Lucy Noakes, "Dying for the Nation: Death, Grief and Bereavement in Second World War Britain" (Manchester UP, 2022)
Death in war matters. It matters to the individual, threatened with their own death, or the death of loved ones. It matters to groups and communities who have to find ways to manage death, to support ...
12 Dec 202447min
Mie Nakachi, "Replacing the Dead: The Politics of Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Today I talked to Mie Nakachi about Replacing the Dead: The Politics of Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union (Oxford UP, 2021) In 1920, the Soviet Union became the first country in the world to le...
10 Dec 20241h 8min
Wendy Pearlman, "The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora" (Liveright, 2024)
War forced millions of Syrians from their homes. It also forced them to rethink the meaning of home itself. In 2011, Syrians took to the streets demanding freedom. Brutal government repression transfo...
10 Dec 20241h 4min
Casey B. K. Dominguez, "Commander in Chief: Partisanship, Nationalism, and the Reconstruction of Congressional War Powers" (UP of Kansas, 2024)
The balance of power between the United States Congress and the president is particularly contested when it comes to war powers. The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war but Artic...
9 Dec 202456min
Pascal Lottaz and Ingemar Ottosson, "Sweden, Japan, and the Long Second World War: 1931-1945" (Routledge, 2021)
Lottaz and Ottosson explore the intricate relationship between neutral Sweden and Imperial Japan during the latter's 15 years of warfare in Asia and in the Pacific. While Sweden's relationship with Eu...
8 Dec 20241h 13min
Richard J. Evans, "Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich" (Penguin, 2024)
Richard Evans, author of the acclaimed The Third Reich Trilogy and over two dozen other volumes on modern Europe, is our preeminent scholar of Nazi Germany. Having spent half a century searching for t...
8 Dec 20241h 2min
Stanislava P. Mladenova, "When Rambo Meets the Red Cross: Civil-Military Engagement in Fragile States" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024)
Non-governmental organisations and militaries are notorious for their difficult relationship. The military is mostly understood through the prism of its lethality, and NGOs are perceived as idealistic...
6 Dec 202451min
Caroline Alexander, "Skies of Thunder: The Deadly World War II Mission Over the Roof of the World" (Viking, 2024)
During the Second World War, FDR promised thousands of tons of US material to Chiang Kai Shek in order to keep China in the war and keep Japan distracted. But how would the US get it there? The only l...
5 Dec 202445min
