Norman Holmes Pearson actually did what a great many professors dream about doing. He was an expert in his field, but he also worked as an Intelligence Officer for the US military during World War II and the Cold War. And he wasn’t a desk jockey, but an active spy. Despite a major physical disability,…
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Buzzkill Genius Dr. Philip Nash brings us a fabulous (and very relevant) show on the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. There’s so much more to those events than the standard “eye-ball-to-eye-ball” story would have us believe. Among many other things, we learn why the Cold War was so cold. You’ll understand so much more after…
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All wars are bad. But why was World War II so extreme? Coming less than 20 years after World War I (the most extreme war up until that time), the Second World War’s death toll is _conservatively_ calculated at 60 million people. And some estimates are higher than that. Professor Phil Nash joins us to…
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Professor Philip Nash continues his excellent analysis of the famous Battle of Stalingrad. The grim complications in the details of the history of this battle give us perfect insight into the nature of warfare during this period. Dr. Nash finishes up by explaining how the Battle of Stalingrad fits into the larger period of late…
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Stalingrad. Even just the name of the city conjures up images of a brutal, months-long battle that helped change the course of the war. Professor Nash discusses the background of the battle, Hitler’s intent in attacking that part of the Soviet Union, and how the Red Army defended the area and built up the resilience…
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German soldiers were kept in the Soviet Union until the late 1950s. Professor Grunewald explains why the Soviets kept the POWs after the war, what they did with them, and why they were incarcerated for so long. Was it retribution for the millions of Soviet war dead? Were the German POWs used as a necessary…
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Crikey. I used to think that no American presidential election could be more strange than the ones in 2016 and 2020. Donald Trump would just throw out random, fact-free statements, and they would be taken as gospel by his followers. That part of the electorate, essentially, turned his falsehoods into their own reality. That’s happening…
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It’s September 3rd, and we’ve been told that there’s going to be a debate between the Republican candidate for President, Donald Trump, and the Democratic candidate for President, Kamala Harris, on September 10th. Given all the changes that have taken place during this tumultuous campaign, and the frankly unhinged nature of one of the candidates,…
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Slave trading continued in the south during the Civil War. Between Fort Sumter to Appomattox, Confederates bought and sold thousands of African American men, women, and children. These transactions in humanity made the internal slave trade a cornerstone of Confederate society, a bulwark of the Rebel economy, and a central part of the experience of…
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Professor Nash tells us about wives and lovers of leading Nazis, women who participated in Nazi crimes, and women who worked against the Nazi regime. We look at everyone from Eva Braun, Hitler’s partner, to Sophie Scholl, one of the leaders of the White Rose resistance to the Nazi state. This episode shows that German…
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