At a time when globalization is being contested by nationalists and battered by coronavirus, Mark talks to Samuel (Sandy) Zipp, Associate Professor of American Studies and Urban Studies at Brown, about the first American globalist: ex-Republican Presidential Candidate Wendell Willkie. Sandy is the author of 'The Idealist: Wendell Willkie's Wartime Quest to Build One World,' and as he describes in it, after losing to FDR, Willkie circumnavigated the globe in 1942, steeled the Allied countries' resolve to fight Nazism, and in the process picked up a new politics of globalism. Back home Willkie wrote 'One World,' a wildly successful book that briefly pushed Americans to embrace the causes of decolonization. Mark and Sandy discuss Willkie’s odyssey, and its relevance for the world we find ourselves in today.

You can learn more about Zipp’s book here: [https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674737518]