New Books in Diplomatic History
Episodes
Stephan Kieninger, "Dynamic Détente: The United States and Europe, 1964-1975" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016)
07 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This book examines the dynamic evolution of Western détente policies which sought to transform Europe and overcome its Cold War division through more...
NATO, the Indo-Pacific, and the Future of Burden-Sharing: A Conversation with Brian Blankenship
07 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Brian Blankenship comes back to the New Books Network to talk about what his book, The Burden-Sharing Dilemma: Coercive Diplomacy in US Al...
Geoffrey Wawro, "The Vietnam War: A Military History" (Basic Books, 2024)
06 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Vietnam War cast a shadow over the American psyche from the moment it began. In its time it sparked budget deficits, campus protests, and an erosi...
Jill Kastner and William C. Wohlforth, "A Measure Short of War: A Brief History of Great Power Subversion" (Oxford UP, 2025)
06 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In 2016 the United States was stunned by evidence of Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential election. But it shouldn’t have been. Subversion—do...
Vappala Balachandran, "India and China at Odds in the Asian Century: A Diplomatic and Strategic History" (Hurst, 2025)
05 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
China and India have had a tense relationship, disagreeing over territory, support for each other’s rivals, and even, at times, leadership of the “...
Talin Suciyan, "Armenians in Turkey after the Second World War: An Archival Reader of USSR Consular Documents" (I. B. Tauris & Company, 2025)
04 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This reader brings to light newly discovered archival material compiled by the Soviet Consulate in Istanbul. The book reveals the lives and experience...
Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War" (Princeton UP, 2024)
04 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When World War II ended, about one million people whom the Soviet Union claimed as its citizens were outside the borders of the USSR, mostly in the We...
Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt, "The Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy: Oil and Arab Nationalism in Iraq" (Stanford UP, 2021)
03 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A new history of Middle East oil and the deep roots of American violence in Iraq. Iraq has been the site of some of the United States' longest and mos...
Helen Thompson on Disorder and the Analysis of Contemporary Geopolitics
20 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Helen Thompson, Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University and co-host of the great podcast,...
Alan Strathern, "Converting Rulers: Global Patterns, 1450-1850" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
19 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why did so many rulers throughout history risk converting to a new religion brought by outsiders? In his award-winning Unearthly Powers (2019), Dr. ...
Dennis Ross, "Statecraft 2.0: What America Needs to Survive in a Multipolar World" (Oxford UP, 2025)
18 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In a multipolar world where America wields less relative power, the United States can no longer get away with poor statecraft. To understand how the U...
Lines of Control: India’s Foreign Policy and China
17 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This podcast episode, hosted by Kikee Doma Bhutia from the University of Tartu, features journalist and analyst Aadil Brar discussing India's foreign ...
Stuart Ward, "Untied Kingdom: A Global History of the End of Britain" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
16 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How did Britain cease to be global? In Untied Kingdom: A Global History of the End of Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Professor Stuart War...
Charlie English, "The CIA Book Club: The Best-Kept Secret of the Cold War" (Random House, 2025)
04 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For nearly five decades after the Second World War, the Iron Curtain divided Europe, forming the longest and most heavily guarded border on earth. No ...
Jeremy Black, "British Politics and Foreign Policy, 1727-44" (Routledge, 2014)
03 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Covering the period from the end of the Anglo-French alliance in 1731 to the declaration of war between the two powers in 1744, British Politics and ...
Subho Basu, "Intimation of Revolution: Global Sixties and the Making of Bangladesh" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
02 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Intimation of Revolution: Global Sixties and the Making of Bangladesh (Cambridge UP, 2023) analyzes the growth of Bengali nationalism in East Pakist...
Jeremy Black, "Politics and Foreign Policy in the Age of George I, 1714-1727" (Routledge, 2016)
01 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Through its focus on the relationship between foreign and domestic politics, Politics and Foreign Policy in the Age of George I, 1714-1727 (Routledg...
Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, "The Battle of Manila: Poisoned Victory in the Pacific War" (Oxford UP, 2025)
27 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In our conversation about The Battle of Manila (Oxford University Press, 2025), Nicholas Evan Sarantakes explains how U.S. forces under General Doug...
Brian Masaru Hayashi, "Asian American Spies: How Asian Americans Helped Win the Allied Victory" (Oxford UP, 2021)
24 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Spies deep behind enemy lines; double agents; a Chinese American James Bond; black propaganda radio broadcasters; guerrilla fighters; pirates; smuggle...
Reider Payne, "War and Diplomacy in the Napoleonic Era" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)
23 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Though Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh remains well known today for his role in shaping the post-Napoleonic peace settlement in Europe, his half-...
Max Hastings, “Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975” (Harper, 2018)
22 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
People of various political stripes in many countries (particularly those countries where various political stripes are allowed) have been arguing abo...
Maurizio Ferrera, "Politics and Social Visions: Ideology, Conflict, and Solidarity in the EU" (Oxford UP, 2024)
21 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The starting point of this book is the 'civil war' of ideas that broke out during the early 2010s about the purpose and even the desirability of the E...
Paul M. McGarr, "Spying in South Asia: Britain, the United States, and India's Secret Cold War" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
20 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Spying in South Asia: Britain, the United States, and India's Secret Cold War (Cambridge UP, 2024) is the first comprehensive history of India's sec...
Serhiy Kudelia, "Seize the City, Undo the State: The Inception of Russia's War on Ukraine" (Oxford UP, 2015)
16 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How do separatist conflicts arise and spread? When does separatism become a cover for a foreign aggression? How do local communities respond when stat...
Eric Min, "Words of War: Negotiation as a Tool of Conflict" (Cornell UP, 2025)
06 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Of all interstate conflicts across the last two centuries, two-thirds have ended through negotiated agreement. Wartime diplomacy is thus commonly seen...
Kornel Chang, "A Fractured Liberation: Korea Under U.S. Occupation" (Harvard UP, 2025)
03 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Four decades of Japanese colonialism in Korea ended abruptly in August 1945. It took three weeks for U.S. troops to arrive, which started almost three...
Stacie A. Kent, "Coercive Commerce: Global Capital and Imperial Governance at the End of the Qing Empire" (Hong Kong UP, 2024)
02 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In 1842, the Qing Empire signed a watershed commercial treaty with Great Britain, beginning a century-long period in which geopolitical and global eco...
Sinem Arcak Casale, "Gifts in the Age of Empire: Ottoman-Safavid Cultural Exchange, 1500–1639" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
31 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When the Safavid dynasty, founded in 1501, built a state that championed Iranian identity and Twelver Shi’ism, it prompted the more established Otto...
Walls, Warnings, and the War on Fentanyl: Peter Andreas on Trump’s Border Politics
31 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of International Horizons, Peter Andreas, John Hay Professor of International Studies at Brown University and author of Border Games...
Andrew Canessa and Manuela Lavinas Picq, "Savages and Citizens: How Indigeneity Shapes the State" (U Arizona Press, 2025)
30 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Although Indigenous peoples are often perceived as standing outside political modernity, Savages and Citizens: How Indigeneity Shapes the State (Uni...
Azmeary Ferdoush, "Sovereign Atonement: Citizenship, Territory, and the State at the Bangladesh-India Border" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
29 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The former border enclaves of Bangladesh and India existed as extra-territorial spaces since 1947. They were finally exchanged and merged as host stat...
Vuk Vuksanovic, "Serbia’s Balancing Act: Between Russia and the West" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
21 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Even before its rebirth as a nation in the 1990s, Serbia had acquired a reputation abroad as Russia’s stalwart Slavic ally in the Western Balkans. Y...
Daniela Richterova, "Watching the Jackals: Prague's Covert Liaisons with Cold War Terrorists and Revolutionaries" (Georgetown UP, 2025)
18 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The untold history of Czechoslovakia's complex relations with Middle Eastern terrorists and revolutionaries during the closing decades of the Cold War...
Luca Trenta, "The President's Kill List: Assassination and Us Foreign Policy Since 1945" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)
17 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Investigative reporter Bob Woodward once noted that assassination was the Scarlett letter of American politics because targeted killings challenge the...
Tycho van der Hoog, "Comrades Beyond the Cold War: North Korea and the Liberation of Southern Africa" (Hurst, 2025)
16 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
North Korea was an important player in the decolonisation of Africa. Freedom fighters across the continent received vital assistance from Pyongyang, a...
Fractured Alliances: Trump, Ukraine, and Europe's Security Dilemma
15 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, RBI director John Torpey speaks with Estonian parliamentarian and defense expert Kalev Stoicescu about the recent tensions between th...
Matthew Fuhrmann, "Influence without Arms: The New Logic of Nuclear Deterrence" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
12 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How does nuclear technology influence international relations? While many books focus on countries armed with nuclear weapons, this volume puts the sp...
Cotton, Central Asia and the New Great Game
10 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
On this episode, rural sociologist Dr. Irna Hofman explores how Tajikistan’s cotton fields illuminate shifting power dynamics in Central Asia, histo...
Sabrina P. Ramet and Lavinia Stan, "East Central Europe Since 1989" (Routledge, 2025)
09 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
East Central Europe Since 1989 (Routledge, 2025) examines politics, economics, media, religious institutions, transitional justice, gender inequal...
Kishore Mahbubani, "Living the Asian Century: An Undiplomatic Memoir" (Public Affairs, 2024)
27 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Kishore Mahbubani, longtime Singaporean diplomat and academic, opens his new memoir with a provocative line: “Blame it on the damn British.” Kisho...
Doina Anca Cretu, "Foreign Aid and State Building in Interwar Romania" (Stanford UP, 2025)
26 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The decades following World War I were a period of political, social, and economic transformation for Central and Eastern Europe. Foreign Aid and Sta...
Marion Laurence, "Intrusive Impartiality: Learning, Contestation, and Practice Change in United Nations Peace Operations" (Oxford UP, 2024)
24 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Impartiality is a guiding principle in United Nations peace operations that has helped legitimize multilateral intervention in dozens of armed conflic...
Elsa Stamatopoulou, "Indigenous Peoples in the International Arena: The Global Movement for Self-Determination" (Routledge, 2024)
23 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Elsa Stamatopoulou’s Indigenous Peoples in the International Arena: The Global Movement for Self-Determination (Routledge 2025) provides a definit...
TrumpWorld: Canada, South Africa, Germany, and the Global Far-Right
22 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of International Horizons, John Torpey talks with Heribert Adam, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Simon Fraser University in Vancou...
Kathryn Taylor, "Ordering Customs: Ethnographic Thought in Early Modern Venice" (U Delaware Press, 2023)
18 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Ordering Customs: Ethnographic Thought in Early Modern Venice (University of Delaware Press, 2023) explores how Renaissance Venetians sought to make ...
Samar Al-Bulushi, "War-Making as Worldmaking: Kenya, the United States, and the War on Terror" (Stanford UP, 2024)
17 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Since Kenya's invasion of Somalia in 2011, the Kenyan state has been engaged in direct combat with the Somali militant group Al-Shabaab, conducting ai...
Patricia Owens, "Erased: A History of International Thought Without Men" (Princeton UP, 2025)
13 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The academic field of international relations presents its own history as largely a project of elite white men. And yet women played a prominent role ...
Rebecca Davis Gibbons, "The Hegemon's Tool Kit: US Leadership and the Politics of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime" (Cornell UP, 2022)
11 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
At a moment when the nuclear nonproliferation regime is under duress, Rebecca Davis Gibbons provides a trenchant analysis of the international system ...
Canada and Eastern Europe, 1945–1991: Meeting in the Middle
10 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press) sat down with Andrea Chandler to talk about her new book with CEU Press, Canada and Eastern Europe,...
Finlandization to ‘Finland Boom‘ in Japan: Finland’s Public Diplomacy in Japan
08 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Finland, a minor player on the international arena and burdened with the tag of ‘Finlandization’ during much of the post-WWII period, has won surp...
Jonathan Haslam, "Hubris: The American Origins of Russia's War against Ukraine" (Harvard UP, 2025)
06 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 should not have taken the world by surprise. The attack escalated a war that began in 2014 wi...
Hal Brands, "The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern World" (Norton, 2025)
05 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We often think of the modern era as the age of American power. In reality, we’re living in a long, violent Eurasian century. That giant, resource-ri...
Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War" (Princeton UP, 2024)
05 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When World War II ended, about one million people whom the Soviet Union claimed as its citizens were outside the borders of the USSR, mostly in the We...
Trump’s Second Term and Europe: Nationalism, NATO, and the Future of Transatlantic Relations
03 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey interviews Nathalie Tocci, director of the Institute of International Affairs in ...
Adam Chapnick, "Canada First, Not Canada Alone: A History of Canadian Foreign Policy" (Oxford UP, 2024)
01 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The definitive history of Canadian foreign policy since the 1930s, Canada First, Not Canada Alone: A History of Canadian Foreign Policy (Oxford UP, ...
Enrico Ciappi, "Building Europe in New York: From the Munich Conference to the European Coal and Steel Community (1938-1952)" (Routledge, 2025)
31 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s European Union grew out of functional communities set up in the wake of world war in the 1950s. It would shock the new White House intake...
Benjamin Carter Hett, "The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War" (Henry Holt, 2020)
28 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Berlin, November 1937. Adolf Hitler meets with his military commanders to impress upon them the urgent necessity for a war of aggression in eastern Eu...
Peter Harmsen, "Fury and Ice: Greenland, the United States and Germany in World War II" (Casemate, 2024)
27 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Today I talked to Peter Harmsen about his book Fury and Ice: Greenland, the United States and Germany in World War II (Casemate, 2024). The wartime...
Avinash Paliwal, "India's Near East: A New History" (Oxford UP, 2024)
23 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
After student protests toppled Bangladesh prime minister Sheikh Hasina last year, New Delhi and Dhaka have been at odds. Indian politicians complain a...
Eva Payne, "Empire of Purity: The History of Americans' Global War on Prostitution" (Princeton UP, 2024)
18 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Between the 1870s and 1930s, American social reformers, working closely with the US government, transformed sexual vice into an international politica...
Christina L. Davis, "Discriminatory Clubs: The Geopolitics of International Organizations" (Princeton UP, 2023)
17 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Member selection is one of the defining elements of social organization, imposing categories on who we are and what we do. Discriminatory Clubs: The ...
Frank Trentmann, "Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022" (Knopf, 2024)
16 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Frank Trentmann’s Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022 (Knopf, 2024) traces the moral concerns and clashes of a nation re-building, re-cons...
Stephen Watt, "From the 'Troubles' to Trumpism: Ireland and America, 1960-2023" (Anthem Press, 2024)
15 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Stephen Watt is the Provost Professor of English at Indiana University. His research interests include drama and theatre of the 19th and 20th centurie...
Isaac Stanley-Becker, "Europe Without Borders: A History" (Princeton UP, 2025)
14 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Forty years ago, Schengen - a wine-making village at the tripoint border of Luxembourg, France, and Germany - made European history when diplomats fro...
Jonathan R. Beloff, "The Strategy to End the Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda" (Lexington Books, 2025)
11 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Utilizing Strategic Theory as a framework for warfare and incorporating the testimonies and experiences of eight genocide survivors as well as militar...
Sixiang Wang, "Boundless Winds of Empire: Rhetoric and Ritual in Early Chosŏn Diplomacy with Ming China" (Columbia UP, 2023)
10 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Chosŏn dynasty of Korea enjoyed generally peaceful and stable relations with Ming China, a relationship that was carefully cultivated and achieve...
Gabriel Gavin, "Ashes of Our Fathers: Inside the Fall of Nagorno-Karabakh" (Hurst, 2025)
09 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
From the collapse of the Soviet Union until late 2023, Armenia and Azerbaijan were fighting unrelenting hot and cold wars over Nagorno-Karabakh - a ti...
Jacob Flaws, "Spaces of Treblinka: Retracing a Death Camp" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)
09 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In our conversation about Spaces of Treblinka: Retracing a Death Camp (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), Dr. Jacob Flaws expands the spatial real...
Rebecca Charbonneau, "Mixed Signals: Alien Communication Across the Iron Curtain" (Polity, 2024)
08 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the shadow of the Cold War, whispers from the cosmos fueled an unlikely alliance between the US and USSR. The search for extraterrestrial intellige...
Simon Hall, "Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s" (Faber and Faber, 2020)
07 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In his new book Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s (Faber, 2020), Simon Hall, a Professor of Modern History at the Univer...
Theresa Keeley, "Reagan's Gun-Toting Nuns: The Catholic Conflict Over Cold War Human Rights Policy in Central America" (Cornell UP, 2020)
06 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Reagan's Gun-Toting Nuns: The Catholic Conflict Over Cold War Human Rights Policy in Central America (Cornell UP, 2020), Theresa Keeley analyzes ...
Rasmus Sinding Søndergaard, "Reagan, Congress, and Human Rights: Contesting Morality in US Foreign Policy" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
06 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Reagan, Congress, and Human Rights: Contesting Morality in US Foreign Policy (Cambridge UP, 2020) traces the role of human rights concerns in US fore...
Marc Gallicchio, "Unconditional: The Japanese Surrender in World War II" (Oxford UP, 2020)
04 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Signed on September 2, 1945 aboard the American battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay by Japanese and Allied leaders, the instrument of surrender for...
Simon Miles, "Engaging the Evil Empire: Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War" (Cornell UP, 2020)
04 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In a narrative-redefining approach, Engaging the Evil Empire: Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War (Cornell UP, 2020) dr...
Victor D. Cha, "The Black Box: Demystifying the Study of Korean Unification and North Korea" (Columbia UP, 2024)
02 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
North Korea is, to this day, still one of the world’s most mysterious countries. What little we know about daily life in the country comes from defe...
Taomo Zhou, “Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War” (Cornell UP, 2019)
01 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
If tales of China’s radical ‘opening up’ to the world over the last 30 years imply that the country was somehow ‘closed’ before this, then o...
Enze Han, "The Ripple Effect: China's Complex Presence in Southeast Asia" (Oxford UP, 2024)
26 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Many studies of China's relations with and influence on Southeast Asia tend to focus on how Beijing has used its power asymmetry to achieve regional i...
Emily Mitchell-Eaton, "New Destinations of Empire: Mobilities, Racial Geographies, and Citizenship in the Transpacific United States" (U Georgia Press, 2024)
22 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 1986 the Compact of Free Association marked the formal end of U.S. colonialism in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, while simultaneously re-ent...
Mattias Fibiger, "Suharto's Cold War: Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and the World" (Oxford UP, 2023)
17 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Conventional accounts of the Cold War focus on competition between the United States and Soviet Union as key to shaping world events. In focusing on t...
Brian Martin, "From Underground Railroad to Rebel Refuge: Canada and the Civil War" (ECW Press, 2022)
16 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Despite all we know about the Civil War, its causes, battles, characters, issues, impacts, and legacy, few books have explored Canada’s role in the ...
Azad Essa, "Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel" (Pluto Press, 2023)
13 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Under Narendra Modi, India has changed dramatically. As the world attempts to grapple with its trajectory towards authoritarianism and a 'Hindu Rashtr...
Pascal Lottaz and Ingemar Ottosson, "Sweden, Japan, and the Long Second World War: 1931-1945" (Routledge, 2021)
08 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Lottaz and Ottosson explore the intricate relationship between neutral Sweden and Imperial Japan during the latter's 15 years of warfare in Asia and i...
Tristan A. Volpe, "Leveraging Latency: How the Weak Compel the Strong with Nuclear Technology" (Oxford UP, 2023)
08 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Over the last seven decades, some states successfully leveraged the threat of acquiring atomic weapons to compel concessions from superpowers. For man...
Caroline Alexander, "Skies of Thunder: The Deadly World War II Mission Over the Roof of the World" (Viking, 2024)
05 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 distrac...
Cindy Ermus, "The Great Plague Scare of 1720: Disaster and Diplomacy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
03 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This episode features a conversation with Dr. Cindy Ermus on her recently published book, The Great Plague Scare of 1720: Disaster and Diplomacy in t...
How Are Southeast Asia’s Toxic Alliances Undermining the Region’s Prospects for Democracy?
29 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Why are dubious power-sharing deals on the rise across Southeast Asia? What effects do they have on the region’s prospects for democracy? And are th...
Nina Valbousquet, "Lukewarm Souls: The Vatican facing the Shoah" (La Découverte, 2024)
26 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The exceptional opening of the archives of the pontificate of Pius XII (1939-1958) in 2020 did not end the controversies surrounding the silence of th...
Osamah F. Khalil, "A World of Enemies: America's Wars at Home and Abroad from Kennedy to Biden" (Harvard UP, 2024)
26 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
A sobering account of how the United States trapped itself in endless wars—abroad and at home—and what it might do to break free. Over the past ha...
Middle East on the Brink: Escalation, Diplomacy, and the Search for Stability
24 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Recent developments in the Middle East have raised concern about the potential for a wider regional war. What do escalating tensions in Gaza, Lebanon,...
Masha Kirasirova, "The Eastern International: Arabs, Central Asians, and Jews in the Soviet Union's Anticolonial Empire" (Oxford UP, 2024)
19 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the first few years after the Russian Revolution, an ideological project coalesced to link the development of what Stalin demarcated as the interna...
D. M. Giangreco, "Truman and the Bomb: The Untold Story" (Potomac Books, 2023)
15 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Many myths have grown up around President Harry S. Truman’s decision to use nuclear weapons against Imperial Japan. In destroying these myths, D. M....
Todd Stern, "Landing the Paris Climate Agreement: How It Happened, Why It Matters, and What Comes Next" (MIT Press, 2024)
08 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
From the U.S. lead negotiator on climate change, an inside account of the seven-year negotiation that culminated in the Paris Climate Agreement in 201...
Why Can’t the US Compete with China in Infrastructure?
07 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Dr. Shahar Hameiri and Dr. Lee Jones discuss the political economy and financing behind global infrastructure development, with a foc...
Andrea Benvenuti, "Nehru's Bandung: Non-Alignment and Regional Order in Indian Cold War Strategy" (Oxford UP, 2024)
24 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 1955, the leaders of 29 Asian and African countries flock to the small city of Bandung, Indonesia, for the first-ever Afro-Asian conference. India ...
Alexis Peri, "Dear Unknown Friend: The Remarkable Correspondence Between American and Soviet Women" (Harvard UP, 2024)
24 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the tense years of the early Cold War, American and Soviet women conducted a remarkable pen-pal correspondence that enabled them to see each other ...
India Rising: Navigating the Second Cold War in South Asia from Nepal to the Maldives
23 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What is the role of India in the Second Cold War (SCW) in South Asia? How do local histories, internal politics, and subnational dynamics shape relati...
Beatrice de Graaf, "Fighting Terror after Napoleon: How Europe Became Secure after 1815" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
22 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
After twenty-six years of unprecedented revolutionary upheavals and endless fighting, the victorious powers craved stability after Napoleon's defeat i...
Michael J. Alarid, "Hispano Bastion: New Mexican Power in the Age of Manifest Destiny, 1837-1860" (U New Mexico Press, 2022)
19 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Hispano Bastion: New Mexican Power in the Age of Manifest Destiny, 1837-1860 (University of New Mexico Press, 2023), historian Dr. Michael J. Ala...
E. L. Gaston, "Illusions of Control: Dilemmas in Managing U.S. Proxy Forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria" (Columbia UP, 2024)
19 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Over the last two decades, the United States has supported a range of militias, rebels, and other armed groups in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Critic...
Donald R. Hickey, "Tecumseh's War: The Epic Conflict for the Heart of America" (Westholme, 2023)
14 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Shawnee leader Tecumseh came to prominence in a war against the United States waged from 1811 to 1815. In 1805, Tecumseh's younger brother Lalawet...