Libya: The Italian Occupation

Marco Werman interviews historian Ronald Bruce St John about the Italian colonial encounter with Libya on this week’s episode of How We Got Here.

More on Egypt

Here’s my Muslim Brotherhood piece from Monday with thoughts from Robert Malley, Jim Phillips, and Alison Pargeter, author of The Muslim Brotherhood: The Burden of Tradition.

 

Also,  a new history pod on women in Egypt with historian Mona Russell.  I’ve also tucked Lisa Mullins’ interview with Mike Rapport into that pod. Rapport wrote 1848: Year of Revolution and talks with Lisa about how today’s uprisings are resonant of Europe in 1848.

Mubarak and History

I’ve started doing interviews about the historical context for what we’re seeing in Egypt and other Arab countries.  Here’s today’s radio piece about Mubarak and his political moment. And here is the latest episode of How We Got Here, an interview with Michael Wahid Hanna of The Century Foundation.  I’m planning more episodes on Egypt–if you have historical questions, send them my way and I’ll try to get them answered.

Reporting on history and memory in Germany

How We Got Here #55 is a conversation with journalist and radio producer Daniel Estrin about the backstories to some features he filed for PRI’s The World from Germany in 2010. Enjoy.

A Rope and a Prayer

How We Got Here #54 is a conversation with New York Times reporter David Rohde and his wife Kristen Mulvihill about their new book A Rope and a Prayer: A Kidnapping from Two Sides.

How We Got Here #32

Check out the latest episode of my history podcast here.

How We Got Here #30

Check out the latest episode of the history podcast:  Marco Werman of PRI’s The World interviews James David Robenalt about his new book The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage during the Great War. Robenalt is a Cleveland lawyer with deep roots in Ohio. He was lucky enough to get his hands on a microfiche copy of Harding’s love letters to his mistress; the originals are still under seal in the Library of Congress. The resulting tale is full of surprises, about Harding, about his lover Carrie Phillips, and about the politics and foreign relations of the day.

How We Got Here #29

New history podcast is up–long versions of my interviews this week with Haleh Esfandiari, author of My Prison, My Home and Peter Maass who wrote Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil.  There’s also an interview with the Canadian health care expert and former politician Roy Romanow on the origins of the Canadian system. Finally an excerpt that didn’t make it into the radio segment from my interview Tuesday with Anne-Marie Goetz of UNIFEM, The UN Development Fund for Women, about rape as a weapon of war.  I include it in the history podcast  because Goetz includes a great deal of historical perspective in answering the question of why it’s so urgent to address epidemic levels of sexual violence in conflict and post-conflict zones around the world.  More info on HWGH#29 at http://www.theworld.org/history as soon as I have time to post there.

Back to work

There’s a new episode of my history podcast up at The World’s website. Check it out: Moscow in 1993, revisiting the Taliban, finding out who Curtis LeMay was.

Lots on my mind–more apparent drone attacks still have me thinking about how bombing works/doesn’t work. I took out a whole pile of library books on the history of bombing which I look forward to perusing. Yesterday’s Jeffrey Gettleman NYT/IHT piece on male rape victims in Congo jolted me back to that topic too. Adam Hochschild has an overview of the Congo situation in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books which I found really helpful. It’s not getting better. I’ve got lots of news to catch up on from two weeks-plus vacation including this CNN report from last week on nursing in Malawi by Christine Gorman.

Understanding McNamara

is the subject of this week’s podcast. You can find it at http://www.theworld.org/how-we-got-here-podcast.