New Books in Diplomatic History

Feb 01 2025 928 ep. 57 mins 205
New Books in Diplomatic History Podcast artwork

Interviews with scholars of diplomacy, international relations, and geopolitics about their new books.

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Adam Chapnick, "Canada First, Not Canada Alone: A History of Canadian Foreign Policy" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Feb 01 2025 61 mins  
The definitive history of Canadian foreign policy since the 1930s, Canada First, Not Canada Alone: A History of Canadian Foreign Policy (Oxford UP, 2024) examines how successive prime ministers have promoted Canada's national interests in a world that has grown increasingly complex and interconnected. Eleven case studies focus on environmental reform, Indigenous peoples, trade, hos

Enrico Ciappi, "Building Europe in New York: From the Munich Conference to the European Coal and Steel Community (1938-1952)" (Routledge, 2025)

Jan 31 2025 48 mins  
Today’s European Union grew out of functional communities set up in the wake of world war in the 1950s. It would shock the new White House intake to learn that the wartime American political class lobbied hard for a postwar United States of Europe. The role of US officials in building Europe’s first community – one for the coal and steel industries – and their close ties t

Benjamin Carter Hett, "The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War" (Henry Holt, 2020)

Jan 28 2025 84 mins  
Berlin, November 1937. Adolf Hitler meets with his military commanders to impress upon them the urgent necessity for a war of aggression in eastern Europe. Some generals are unnerved by the Führer’s grandiose plan, but these dissenters are silenced one by one, setting in motion events that will culminate in the most calamitous war in history. Benjamin Carter Hett takes us behind

Peter Harmsen, "Fury and Ice: Greenland, the United States and Germany in World War II" (Casemate, 2024)

Jan 27 2025 71 mins  
Today I talked to Peter Harmsen about his book Fury and Ice: Greenland, the United States and Germany in World War II (Casemate, 2024). The wartime interest in Greenland was a direct result of its vital strategic position--if you wanted to predict the weather in Europe, you had to have men in place on the vast, frozen island. The most celebrated example of Greenland's crucial contr

Avinash Paliwal, "India's Near East: A New History" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Jan 23 2025 49 mins  
After student protests toppled Bangladesh prime minister Sheikh Hasina last year, New Delhi and Dhaka have been at odds. Indian politicians complain about Hindus being mistreated in the Muslim-majority country; Bangladesh’s interim government fears that Hasina may launch a bid to return to power from India. It’s the latest development in what’s become an extremely complicated

Eva Payne, "Empire of Purity: The History of Americans' Global War on Prostitution" (Princeton UP, 2024)

Jan 18 2025 69 mins  
Between the 1870s and 1930s, American social reformers, working closely with the US government, transformed sexual vice into an international political and humanitarian concern. As these activists worked to eradicate prostitution and trafficking, they promoted sexual self-control for both men and women as a cornerstone of civilization and a basis of American exceptionalism. Empire

Christina L. Davis, "Discriminatory Clubs: The Geopolitics of International Organizations" (Princeton UP, 2023)

Jan 17 2025 48 mins  
Member selection is one of the defining elements of social organization, imposing categories on who we are and what we do. Discriminatory Clubs: The Geopolitics of International Organizations (Princeton UP, 2023) shows how international organizations are like social clubs, ones in which institutional rules and informal practices enable states to favor friends while excluding rivals

Frank Trentmann, "Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022" (Knopf, 2024)

Jan 16 2025 57 mins  
Frank Trentmann’s Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022 (Knopf, 2024) traces the moral concerns and clashes of a nation re-building, re-constituting, and re-imagining itself from the depths of World War II to Chancellor Scholz’s Zeitenwende (‘new era’). Key elements of modern German identity, including the memory of the Holocaust, the nature of the Sozialstaat, the te

Stephen Watt, "From the 'Troubles' to Trumpism: Ireland and America, 1960-2023" (Anthem Press, 2024)

Jan 15 2025 51 mins  
Stephen Watt is the Provost Professor of English at Indiana University. His research interests include drama and theatre of the 19th and 20th centuries, Irish Studies, and the contemporary university and his recent works include Bernard Shaw’s Fiction, Material Psychology, and Affect: Shaw, Freud, Simmel (2018), “Something Dreadful and Grand”: American Literature and the Iris

Isaac Stanley-Becker, "Europe Without Borders: A History" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Jan 14 2025 45 mins  
Forty years ago, Schengen - a wine-making village at the tripoint border of Luxembourg, France, and Germany - made European history when diplomats from these countries, Belgium, and the Netherlands struck a deal to scale back their mutual border checks. "The event at Schengen went unnoticed by much of the European press," writes Isaac Stanley-Becker in Europe Without Borders: A His