New Books in Military History
Interviews with Scholars of Military History about their New Books
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- Update frequency
- every day
- Average duration
- 59 minutes
- Episodes
- 1507
- Years Active
- 2008 - 2025
Shaun Walker, "The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West" (Knopf, 2025)
Shaun Walker, The Illegals (Knopf, 2025) is the definitive history of Russia’s most secret spy program, from the earliest days of the Soviet Union to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and a revelatory exa…
00:57:13 |
Wed 30 Apr 2025
William Kiser, "The Business of Killing Indians: Scalp Warfare and the Violent Conquest of North America" (Yale UP, 2025)
In Cormac McCarthy's 1985 Western, Blood Meridian, the story follows infamous scalp hunter John Joel Glanton through the Mexican borderlands in the mid-19th century. How much of this story is myth, a…
01:03:55 |
Tue 29 Apr 2025
Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, "The Battle of Manila: Poisoned Victory in the Pacific War" (Oxford UP, 2025)
In our conversation about The Battle of Manila (Oxford University Press, 2025), Nicholas Evan Sarantakes explains how U.S. forces under General Douglas MacArthur won a climactic battle in the Pacific…
01:00:22 |
Mon 28 Apr 2025
Tim Grady, "Burying the Enemy: The Story of Those who Cared for the Dead in Two World Wars" (Yale UP, 2025)
In Burying the Enemy: The Story of Those who Cared for the Dead in Two World Wars (Yale University Press, 2025), Tim Grady recounts here a detailed history of the fate of combatants who died on enemy…
00:52:30 |
Sun 27 Apr 2025
Alexandra Birch, "Hitler’s Twilight of the Gods: Music and the Orchestration of War and Genocide in Europe" (U Toronto Press, 2025)
Music was an integral part of statecraft and identity formation in the Third Reich. Structured thematically and semiotically around the Wagnerian tetralogy of the Ring cycle, Hitler’s Twilight of the…
01:19:04 |
Sat 26 Apr 2025
John Lechner, "Death Is Our Business: Russian Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare" (Bloombury, 2025)
In 2014, a well-trained, mysterious band of mercenaries arrived in Ukraine, part of Russia's first attempt to claim the country as its own. Upon ceasefire, the “Wagner Group” faded back into shadow, …
01:26:03 |
Fri 25 Apr 2025
Reider Payne, "War and Diplomacy in the Napoleonic Era" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)
Though Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh remains well known today for his role in shaping the post-Napoleonic peace settlement in Europe, his half-brother Sir Charles Stewart has received far less…
01:10:01 |
Thu 24 Apr 2025
Brian Masaru Hayashi, "Asian American Spies: How Asian Americans Helped Win the Allied Victory" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Spies deep behind enemy lines; double agents; a Chinese American James Bond; black propaganda radio broadcasters; guerrilla fighters; pirates; smugglers; prostitutes and dancers as spies; and Asian A…
01:08:58 |
Wed 23 Apr 2025
Paul M. McGarr, "Spying in South Asia: Britain, the United States, and India's Secret Cold War" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
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 secret Cold War. It examines interventions made by the…
01:02:30 |
Sun 20 Apr 2025
Sasha Colby, "The Matryoshka Memoirs: A Story of Ukrainian Forced Labour, the Leica Camera Factory, and Nazi Resistance" (ECW Press, 2023)
Irina Nikifortchuk was 19 years old and a Ukrainian schoolteacher when she was abducted to be a forced laborer in the Leica camera factory in Nazi Germany. Eventually pulled from the camp hospital to…
01:22:00 |
Sat 19 Apr 2025
Richard Overy, "Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan" (Norton, 2025)
September 2 will mark the 80th anniversary of Japan’s formal surrender to the United States aboard the USS. Missouri, ending the Second World War. The U.S. decision to drop two atomic bombs on the Ja…
00:37:39 |
Thu 17 Apr 2025
Serhiy Kudelia, "Seize the City, Undo the State: The Inception of Russia's War on Ukraine" (Oxford UP, 2015)
How do separatist conflicts arise and spread? When does separatism become a cover for a foreign aggression? How do local communities respond when state institutions collapse, and militants take over?…
00:57:43 |
Wed 16 Apr 2025
Georgina Banks, "Back to Bangka: Searching for the Truth about a Wartime Massacre" (Viking Australia, 2023)
Georgina Banks searches for the truth of what happened to her Great Aunt ‘Bud’, killed in the Second World War.
Bangka Strait, Indonesia, 1942. Allied ships are evacuating thousands in flight from Si…
00:47:22 |
Mon 14 Apr 2025
David G. Williamson, "Poland Betrayed: The Nazi-Soviet Invasions of 1939" (Pen & Sword, 2011)
After staging a mock attack at Gleiwitz, Germany unleashed its blitzkrieg on Poland on September 1, 1939. Two week later, Soviet forces streamed into the beleaguered country from the east. By early O…
00:27:17 |
Fri 11 Apr 2025
Margaret Urwin, "A State in Denial: British Collaboration with Loyalist Paramilitaries" (Mercier Press, 2016)
A State in Denial: British Collaboration with Loyalist Paramilitaries (Mercier Press, 2016) uses previously secret official documents to explore the tangled web of relationships between the top echel…
00:59:19 |
Thu 10 Apr 2025
Lesley J. Gordon, "Dread Danger: Cowardice and Combat in the American Civil War" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
Those who fought in the Civil War were expected to overcome their fear of injury or death as they charged into a hail of bullets. Soldiers could expect erupting artillery shells or Minié balls to mai…
00:39:47 |
Wed 09 Apr 2025
Paddy Walker, "War Without Oversight: Why We Need Humans on the Battlefield" (Howgate, 2025)
Amid the fanfare around AI and autonomous weapons, decision-makers - both military and political - are imagining an augmented future for warfare that minimises human influence and connection. But in …
01:32:29 |
Mon 07 Apr 2025
Frances Yaping Wang, "The Art of State Persuasion: China's Strategic Use of Media in Interstate Disputes" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Why do nations actively publicize previously overlooked disputes? And why does this domestic mobilization sometimes fail to result in aggressive policy measures?
The Art of State Persuasion (Oxford …
00:23:38 |
Sun 06 Apr 2025
Eric Min, "Words of War: Negotiation as a Tool of Conflict" (Cornell UP, 2025)
Of all interstate conflicts across the last two centuries, two-thirds have ended through negotiated agreement. Wartime diplomacy is thus commonly seen as a costless and mechanical process solely desi…
00:59:52 |
Sun 06 Apr 2025
David Dean Barrett, "140 Days to Hiroshima: The Story of Japan's Last Chance to Avert Armageddon" (Diversion Books, 2020)
During the closing months of World War II, two military giants locked in a death embrace of cultural differences and diplomatic intransigence. While developing history’s deadliest weapon and weighing…
01:12:03 |
Fri 04 Apr 2025
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