When the Germans requested an armistice in October 1918, it was a shock to the Allied political and military leadership. They had been expecting, and planning for, the war to continue into 1919, the year they hoped to achieve a complete military victory over the Central Powers. 

In Coalition Strategy and the End of the First World War: The Supreme War Council and War Planning, 1917-1918" (Cambridge UP, 2019), Meighen McCrae illuminates how, throughout this planning process, the Supreme War Council evolved to become the predominant mechanism for coalition war-making. She analyses the Council's role in the formulation of an Allied strategy for 1918-1919 across the various theatres of war and compares the perspectives of the British, French, Americans and Italians. In doing so we learn how, in an early example of modern alliance warfare, the Supreme War Council had to coordinate national needs with coalition ones.

Alex Beckstrand is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Connecticut, an officer in the Marine Corps Reserves, and works in the aerospace industry. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @AlexBeckstrand.

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In this podcast, Amy Edwards, author of Are We Rich Yet?: The Rise of Mass Investment Culture in Contemporary Britain (U California Press, 2022), provides a fascinating journey into her own research and how she built a picture of a key moment of the 20th century. As a result, she brings together different strands of work such as cultural, business, economic and financial history. The book and podcast will be of interest to anyone old enough to remember the 1980s or whose current life has been shaped by that decade.

References to other works discussed in the podcast:

Allon, Fiona. 2014. "The Feminisation of Finance", Australian Feminist Studies, 29:79, 12-30, DOI: 10.1080/08164649.2014.901279

Chatelain, Marcia. 2020. Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America. Liverlight. NBN Interview by Amanda Joyce here.

Effosse, Sabine. 2021. “Financial Empowerment for Married Women in France.” Quaderni Storici 166: 117-141. doi: 10.1408/101558

Martínez-Rodríguez, Susana (2022). “DIANA (1969-1978): The First Women´s Finance Magazine in Spain” Feminist Media Studies (early view). NBN Interview by Paula de la Cruz here. 

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The Brexit debate has been so all-consuming and filled with so much misinformation that many Brits and others can overlook some the challenges facing the European Union itself. Looked at in broad terms, it has been an astonishingly successful political project, having delivered 70 years of peace and prosperity. But what lies ahead? What issues does it need to tackle to maintain that kind of success? Luuk van Middelaar is a Dutch historian, Professor of EU law at Leiden University. He has worked at the heart of EU institutions and give his observations and analysis of the underlying tensions in the EU and what lies ahead.

Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press.

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Feminism's Empire (Cornell UP, 2022) investigates the complex relationships between imperialisms and feminisms in the late nineteenth century and demonstrates the challenge of conceptualizing "pro-imperialist" and "anti-imperialist" as binary positions. By intellectually and spatially tracing the era's first French feminists' engagement with empire, Carolyn J. Eichner explores how feminists opposed—yet employed—approaches to empire in writing, speaking, and publishing. In differing ways, they ultimately tied forms of imperialism to gender liberation. Among the era's first anti-imperialists, French feminists were enmeshed in the hierarchies and epistemologies of empire. They likened their gender-based marginalization to imperialist oppressions. Imperialism and colonialism's gendered and sexualized racial hierarchies established categories of inclusion and exclusion that rested in both universalism and ideas of "nature" that presented colonized people with theoretical, yet impossible, paths to integration. Feminists faced similar barriers to full incorporation due to the gendered contradictions inherent in universalism. The system presumed citizenship to be male and thus positioned women as outsiders. Feminism's Empire connects this critical struggle to hierarchical power shifts in racial and national status that created uneasy linkages between French feminists and imperial authorities.

Dr. Carolyn J. Eichner about is a Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Feminism’s Empire is her third book. Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune came out in 2004 and The Paris Commune: A Brief History came out in 2022. Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune was published in French as Franchir les barricades: les femmes dans la Commune de Paris (Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2020). Translated by Bastien Craipain, it was a finalist for the Prix Augustin Thierry in 2021, an award from the city of Paris for a historical study concerning the period between Antiquity and the late 19th century. In 2022-2023 she will be a Fulbright Research scholar in France and will be in residence at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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What happens when you bring together an important collection of previously secret archival documents dealing with France's nuclear detonations in the Pacific from 1966 to 1996, a nuclear scientist, and an investigative journalist? Working together beginning in early 2020, Sébastien Philippe and Tomas Statius, the authors of Toxique: Enquête sur les essais nucléaires français en Polynésie (Presses universitaires de France and Disclose, 2021) have now shared with readers the meaningful and provocative results of just such a collaboration. Revisiting the history of France's nuclear weapons program over a period of three decades (following an initial set of atmospheric and underground detonations in the Algerian Sahara from 1960 to 1966), Toxique is a scientific and journalistic interrogation of the immediate and long-term health and environmental effects of the 193 bombs the French military exploded in the region, exposing civilians, as well as French military and other personnel to the fallout and radiation emitted by these explosions. 

The significance of this interdisciplinary investigation cannot be overstated. As Toxique shows, these nuclear detonations continue to have harmful effects on the everyday lives of thousands of local residents, along with those veterans who served in the area. As Philippe and Statius have shown, the toxicity of these nuclear blasts has been consistently underestimated and misrepresented by the French military and state. Holding important implications for the victims of these detonations in terms of both recognition and financial compensation, the book and its accompanying online platform, Moruroa Files, have made a huge impact. I was thrilled to have the chance to speak with these remarkable researchers and writers and hope listeners will learn from and enjoy our conversation. The more people within and beyond the field of French Studies who are aware of this damaging past and present, the better.

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In The Memory of Colonialism in Britain and France: The Sins of Silence (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021), Itay Lotem explores the remembering of empire in Britain and France. By comparing these two former colonial powers, the author tells two distinct stories about coming to terms with the legacies of colonialism, the role of silence and the breaking thereof. Focusing on memory as an ongoing, politicized public debate, the book examines the afterlife of colonial history as an element of political and social discourse that depends on actors’ goals and priorities.

Itay Lotem earned his Ph.D at the University of London, Queen Mary and is currently a senior lecturer in French Studies at the University of Westminster.

Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California.

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In Minerva’s French Sisters: Women of Science in Enlightenment France (Yale University Press, 2021), Nina Gelbart, Professor of History and Anita Johnson Wand Professor of Women’s Studies at Occidental College, shares the stories of six, incredibly resourceful, and dedicated women who contributed substantially to the sciences of their time. While offering valuable comments on the challenges of writing gender-inclusive histories of science, the book restores the legacies of the mathematician Elisabeth Ferrand, the astronomer Nicole Reine Lepaute, the botanists Jeanne Barret and Madeleine Françoise Basseporte, the anatomist Marie-Marguerite Bihéron, and the chemist Marie Geneviève Charlotte Thiroux d’Arconville. Minerva’s French Sisters also reads as the personal journey of an historian looking for lost evidence and piecing together traces to offer a unique vision of the Enlightenment sciences through the lens of these women.

Victor Monnin, Ph.D. is an historian of science specialized in the history of Earth sciences. He is also teaching French language and literature to undergraduates.

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How people traveled, and how people wrote about travel, changed in the interwar years. Novel technologies eased travel conditions, breeding new iterations of the colonizing gaze. The sense that another war was coming lent urgency and anxiety to the search for new places and "authentic" experiences. In Interwar Itineraries: Authenticity in Anglophone and French Travel Writing (Amherst College Press, 2022), Emily O. Wittman identifies a diverse group of writers from two languages who embarked on such quests. For these writers, authenticity was achieved through rugged adventure abroad to economically poorer destinations. Using translation theory and new approaches in travel studies and global modernisms, Wittman links and complicates the symbolic and rhetorical strategies of writers including André Gide, Ernest Hemingway, Michel Leiris, Isak Dinesen, Beryl Markham, among others, that offer insight into the high ethical stakes of travel and allow us to see in new ways how models of the authentic self are built and maintained through asymmetries of encounter.

This book is available open-access here. 

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When French author Jules Verne wrote Around the World in 80 Days in the late 1800s, scheduled global travel was practically science fiction, and 80 days seemed impossibly fast. But his techno-futurist novel inspired everyday adventurers to traverse the globe by boat, train, bike, and foot—and beat his protagonist’s record. Harvard professor Joyce Chaplin discusses what we can learn from Jules Verne’s classic novel. Joyce Chaplin is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University. She is the author of Round About The Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm.

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M. K. Beauchamp's Instruments of Empire: Colonial Elites and U.S. Governance in Early National Louisiana, 1803–1815 (LSU Press, 2021) examines the challenges that resulted from U.S. territorial expansion through the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. With the acquisition of this vast region, the United States gained a colonial European population whose birthplace, language, and religion often differed from those of their U.S. counterparts. This population exhibited multiple ethnic tensions and possessed little experience with republican government. Consequently, administration of the territory proved a trial-and-error endeavor involving incremental cooperation between federal officials and local elites. As Beauchamp demonstrates, this process of gradual accommodation served as an essential nationalizing experience for the people of Louisiana.

After the acquisition, federal officials who doubted the loyalty of the local French population and their capacity for self-governance denied the territory of Orleans--easily the region's most populated and economically robust area--a quick path to statehood. Instead, U.S. officials looked to groups including free people of color, Native Americans, and recent immigrants, all of whom found themselves ideally placed to negotiate for greater privileges from the new territorial government. Beauchamp argues that U.S. administrators, despite claims of impartiality and equality before the law, regularly acted as fickle agents of imperial power and frequently co-opted local elites with prominent positions within the parishes. Overall, the methods utilized by the United States in governing Louisiana shared much in common with European colonial practices implemented elsewhere in North America during the early nineteenth century.

While historians have previously focused on Washington policy makers in investigating the relationship between the United States and the newly acquired territory, Beauchamp emphasizes the integral role played by territorial elites who wielded enormous power and enabled government to function. His work offers profound insights into the interplay of class, ethnicity, and race, as well as an understanding of colonialism, the nature of republics, democracy, and empire. By placing the territorial period of early national Louisiana in an imperial context, this study reshapes perceptions of American expansion and manifest destiny in the nineteenth century and beyond.

Instruments of Empire serves as a rich resource for specialists studying Louisiana and the U.S. South, as well as scholars of slavery and free people of color, nineteenth-century American history, Atlantic World and border studies, U.S. foreign relations, and the history of colonialism and empire.

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