Michael Gorra, "The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War" (Liveright, 2020)
Today I talked to Michael Gorra about his new book The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War (Liveright, 2020). This episode touches on two of William Faulkner’s novels in particular: The Sound ...
21 Jan 202136min
D. Barno and N. Bensahel, "Adaptation Under Fire: How Militaries Change in Wartime" (Oxford UP, 2020)
Few human enterprises are as complex, dynamic, and unpredictable as war. Armed conflict substitutes the relatively ordered reality of peace with the undeniably chaotic reality of combat. Militaries, b...
8 Jan 20211h 2min
Jeremy Black, "A History of the Second World War in 100 Maps" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
The First World War was marked by an exceptional expansion in the use and production of military cartography. But World War II took things even further, employing maps, charts, reconnaissance, and the...
6 Jan 202128min
Kelly A. Hammond, "China's Muslims and Japan's Empire: Centering Islam in World War II" (UNC Press, 2020)
The 1930s-40s expansion of the Japanese empire was marked by significant interest among Japan-based scholars and policy-makers in China’s Muslim population and how best to write them into a new pan-As...
30 Dec 202059min
Donald F. Johnson, "Occupied America: British Military Rule and the Experience of Revolution" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020)
When we read the Declaration of Independence, what tends to jump off the page are the lofty propositions concerning natural rights. Yet over a third of the brief document is taken up with a set of cha...
28 Dec 202034min
Mark Cornwall, "Sarajevo 1914: Sparking the First World War" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
In June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. This key event in 20th-century history continues to fascinate the public imagination, yet few historians hav...
17 Dec 202042min
Jeremy Black, "Tank Warfare" (Indiana UP, 2020)
The story of the battlefield in the 20th century was dominated by a handful of developments. Foremost of these was the introduction and refinement of tanks. In Tank Warfare (Indiana UP, 2020), promine...
16 Dec 202052min
Jiří Hutečka, "Men Under Fire: Motivation, Morale, and Masculinity among Czech Soldiers in the Great War, 1914–1918" (Berghahn Books, 2019)
In historical writing on World War I, Czech-speaking soldiers serving in the Austro-Hungarian military are typically studied as Czechs, rarely as soldiers, and never as men. As a result, the question ...
9 Dec 20201h 2min
