This is a reassessment of British and Italian grand strategies during the First World War. Dr. Stefano Marcuzzi, Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, tries to shed new light on a hitherto overlooked but central aspect of Britain and Italy's war experiences: the uneasy and only partial overlap between Britain's strategy for imperial defense ... Show More
Mar 3
Rosella Cappella Zielinski and Paul Poast, "Wheat at War: Allied Economic Cooperation in the Great War" (Oxford UP, 2025)
The battlefields were not the only places that threatened death during World War I. As conflict raged on and supply lines tightened, the allied powers of France, Britain, and Italy faced a fundamental problem: keeping their soldier and civilian populations safe from starvation. W ... Show More
54m 45s
Mar 1
Trish FitzSimons and Madelyn Shaw, "Fleeced: Unraveling the History of Wool and War" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
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
1h 9m
Mar 1
James Giesler, "Francisco de Saavedra's American Revolutionary War, The Spanish Contribution to the Battle of Yorktown" (James Giesler, 2025)
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
59m 34s
Aug 2021
Jonathan Haslam, "The Spectre of War: International Communism and the Origins of World War II" (Princeton UP, 2021)
The Spectre of War: International Communism and the Origins of World War II (Princeton UP, 2021), looks at a subject we thought we knew—the roots of the Second World War—and upends our assumptions with a new interpretation. Professor Jonathan Haslam, in the words of historian, Ge ... Show More
1h 3m
Oct 2023
205 - Victory to Defeat: The British Army 1918-40
<p>As some of you may know, I am also a First World War historian, and the academic history of the war can be very different from the public perspective, which dwells on the first two years of the war. </p> <p>Forgetting the victories of 1917 and 1918 is not new; it is something ... Show More
56m 31s
Nov 2023
The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 and the Making of Modern European Warfare
Among the conflicts that convulsed Europe during the nineteenth century, none was more startling and consequential than the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871. Deliberately engineered by Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the war succeeded in shattering French supremacy, deposi ... Show More
39m 45s
Jul 2023
The Late, Great Stephen Ambrose: WWII and Getting Down to Business (The Italian Campaign)
On this episode of Our American Stories, even before the U.S./British victory in the North African campaign in May 1943, there was disagreement among the Allies on the best strategy to defeat the Axis. Eventually the U.S. and British political leadership reached a compromise in w ... Show More
30m 17s
Jun 2021
Sean McMeekin, "Stalin's War: A New History of World War II" (Basic Books, 2021)
World War II endures in the popular imagination as a heroic struggle between good and evil, with villainous Hitler driving its events. But Hitler was not in power when the conflict erupted in Asia—and he was certainly dead before it ended. His armies did not fight in multiple the ... Show More
1h 15m
Nov 2022
252. The World Cup: British Imperialism, South American rivalries, and Mussolini (Part 1)
Welcome to The Rest Is History's definitive guide to the history of the FIFA World Cup, which looks past the football and uncovers the personalities, geopolitics, and drama behind the tournament.
In the first of three episodes, Tom and Dominic debate whether the global game is a ... Show More
58m 22s