World War I was a catastrophe for the lands that would become Lebanon. With war came famine, and with famine came unspeakable suffering, starvation, and mass death. For nearly four years the deadly crisis reshaped society, killing untold thousands and transforming how people lived, how they interacted, and even how they saw the world around them. Famine Worl ... Show More
Jan 30
Najati Sidqi, "Memoirs of a Palestinian Communist: The Secret Life of Najati Sidqi" (U Texas Press, 2025)
In the public eye, Najati Sidqi was known as a journalist and writer, a translator of Russian classics, and an outspoken opponent of Nazism. However, Sidqi concealed a critical component of his life from the world and his family. He was an underground activist for the Palestinian ... Show More
25m 54s
Jan 29
Yossef Rapoport, "Becoming Arab: The Formation of Arab Identity in the Medieval Middle East" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Today, much of the Middle East is “Arab”—an identity that now extends across North Africa and up through the Near East to Syria. Yet how did this region become Arab? How did this identity spread? Was it due to migration, or conquest? Historian Yossef Rapoport, in his book Becomi ... Show More
41m 38s
Jan 26
Adam Bursi, "Traces of the Prophets: Relics and Sacred Spaces in Early Islam" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)
Adam Bursi’s Traces of the Prophets: Relics and Sacred Spaces in Early Islam (Edinburg University Press, 2024) uses writings by early Muslims to map a history of material objects, relics, and tombs of prophetic figures as they were conceptualized in the 8th and 9th centuries. The ... Show More
56m 59s
Jun 2023
Pandemics Cause Misery and Death, But They Also Created Agriculture and Put Humans on Top of the Food Chain
Three years into a global pandemic, the fact that infectious disease is capable of reshaping humanity is obvious. But seen in the context of sixty thousand years of human and scientific history, COVID-19 is simply the latest in a series of world-changing pathogens. In fact, the r ... Show More
49m 56s
Aug 2021
Grace M. Cho, "Tastes Like War: A Memoir" (Feminist Press, 2021)
The US military camptowns were established shortly after the Second World War in 1945, appropriating the Japanese comfort stations. The Korean government actively supported the creation of camptowns for its own economic and national security interests. Utilizing the Japanese colo ... Show More
58m 26s
Nov 2015
Nicholas Stargardt, “The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945” (Basic Books, 2015)
In all of the thousands upon thousands of books written about Nazi Germany, it’s easy to lose track of some basic questions. What did Germans think they were fighting for? Why did they support the war? How did they (whether the they were soldiers fighting in France or Russia, wom ... Show More
1h 10m
Oct 2020
Brandon M. Schechter, "The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects" (Cornell UP, 2019)
The Stuff of Soldiers: A History of the Red Army in World War II Through Objects (Cornell University Press) uses everyday objects to tell the story of the Great Patriotic War as never before. Brandon Schechter attends to a diverse array of things―from spoons to tanks―to show how ... Show More
58m 6s