Victor McFarland is an assistant professor in the Missouri University Department of History. His research interests center on energy, the environment, and U.S. relations with the Middle East, with a special focus on Saudi Arabia. His book Oil Powers: A History of the U.S.-Saudi Alliance is available now from Columbia University Press.

Originally from North Idaho, Dr. McFarland received his B.A. from Stanford University and his M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University. Before coming to the University of Missouri, he was a Miller Center fellow at the University of Virginia in 2012-13 and a Dickey Center fellow at Dartmouth College in 2013-14. In 2018-19 he served as a Warren Center faculty fellow at Harvard University.

You can follow him on twitter, here.

From the Publisher:

Since the mid-twentieth century, the United States and Saudi Arabia have built a close but often troubled alliance. In this critical history, Victor McFarland reveals the deep ties binding the leaders of the two nations.

Connecting foreign relations and domestic politics, McFarland challenges the view that the U.S.-Saudi alliance is the inevitable consequence of American energy demand and Saudi Arabia’s huge oil reserves. Oil Powers traces the growth of the alliance through a dense web of political, economic, and social connections that bolstered royal and executive power and the national-security state. McFarland shows how U.S. and Saudi elites collaborated to advance their shared interests against rivals at home and abroad. During the 1970s, as higher oil prices enriched the Saudi government, destabilized the American economy, and changed the balance of power in the Middle East, leaders of both countries responded by consolidating their alliance. Facing objections from their own people, Washington and Riyadh chose to shield their partnership from public oversight and accountability. While American support empowered the Saudi royal family and helped the kingdom expand its influence across the Middle East, Saudi elites also encouraged a rightward shift in U.S. foreign and economic policy—with profound long-term effects. Oil Powers reveals the role of the U.S.-Saudi alliance in laying the groundwork for American military involvement in the Middle East and the entrenchment of a global order fueled by oil.

Some Highlights:

Why Victor studies US - Saudi policy

Arabic language

Source base for the book

Availability of Saudi sources

What is an oil power?

Is the US-Saudi relationship an "Alliance?"

From King Abdulaziz to Prince MBS

The importance of the 1970s

Communism and the Cold War

Israel

The two-country approach to history

Suggestions:

Victor - Wadjda, (2013) film by Haifaa al-Mansour

Steven - Cities of Salt, (1989) book by Abdelrahman Munif

Cover image: King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, President Nixon and Mrs Nixon (May, 1971).

https://youtu.be/DK6kYku6o7Y

Dr. Danielle Giffort is a medical sociologist who studies the politics of health and social movements. She recently published the book, Acid Revival: The Psychedelic Renaissance and the Quest for Medical Legitimacy (University of Minnesota, 2020). She is currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Liberal Arts at the St. Louis College of Pharmacy. Her research has appeared in Gender & Society, Sociology Compass, PsychCritiques, and MedED Portal.

You can read more at her website, here.

From the Publisher:

Psychedelic drugs are making a comeback. In the mid-twentieth century, scientists actively studied the potential of drugs like LSD and psilocybin for treating mental health problems. After a decades-long hiatus, researchers are once again testing how effective these drugs are in relieving symptoms for a wide variety of psychiatric conditions, from depression and obsessive–compulsive disorder to posttraumatic stress disorder and substance addiction. In Acid Revival, Danielle Giffort examines how this new generation of researchers and their allies are working to rehabilitate psychedelic drugs and to usher in a new era of psychedelic medicine.

As this team of researchers and mental health professionals revive the field of psychedelic science, they are haunted by the past and by one person in particular: psychedelic evangelist Timothy Leary. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews with people working on scientific psychedelia, Giffort shows how today’s researchers tell stories about Leary as an “impure” scientist and perform his antithesis to address a series of lingering dilemmas that threaten to rupture their budding legitimacy. Acid Revival presents new information about the so-called psychedelic renaissance and highlights the cultural work involved with the reassembly of dormant areas of medical science.This colorful and accessible history of the rise, fall, and reemergence of psychedelic medicine is infused with intriguing narratives and personalities—a story for popular science aficionados as well as for scholars of the history of science and medicine.

Some Highlights:

Knowledge Production

Timothy Leary and LSD research

Albert Hoffman and the discovery of LSD

Indigenous cultures and use of psychedelics

Eastern philosophy and mysticism

Caution with psychedelic research

Drug - Set - Setting methodology

Objective truth in scientific research

Conversion therapy

Alcoholism remedy

Self-Experimentation

Researchers today - bringing in neuroscience

Roland Griffiths and Johns Hopkins

Suggestions:

Danielle - Right now w/ John Globlikon on YT

Steven - Jekyll and Hyde

https://youtu.be/65pxO8cjvR4

 

Roger Moorhouse studied history at the University of London and is a visiting professor at the College of Europe in Warsaw. He is the author of several books on World War II history, including Berlin at War (shortlisted for the Hessell-Tiltman Prize) and The Devils’ Alliance. He lives in the United Kingdom.

His new book, Poland 1939: The Outbreak of World War II (Basic 2020), looks at the beginning of World War II in Poland.

 

 

 

 

From the Publisher:

A gripping history of the September Campaign and the onset of World War II

For Americans, World War II began in December of 1941, with the bombing of Pearl Harbor; but for Poland, the war began on September 1, 1939, when Hitler's soldiers invaded, followed later that month by Stalin's Red Army. The conflict that followed saw the debut of many of the features that would come to define the later war-blitzkrieg, the targeting of civilians, ethnic cleansing, and indiscriminate aerial bombing-yet it is routinely overlooked by historians.

In Poland 1939, Roger Moorhouse reexamines the least understood campaign of World War II, using original archival sources to provide a harrowing and very human account of the events that set the bloody tone for the conflict to come.

Podcast Highlights:

The beginning of World War II in Europe

How history is often "Written by the victors"

Nazi propaganda

Dispelling the Calvary vs. Tanks trope

Race war against Poland

The Soviet Union - victims, victors, or perpetrators?

Polish resistance and the fight against invasion

French and British response to the war

Writing for a broad audience

Elevating Polish accounts of the war

https://youtu.be/w27y5b53s1g

 

Suggestions:

Roger: Katyn - Andrzej Wajda

Steven: 19 Polish Songs - Frederic Chopin

Cover image: German troops breaking the border barrier in the Polish town of Sopot on the morning of 1 September 1939. The Soviet invasion would follow on 17 September.

James Carter is a writer and historian of modern China. He earned his PhD from Yale University under the direction of Jonathan Spence, and has taught since 1999 at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. His new book is Champions Day: The End of Old Shanghai, coming in June from W.W. Norton. In it, Carter describes the many worlds of Shanghai on the eve of World War II, centered on the city’s celebrated race track just weeks before Pearl Harbor.

Dr. Carter is the author of two previous books: Heart of Buddha, Heart of China: The Life of Tanxu, a 20th-century Monk (Oxford, 2010) and Creating a Chinese Harbin: Nationalism in an International City, 1916-1932 (Cornell, 2002). He has also written about China’s modern history and its relations with the West for the Times Literary Supplement, the Washington Post Monkey Cage blog, ChinaFile, the Los Angeles Review of Books China Channel, and numerous scholarly publications.

More information about Dr Carter’s speaking and publications can be found at his website. You can follow him on Twitter here. Pre-order your copy of Champions Day here.

From the Publisher:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWarwF2wIos

 

How a single day revealed the history and foreshadowed the future of Shanghai.

It is November 12, 1941, and the world is at war. In Shanghai, just weeks before Pearl Harbor, thousands celebrate the birthday of China’s founding father, Sun Yat-sen, in a new city center built to challenge European imperialism. Across town, crowds of Shanghai residents from all walks of life attend the funeral of China’s wealthiest woman, the Chinese-French widow of a Baghdadi Jewish businessman whose death was symbolic of the passing of a generation that had seen Shanghai’s rise to global prominence. But it is the racetrack that attracts the largest crowd of all. At the center of the International Settlement, the heart of Western colonization—but also of Chinese progressivism, art, commerce, cosmopolitanism, and celebrity—Champions Day unfolds, drawing tens of thousands of Chinese spectators and Europeans alike to bet on the horses.In a sharp and lively snapshot of the day’s events, James Carter recaptures the complex history of Old Shanghai. Champions Day is a kaleidoscopic portrait of city poised for revolution.

Podcast Highlights:

Learning languages and living in Harbin

The Shanghai International Settlement

Cosmopolitanism among Shanghailanders

Fasination with Chinese culture

Nostalgia for the past in China

Shanghai War

Japanese invasion of China

Lonely island period

Dong Daiyo and the modern Shanghai

Liza Hardoon

The first Americans to die in World War II

The Use of digital Sources in research

Suggestions:

James: Historical Photographs of China, Train to Busan

Steven: Shanghai Ghetto, Snowpiercer

 

https://youtu.be/T3X07T7kGIM

 

Cover Image:

From: Twentieth century impressions of Hong-kong, Shanghai, and other Treaty Ports of China. Their history, people, commerce, industries, and resources

Harry Blutstein has worked as a freelance journalist since 1972 and his articles have appeared in major Australian newspapers. He is an adjunct professor at RMIT University and a fellow at the University of Melbourne. More recently he has published several books: An Insider's Guide to Australia (Kummerly & Frey, 1995), Ascent of Globalisation (Manchester University Press, 2016) and his latest, Cold War Games (Echo Publishing, 2017) and has been reviewed in the Sydney Morning Herald, He is currently working on a book on the 1968 Olympic Games, the working title of which is Games of Discontent: Protests and Political Battles at the 1968 Mexico Olympic Games, which should be available mid-2021. His twitter handle is @harryblutstein.

About Cold War Games:

Cold War Games: Spies, Subterfuge and Secret Operations

 The 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games have become known as the ‘friendly games’, but East-West rivalry ensured that they were anything but friendly. From the bloody semi-final water polo match between the USSR and Hungary, to the large number of athletes who defected to the West, sport and politics collided during the Cold War.

Cold War Games shows vividly how the USSR and US exploited the Melbourne Olympic Games for propaganda, turning athletic fields, swimming pools and other sporting venues into battlefields in which each fought for supremacy.

There were glimmers of peace and solidarity. Cold War Games also tells the love story between Czechoslovak discus thrower Olga Fikotová, and American hammer thrower Hal Connolly, and their struggle to overcome Cold War politics to marry.

Cold War Games is a lively, landmark book, with fresh information from ASIO files and newly discovered documents from archives in the USSR, US and Hungary, revealing secret operations in Melbourne and showing just how pivotal the 1956 Olympic Games were for the great powers of the Cold War.

 

Some Highlights: 

Harry's background interest in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics

1956 Hungarian Revolution

Privilege of athletes behind the iron curtain

"The Friendly Games" and the power of olympic sport

Bloody water polo "Blood in the Water"

Spies and Aussie Rules Football

The decision of defection for an athlete

Vladimir Kutz and running through the pain

The Power of Protest in Sports

1968 Olympic games and Harry's upcoming work

Stalin vs. Tito and Soviet Soccer

Suggestions:

Harry: Read fun books, such as the work of Carl Hiaasen

Steven: Sign-up with your local library and read books for free (especially now!)

https://youtu.be/3ZNqpfItMfU

 

 

Dr. Thomas DiBlasi is an associate professor at St. Joseph's College in New York, where he teaches and writes about the history of psychology.  Tom completed his PhD at Hofstra where he received general and specialized training in treating anxiety, depression, anger, and crisis counseling. At St. Joseph's College, he I teaches undergraduate students and research anger, aggression, and revenge.  I am lucky enough to have nearly ten publications and over 25 presentations on such topics. I consider myself fortunate to have a clinical and a teaching job, where people trust me to be vulnerable and allow me to help them carve their path.  You can read more, here.

You can reach Tom on Psychology Today and My OCD Care

You can follow Tom on Twitter @DiBlasiPhD.

Some Highlights:

Psychology- is it really a science?

Objectivity and history

John Watson and Behaviorism

Predict, Control, Describe, and Explain

Associationalism, neobehaviorism, and sociobehaviorism

Teaching undergraduates online during the spread of COVID-19

Substance abuse, anger management, and the compassion of psychology

Use of technology for the development of social skills and emotion

Fire Emblem, Super Smash Bros., and the benefits of the Nintendo Switch

Tools for online teaching: Watercooler dialogue, discussion posts and replies, and standard meeting times

Creating To-Do lists and schedules to get through shelter-in-place days

Suggestions:

Tom: Use behaviorism to change your behavior and live the life that you want to live. Make to-do lists the night before and set out to accomplish them the next day. Use positive reinforcement to help develop behaviors. Read some of the classics:

Steven: Play Football Manager 20 for free (Until April 1, 2020 on steam!)

 

https://youtu.be/6eCY-eSbE8w

Dr. Anna Clayfield is an expert in history and languages and the current Programme Leader for BA Modern Languages & Lecturer in Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Chester. Her latest book is The Guerrilla Legacy of the Cuban Revolution (University Press of Florida, 2019).

You can follow Anna on twitter @AnnaClayfield

 

 

 

 

Buy the Book: 

About the Book: 

Analyzing official discourse, including newspapers, history textbooks, army training manuals, the writings of Che Guevara, and the speeches of Fidel Castro, Clayfield examines how the Cuban government has promoted guerrilla motifs. After 1959, the revolutionary leadership relied on this discourse to shape a new political culture. During the implementation of Soviet-style management in the late 1960s and 1970s, Cuba underwent profound structural changes, but the beliefs and values that underpinned the Revolution—and that were linked to the guerrilla ethos—were still upheld.

Clayfield traces the shifting ideologies that circulated in Cuba during the 1980s to show how this rhetorical strategy helped prevent the proliferation of a siege mentality. The guerrilla code became a recourse Cuban leadership used to steel the population through the 1990s Special Period following the collapse of the Soviet Union. And while the outside world perceived the changes that took place during Raúl Castro’s tenure to be signs the Revolution’s socialist model was fading, Clayfield proves guerrillerismo remained an important anchor for the new regime. By weaving the guerrilla ethos into the fabric of Cuban identity, the government has garnered legitimacy for the political authority of former guerrilleros, even decades after the end of armed conflicts.

The Guerrilla Legacy of the Cuban Revolution chronicles how guerrilla rhetoric has allowed the Revolution to adapt and transform over time while appearing to remain true to its founding principles. It also raises the question of just how long this discourse can sustain the Revolution when its leaders are no longer veterans of the sierra, those guerrillas who participated in the armed struggle that brought them to power so many years ago.

Some Highlights: 

The Guerrilla Ethos

The benefits of studying languages

Santiago de Cuba and Havana - two sides of the same island?

Fidel's arrival in Cuba, Campesinos, and the beginning of the Revolution

Guerilla Warfare at odds with the Soviet Union?

Using Speeches and public documents to uncover the history of Guerrillerismo

The special period and changing views of the Revolution

The next generation of leadership in Cuba

Forgetting history or being faithful to history?

#SomosContinuidad

Hasta la Victoria Siempre

 

https://youtu.be/AfIr2kVOcJw

 

Suggestions:

Anna: Visit Cuba, study abroad, and read widely (perhaps you can start with the works of Antoni Kapcia

Steven: Listen to Silvio Rodriguez, particularly "Te doy una cancion"

Dr. Ricky W. Law is a historian of interwar Germany, Japan, and transnational movements. His new book, Transnational Nazism: Ideology and Culture in German-Japanese Relations, 1919–1936, explores the cultural context of Tokyo and Berlin’s political rapprochement in 1936.

Law shares his fascinating story on this episode of the Hour of History podcast explaining how he mastered German, taught in Japan and learned Japanese and combined the two skills to write history. He has shared his knowledge with students in courses that he created, with themes on genocide and weapons of mass destruction, nation-states in film, and democracy. He plans to develop other courses on German, Japanese, and Roman histories.

He is currently working on a book manuscript on interwar and wartime Japanese foreign relations through the lens of foreign language acquisition.

You can follow him on twitter here: @rickywlaw

Read his book:

From the Publisher: 

In 1936, Nazi Germany and militarist Japan built a partnership which culminated in the Tokyo-Berlin Axis. This study of interwar German-Japanese relations is the first to employ sources in both languages. Transnational Nazism was an ideological and cultural outlook that attracted non-Germans to become adherents of Hitler and National Socialism, and convinced German Nazis to identify with certain non-Aryans. Because of the distance between Germany and Japan, mass media was instrumental in shaping mutual perceptions and spreading transnational Nazism. This work surveys the two national media to examine the impact of transnational Nazism. When Hitler and the Nazi movement gained prominence, Japanese newspapers, lectures and pamphlets, nonfiction, and language textbooks transformed to promote the man and his party. Meanwhile, the ascendancy of Hitler and his regime created a niche for Japan in the Nazi worldview and Nazified newspapers, films, nonfiction, and voluntary associations.

Podcast Highlights:

Current relevance of studying Nazification of Japan

What appealed to the Japanese in Nazism?

How Hitler was viewed by the Japanese

Language skills in history

How did people travel between Japan and Germany

Ideological outlooks in pre-War Germany and Japan

Air travel in the 1920s

Nonfiction and the spread of ideology

Radio crossing continents

The "strange alliance"

Suggestions: Listen to find out!

https://youtu.be/KHTu3rIDfuM

Cover image: A scene from a musical revue entitled "Heil Hitler" by the Nichigeki dancing team, staged at Tokyo's Nichigeki Music Hall, Yūrakuchō to welcome the Hitlerjugend that visited Japan in September 1938. From left to right: Keiko Suda, Sanae Shibata, Akemi Shirogane, Chizuko Osabe, Midori Ono. According to the caption in Japanese, the uniform style matches more the United States Army or the Royal Thai Army.

Dr. Ferenc Laczó is an expert on European history and the editor of the recent volume The Legacy of Division: East and West after 1989 (CEU Press 2019). He is currently assistant professor in history at the University of Maastricht where he teaches in the European Studies BA, MA and Minor programs as well as at University College Maastricht. He also acts as the academic secretary of the research group Politics and Culture in Europe and is a member of the Faculty Council.

His main research interests lie in political and intellectual history, modern and contemporary European history with a special focus on Central and Eastern Europe in the twentieth century, Jewish history and the history of the Holocaust, and questions of history and memory. He is the author of Hungarian Jews in the Age of Genocide. An Intellectual History, 1929-1948 (Leiden: Brill, 2016) and two Hungarian-language books Német múltfeldolgozás. Beszélgetések történészekkel a huszadik század kulcskérdéseiről [The German Process of Dealing with the Past. Conversations with Historians on Key Questions of the Twentieth Century] (Budapest: Kijárat, 2016) and Felvilágosult vallás és modern katasztrófa közt. Magyar zsidó gondolkodás a Horthy-korban [Between Enlightened Religion and Modern Catastrophe. Hungarian Jewish Thought in the Horthy Era](Budapest: Osiris, 2014). Laczó is the editor or co-editor of several volumes and thematic journal issues, including (with Joachim von Puttkamer) Catastrophe and Utopia. Jewish Intellectuals in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), Confronting Devastation. Memoirs of Holocaust Survivors from Hungary (Toronto: Azrieli, 2019), and (with Luka Lisjak Gabrijelcic) The Legacy of Division. East and West after 1989 (CEU 2019). His work has appeared on BBC World Service, in China Daily, Veja and Index.hu. His writings have also appeared in Czech, Danish, German, Hebrew, Polish, Slovene and Turkish translation. His books have been reviewed in more than twenty journals.

Many of Laczó's publications are accessible via academia.edu and so is his complete list of publications.

Read the Book:

Overview:

This volume examines the legacy of the East–West divide since the implosion of the communist regimes in eastern Europe in 1989. In a series of original essays, authors from the fields of European and global history, politics and cultureaddress questions fundamental to our understanding of Europe today: How have perceptions and misperceptions between the two halves of the continent changed over the last three decades? Can one speak of a new East-West divide? If so, what characterizes it and why has it re-emerged? Conversely, how have the hopes expressed in ’89 of reunifying Europe been fulfilled?

Some Highlights:

Living through the fall of the Iron Curtain

Walls dividing people, keeping some in and keeping some out

Nationalism in Eastern Europe

The "Myth of the West"

Russia's place in Europe after 1989

The shifting of the border between "east" and "west"

China's role in European change

Rejection of the east v. west dichotomy

Gender after 1989

Immigration and the United Kingdom

What do Poland and Italy have in common? How are they different?

Project of convergence in Europe

The UEFA Champions League and what Football (Soccer) and Tennis tell us about the world

Highlights from a number of contributions to the new volume!

Suggestions:

Ferenc: Don't spend too much time online! Go into different neighborhoods, talk to people, and make observations as an intelligent tourist.

Steven: Go to sporting events when you are an traveling. Observe the sports as anthropologists, political scientists, and historians might.

Douglas Smith is an award-winning historian and translator. His latest book is The Russian Job: How America Saved the Soviet Union From Ruin ( Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2019). Smith is the author of six books on Russia. His works have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He studied German and Russian at the University of Vermont, graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and has a doctorate in history from UCLA.Over the past thirty years Douglas has made many trips to Russia. In the 1980s, he was a Russian-speaking guide on the U.S. State Department’s exhibition “Information USA” that traveled throughout the USSR. He has worked as a Soviet affairs analyst at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Munich and once served as an interpreter for late President Reagan.Douglas has taught and lectured widely in the United States, Britain, and Europe and has appeared in documentaries for National Geographic, the BBC, and Netflix. He is the recipient of numerous awards and distinctions, including a Guggenheim fellowship, Fulbright scholarship, and a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study Center.His book Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy was a bestseller in the UK. It won the inaugural Pushkin House Russian Book Prize in 2013, was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, and was chosen Book of the Year by Andrew Solomon in Salon. His 2016 biography Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs was a finalist for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.Douglas is currently completing a book on the recently discovered photography archive of Major Martin J. Manhoff and a new translation of Konstantin Paustovsky’s epic memoir, The Story of a Life.Born and raised in Minnesota, Douglas has lived in Vienna, London, and Moscow, and is now based in Seattle with his wife and children.

Read the Book:

The Russian Job: How America Saved the Soviet Union From Ruin ( Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2019)

Overview: 

In 1921, facing one of the worst famines in history, the new Soviet government under Vladimir Lenin invited the American Relief Administration, the brainchild of Herbert Hoover, to save communist Russia from ruin. For two years, a small, daring band of Americans fed more than ten million men, women, and children across a million square miles of territory. It was the largest humanitarian operation in history—preventing the loss of countless lives, social unrest on a massive scale, and, quite possibly, the collapse of the communist state.

Now, almost a hundred years later, few in either America or Russia have heard of the ARA. The Soviet government quickly began to erase the memory of American charity. In America, fanatical anti-communism would eclipse this historic cooperation with the Soviet Union.

Douglas Smith resurrects the American relief mission from obscurity, taking the reader on an unforgettable journey from the heights of human altruism to the depths of human depravity. The story of the ARA is filled with political intrigue, espionage, the clash of ideologies, violence, adventure, and romance, and features some of the great historical figures of the twentieth century.

In a time of cynicism and despair about the world’s ability to confront international crises, The Russian Job is a riveting account of a cooperative effort unmatched before or since.

Some Highlights:

President Herbert Hoover

The American Relief Administration

Congressional backing to provide aid abroad

Writing for a general audience

Douglas Smith's academic background

American men and famine in the Soviet Union

Lenin's appeal for help

World War I veterans "famine shock"

Writing back home about service in the Soviet Union

The Holodomor and why the famine of 1921-23 isn't as well known