Ronald H. Spector, "A Continent Erupts: Decolonization, Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, 1945-1955" (Norton, 2023)
On September 2, 1945, Japan surrendered to the United States, ending the Second World War. Yet the Japanese invasion had upended the old geopolitical structures of European empires, leaving old imperi...
5 Jan 202341min
Sebastian Elischer, "Salafism and Political Order in Africa" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
Violent Islamic extremism is affecting a growing number of countries in sub-Saharan Africa. In some, jihadi Salafi organizations have established home bases and turned into permanent security challeng...
4 Jan 20231h 4min
The Russo-Ukrainian War from a Military Point of View
On February 24 2022, Vladimir Putin shocked the world by invading Ukraine. In this short interview, veteran military historian Jeremy Black looks at the conflict from a military point of view. Why hav...
3 Jan 202311min
Zachary Schrag, "The Princeton Guide to Historical Research" (Princeton UP, 2021)
The essential handbook for doing historical research in the twenty-first century The Princeton Guide to Historical Research (Princeton UP, 2021) provides students, scholars, and professionals with the...
31 Dec 202241min
Involution and Negative Equilibrium: Explaining the Ongoing Conflict in the Congo
This week on International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey is joined by Jason Stearns, assistant professor of international studies at Simon Fraser University, who discusses how the Congolese gover...
28 Dec 202238min
Julia Elsky, "Writing Occupation: Jewish Émigré Voices in Wartime France" (Stanford UP, 2020)
Among the Jewish writers who emigrated from Eastern Europe to France in the 1910s and 1920s, a number chose to switch from writing in their languages of origin to writing primarily in French, a langua...
28 Dec 20221h 14min
Sean Patterson, "Makhno and Memory: Anarchist and Mennonite Narratives of Ukraine's Civil War, 1917-1921" (U Manitoba Press, 2020)
In the chaos of the end of WWI, the Russian Civil War, and a brief period of Ukrainian independence there occurred a series of massacres of German Mennonites. Sean Patterson's recent book Makhno and M...
28 Dec 20221h 7min
Ian Garner, "Stalingrad Lives!: Stories of Combat and Survival" (McGill-Queen's Press, 2022)
In the fall of 1942, only the city of Stalingrad stood between Soviet survival and defeat as Hitler’s army ran rampant. With the fate of the USSR hanging in the balance, Soviet propaganda chiefs sent ...
26 Dec 202253min
