Joanna Newman, "Nearly the New World: The British West Indies and the Flight from Nazism, 1933–1945" (Berghahn Books, 2019)
In the years leading up to the Second World War, increasingly desperate European Jews looked to far-flung destinations such as Barbados, Trinidad, and Jamaica in search of refuge from the horrors of H...
12 Dec 20221h 2min
Rohan Mukherjee, "Ascending Order: Rising Powers and the Politics of Status in International Institutions" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Why do rising powers sometimes challenge an international order that enables their growth, and at other times support an order that constrains them? Ascending Order: Rising Powers and the Politics of ...
12 Dec 202251min
Daniel Immerwahr, "The Galactic Vietnam: Technology, Modernization, and Empire in George Lucas’s Star Wars" (2022)
In this episode I got to chat about two of my favorite things: the history of imperialism and Star Wars with Daniel Immerwahr, Professor of History at Northwestern University. Our conversation focused...
10 Dec 20221h 4min
James Mark and Paul Betts, "Socialism Goes Global: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonisation" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Socialism Goes Global: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonisation (Oxford UP, 2022) is the first work to provide a broad history of the relationship between Eastern Europe and th...
9 Dec 20221h 18min
Frederic C. Hof, "Reaching for the Heights: The Inside Story of a Secret Attempt to Reach a Syrian-Israeli Peace" (USIP, 2022)
Reaching for the Heights: The Inside Story of a Secret Attempt to Reach a Syrian-Israeli Peace (USIP, 2022) is an insider’s account of secret negotiations to broker a Syria-Israel peace deal―negotiati...
8 Dec 20221h 20min
Tanisha M. Fazal, "Wars of Law: Unintended Consequences in the Regulation of Armed Conflict" (Cornell UP, 2020)
In Wars of Law: Unintended Consequences in the Regulation of Armed Conflict (Cornell UP, 2020), Tanisha M. Fazal assesses the unintended consequences of the proliferation of the laws of war for the co...
8 Dec 20221h 40min
Nicholas Morton, "The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East" (Basic Books, 2022)
For centuries, the Crusades have been central to the story of the medieval Near East, but these religious wars are only part of the region’s complex history. As Nicholas Morton reveals in The Mongol S...
5 Dec 202237min
Jonathan R. Hunt, "The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam" (Stanford UP, 2022)
The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam (Stanford UP, 2022) reveals how a coalition of powerful and developing states embraced global governance in hopes...
1 Dec 20221h 17min
