In Western Europe, we typically associate Vikings with the storm-tossed waters of the North Sea and the North Atlantic, the deep Scandinavian fjords and the attacks on the monasteries and settlements of north-western Europe. This popular image rarely includes the river systems of Russia and Ukraine, the wide sweep of the Eurasian steppe, the far shores of th ... Show More
Feb 2023
Geoffrey Roberts, "Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books" (Yale UP, 2022)
In this engaging life of the twentieth century’s most self-consciously learned dictator, Geoffrey Roberts explores the books Stalin read, how he read them, and what they taught him. Stalin firmly believed in the transformative potential of words, and his voracious appetite for re ... Show More
1h 17m
Oct 21
Defeat at the Dnepr: The XLVIII Panzerkorps Counterattack at Kiev, November 1943 with Simon Waring (Casemate, 2026)
In late 1943, the German Army on the Eastern Front was in dire straits. Its southern army group had been pushed out of eastern Ukraine, and on 6 November 1943, Kiev—one of the Soviet Union’s largest cities—was retaken by an increasingly capable Soviet Red Army. To prevent the tot ... Show More
1h 18m
Oct 12
Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's March 1917 with Marian Schwartz and Dan Mahoney (U Notre Dame Press, 2017)
In this latest Books for Better Understanding video from Notre Dame Press, David Carlson facilitates a conversation between Marian Schwartz and Dan Mahoney about Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's March 1917 The Red Wheel, Node III available in English now for the first time. Schwartz and ... Show More
53m 17s
May 2024
Vikings Went Everywhere in the Middle Ages, From Baghdad to Constantinople to….. Oklahoma?
Scandinavia has always been a world apart. For millennia Norwegians, Danes, Finns, and Swedes lived a remote and rugged existence among the fjords and peaks of the land of the midnight sun. But when they finally left their homeland in search of opportunity, these wanderers—includ ... Show More
42m 47s
Sep 2024
Viking Travels
<p>Vikings have long been depicted as that stereotype of the hairy, nameless warrior, leaping ashore from his longboat, ready to terrorise a hapless local population in a northern European country. But there were also seers, artisans, travellers, and writers, too whose stories ca ... Show More
47m 12s
Jun 2017
Tell Me About the Varangians (The Vikings of Russia)
Today's question is about the Varangians, a group of Vikings that conquered Kievan Rus and became the first rulers of the Russian state. I'd love it if you could talk about Kievan-Rus, the Rurik dynasty, The Varangians...any of these would be great. WANT ME TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTIO ... Show More
5m 52s
Oct 2024
Ordinary Vikings: hidden histories of the Nordic world
We know the Vikings best as brutal, seafaring, pagan raiders – and that’s an important part of their lives and histories. But it’s only one aspect: what about their love lives, experiences of travels, and attitudes to religion? Speaking with James Osborne, Eleanor Barraclough unp ... Show More
37m 40s
Oct 2025
The Vikings
The Vikings transformed European history, impacted the worlds of both Byzantium and the Abbasid Caliphate, and even, some 500 years before Christopher Columbus, discovered North America. In this episode, I want to look at how and why the Viking diaspora first began, before moving ... Show More
25m 57s