War & International Affairs Episodes

Historian Geoffrey Plank joins Jennifer Robin Terry to discuss his new book, The Last Place in Europe: A History of Gibraltar, and how one tiny territory became a crossroads of empires, cultures, commerce, and contested borders. Gibraltar has almost no natural resources, yet empires have fought over this tiny territory for centuries. Its importance lies in its geography, where Europe meets Africa and the Mediterranean opens into the Atlantic. Geoffrey Plank traces this contested crossroads fr...

Historians Sergio M. González and Lloyd D. Barba join Jennifer Robin Terry on The Clio Dialogues to discuss their book, Sanctuary in America: How Activists Defied the Government and Defended Immigrants—And Why It Still Matters. They explore how an ancient tradition of sacred refuge became a modern movement challenging state power. In 1982, congregations began opening their doors to Salvadorans and Guatemalans fleeing political violence, even as the U.S. government denied them asylum. Facing a...

What does the rise of authoritarianism look like while it is happening in real time? Historian Pamela Toler, author of The Dragon from Chicago: The Untold Story of an American Reporter in Nazi Germany, joins The Clio Dialogues to tell the remarkable story of Sigrid Schultz, the Chicago Tribune’s Berlin bureau chief who reported on the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. Toler and host Jennifer Robin Terry discuss how economic and political in...

History only looks inevitable because we already know the ending. As the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary, it is easy to look backward and see a straight road to 1776. In Contested Continent, historian Peter C. Mancall shows just how uncertain that road actually was. He joins Jennifer Robin Terry to explore a North America shaped by competing peoples, incompatible ambitions, and consequential choices. The result is a different, more comprehensive origin story, one that recovers ...