Sarah Kovner, "Prisoners of the Empire: Insid...

Not everything about wool is warm and fuzzy. Wool, for millennia the cold climate textile fiber, has a long relationship to war, both in terms of supporting it and causing it. Wool's strategic value in wartime, a position it gained over centuries, and contrived shortages of same ...  Show more

Francisco de Saavedra’s American Revolutionary War: The Spanish Contribution to the Battle of Yorktown (James Giesler, 2025) by James Giesler is the story of how the decisive victory in the American Revolutionary War, at the Battle of Yorktown in October 1781, was the result of F ...  Show more

Jennifer Dixon’s Dark Pasts: Changing the State’s Story in Turkey and Japan (Cornell University Press, 2018), investigates the Japanese and Turkish states’ narratives of their “dark pasts,” the Nanjing Massacre (1937-38) and Armenian Genocide (1915-17), respectively. The official ...  Show more

The Korean War is widely misunderstood in the 21st century. Most have a sepia-toned nostalgia of the bravery of World War Two, or the less black-and-white nature of the Vietnam War. But not Korea. If anyone thinks of it, they might think of reruns of M*A*S*H on Nick at Nite or a ...  Show more

In this episode I talk with Daniel Y. Kim, Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Brown University, about his 2020 book Intimacies of Conflict: Cultural Memory and the Korean War, published by New York University Press. Though often considered “the forgotten war,” ...  Show more

The remarkable life of history's first foreign-born samurai and his astonishing journey from Northern Africa to the heights of Japanese society. When Yasuke arrived in Japan in the late 1500s, he had already traveled much of the known world. Kidnapped as a child, and trained into ...  Show more