Rebecca Herman, "Cooperating with the Colossus: A Social and Political History of US Military Bases in World War II Latin America" (Oxford UP, 2022)
During the Second World War, the United States built over two hundred defense installations on sovereign soil in Latin America in the name of cooperation in hemisphere defense. Predictably, it proved ...
29 Mar 202341min
Karen Baum Gordon, "The Last Letter: A Father's Struggle, a Daughter's Quest, and the Long Shadow of the Holocaust" (U Tennessee Press, 2021)
Born a German Jew in 1915, Rudy Baum was eighty-six years old when he sealed the garage door of his Dallas home, turned on the car ignition, and tried to end his life. After confronting her father’s a...
27 Mar 20231h 6min
David Wright Faladé, "Black Cloud Rising" (Grove Press, 2022)
By fall of 1863, Union forces had taken control of Tidewater Virginia, and established a toehold in eastern North Carolina, including along the Outer Banks. Thousands of freed slaves and runaways floo...
26 Mar 202354min
Woody Holton, "Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution" (Simon and Schuster, 2021)
A “deeply researched and bracing retelling” (Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian) of the American Revolution, showing how the Founders were influenced by overlooked Americans—women, ...
21 Mar 202352min
Nadia Abu El-Haj, "Combat Trauma: Imaginaries of War and Citizenship in Post-9/11 America" (Verso, 2022)
One of the most recognizable tropes in American society in the past few decades is the scarred war veteran, returning from foreign lands with wounds both visible and invisible. His experiences are inc...
21 Mar 20231h 18min
Cathal J. Nolan, "Mercy: Humanity in War" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Mercy: Humanity in War (Oxford University Press, 2022) gathers and explores acts of singular mercy, giving them form and substance across wars, causes, and opposing uniforms. These acts demand our att...
19 Mar 20231h 13min
Tom Dunkel, "White Knights in the Black Orchestra: The Extraordinary Story of the Germans Who Resisted Hitler" (Hachette Books, 2021)
They were a small group of conspirators who risked their lives by plotting relentlessly to obstruct and destroy the Third Reich from within. The Gestapo nicknamed this shadowy confederation of traitor...
19 Mar 20231h 9min
Ellin Bessner, "Double Threat: Canadian Jews, the Military, and World War II" (New Jewish Press, 2018)
Today I talked to Ellin Bessner about her book Double Threat: Canadian Jews, the Military, and World War II (New Jewish Press, 2018). "He died so Jewry should suffer no more." These words on a Canadia...
18 Mar 202357min
