Stephen C. Mercado, "Japanese Spy Gear and Special Weapons: How Noborito's Scientists and Technicians Served in the Second World War and the Cold War" (Pen & Sword Military, 2025)
War, and the threat of war, spurs governments to invest in secret military technologies and weapons. Imperial Japan, ahead of the Second World War, was no exception. After the First World War, Japan s...
30 Okt 202538min
Robert Jan van Pelt, "The Barrack, 1572-1914: Chapters in the History of Emergency Architecture" (Park Books, 2024)
The Barrack, 1572–1914: Chapters in the History of Emergency Architecture (Park Books, 2024) tells the little-known history of a building type that many people used to register as an alien interloper...
30 Okt 202552min
Kate Epstein on How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National-Security State" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
In this episode I sit down with Kate Epstein, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Camden, as she details her research on the intersection of defense contracting, intellectual prope...
28 Okt 20251h 33min
Anthony Tucker-Jones, "The Secret War: Spies, Lies and the Art of Deception in World War II" (Sirius, 2025)
Written by British former intelligence officer, Anthony Tucker-Jones, this fascinating, illustrated guide takes a deep dive into the secret operations which shaped World War II. Most of the great mil...
27 Okt 20251h 41min
Roger Moorhouse, "Wolfpack: Hitler’s U-Boat War 1939-45" (HarperCollins, 2025)
Winston Churchill famously remarked that the threat of the German U-Boats was the only thing that had “really frightened” him during World War Two. The U-Boats certainly claimed a bitter harvest among...
26 Okt 20251h 5min
Selena Daly, "Emigrant Soldiers: Mobilising Italians Abroad in the First World War" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
During the First World War, over 300,000 Italian emigrants returned to Italy from around the world to perform their conscripted military service, a mass mobilisation which was a uniquely Italian pheno...
24 Okt 20251h 3min
Alice Lovejoy, "Tales of Militant Chemistry: The Film Factory in a Century of War" (U California Press, 2025)
The history of film calls to mind unforgettable photographs, famous directors, and the glitz and hustle of the media business. But there is another tale to tell that connects film as a material to the...
23 Okt 202545min
Aileen Teague, "Policing on Drugs: The United States, Mexico, and the Origins of the Modern Drug War, 1969-2000" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Today, images of cartels, security agents donning face coverings, graphs depicting egregious murder rates, and military guards at US border crossings influence the world's perception of Mexico. Mexico...
22 Okt 202555min
