Didac Queralt, "Pawned States: State Building in the Era of International Finance" (Princeton UP, 2022)
How foreign lending weakens emerging nations In the nineteenth century, many developing countries turned to the credit houses of Europe for sovereign loans to balance their books and weather major fis...
28 Jul 20221h 4min
Anthony Pagden, "The Pursuit of Europe: A History" (Oxford UP, 2022)
The European Union, we are told, is facing extinction. Most of those who believe that, however, have no understanding of how, and why, it become possible to imagine that the diverse peoples of Europe ...
28 Jul 20221h 7min
Robert W. Tomlinson, "The Influence of Foreign Wars on U.S. Domestic Military Policy: The Case of the Yom Kippur War" (Lexington, 2022)
How do military organizations learn? Robert W. Tomlinson's book The Influence of Foreign Wars on U.S. Domestic Military Policy (Lexington, 2022) covers an important instance of military learning in wh...
27 Jul 202232min
Kathryn E. Stoner, "Russia Resurrected: Its Power and Purpose in a New Global Order" (Oxford UP, 2020)
Too often, we are told that Russia plays a weak hand well. But, perhaps the nation's cards are better than we know. Russia ranks significantly behind the US and China by traditional measures of power:...
26 Jul 202232min
Olena Palko and Constantin Ardeleanu, "Making Ukraine: Negotiating, Contesting, and Drawing the Borders in the Twentieth Century" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022)
Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the ongoing war in eastern Ukraine have brought scholarly and public attention to Ukraine's borders. Making Ukraine aims to investigate the various pr...
26 Jul 202258min
Sergei Zhuk, "KGB Operations Against the USA and Canada in Soviet Ukraine 1953-1991" (Routledge, 2022)
Oriented for a general reading audience, Sergei Zhuk's book KGB Operations Against the USA and Canada in Soviet Ukraine 1953-1991 (Routledge, 2022) gives a unique and rare perspective on the KGB speci...
18 Jul 202257min
Jennifer Lin, "Beethoven in Beijing: Stories from the Philadelphia Orchestra's Historic Journey to China" (Temple UP, 2022)
In 1973, the Philadelphia Orchestra boarded a Pan Am 707 plane in Philadelphia for a once-in-a-lifetime journey: a multi-city tour of Maoist China, months after Nixon’s history-making visit. There wa...
14 Jul 202240min
Michael Mandelbaum, "The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy: Weak Power, Great Power, Superpower, Hyperpower" (Oxford UP, 2022)
The United States is now nearly 250 years old. It arose from humble beginnings, as a strip of mostly agrarian and sparsely populated English colonies on the northeastern edge of the New World, far rem...
13 Jul 20221h 17min
