, bridges, a renewable power plant, and an electricity grid: UN peacekeepers might be unusual infrastructure builders, but they’re certainly not unambitious. Since the beginning of the UN’s peace...
15 Touko 34min
Fyodor Tertititsky, "Pyongyang on the Brink: Sixteen Crises That Shaped North Korea" (Hurst, 2026)
North Korea has survived wars, sanctions, and isolation—to the point where it now seems that the continuation of the Kim dynasty, and a starkly divided Korea, is assured. But history is filled with ev...
14 Touko 34min
The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos
Witnesses to the brutal murder of their families and neighbors and the violent destruction of their communities, a cadre of Jewish women in Poland—some still in their teens—helped transform the Jewish...
13 Touko 0s
Wil Haygood, "The War within a War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home" (Knopf, 2026)
Award-winning author Wil Haygood joins Michael Stauch to discuss The War within a War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and at Home (Knopf, 2026) his new book on the experiences of Black soldiers during...
12 Touko 56min
