Turkmenistan rarely makes international headlines–and when it did, it was often stories that highlighted things like the strange cult of personality that surrounded Saparmurat Niyazov, its first post-Soviet president, who named months after himself and made his memoir required reading. Olivier Hein joins us on the show today to talk about Turkmenistan’s long history: as…
In 1722, a war band of grizzled Afghans battled their way from Kandahar to Esfahan and, after a grim siege, overthrew the 200-year-old Safavid dynasty. For the next 70 years, Iran suffered from non-stop civil and foreign wars. Not until the Qajar dynasty took control did the exhausted and impoverished country know some measure of…
The story of the Moy family—U.S.-born Chinese-American siblings who grow up in the first half of the 20th century—is one that spans the Pacific, covering New York, Chicago, and cosmopolitan Shanghai. It’s a story that spans the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Chinese Civil War, and the early Cold War—and stars one sibling…
In 1971, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi threw a party to celebrate the 2,500-year anniversary of the Persian Empire. It was planned to be a massive party, with tents set up in the desert, and invitations sent to just about every world leader across both the Western and Soviet blocs. Robert Templer writes about this celebration–and…
Iran is, once again, in global headlines, following U.S. strikes on the country earlier this year. Operation Epic Fury, as the Department of Defense called it, is the latest twist in Iran’s modern history, starting from the coup that brought the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to power, through the 1956 coup against Mossadegh and the…
That the US is “imperialistic”, if not necessarily “imperial”, has been a point of political rhetoric my entire life. That, however, the US constitutes and maintains an actual empire is an idea of somewhat more recent vintage; whether or not Daniel Immerwahr was the first to make the point in How to Hide an Empire:…
Histories of the Korean War (1950-1953) published in the United States have been surprisingly numerous for a conflict known as America’s “forgotten war”, but few books have appeared in English on the division and occupation of Korea by the Soviet Union and the United States (1945-48). Fewer still have focused on what happened in Korea…
In October 1943, the Gripsholm—a Swedish ocean liner—and the Teia Maru—a Japanese troop ship—sat in Mormugao, a port in Portuguese India. There, the two ships exchanged their passengers: Allied civilians stuck in Japanese territory after Pearl Harbor , and an assortment of Japanese, Japanese-American, and other Japanese-ethnic people from the Americas. The trade capped a…
North Korea has survived wars, sanctions, and isolation—to the point where it now seems that the continuation of the Kim dynasty, and a starkly divided Korea, is assured. But history is filled with events where some change might have drastically altered how a country’s development might have gone. North Korea is no different, at least…
“The Persian learned men,” wrote Herodotus in his Histories, “say that the Phoenicians were the cause of the feud.” Historians have been trying ever since to understand the series of wars that set Europe and Asia against each other, going back to the Trojan War. In The Race for Universal Monarchy, Ebru Turan argues that,…
The British Empire covered much of the world during the 19th century–and each time someone moved through it, they left a paper trail in their wake. Julia Stephens, the author of Worldly Afterlives: Tracing Family Trails Between India and Empire (Princeton University Press, 2025), uses that archive of documents to try to piece together the…
In one of the cases of history not so much repeating itself as rhyming, the current trend of Chinese Americans moving to China, either for opportunity or to avoid perceived threats, is hardly a new phenomenon. Historian Charlotte Brooks tells such a story from a century ago in her new book, The Moys of New…
Sequels seldom seem as good as the works from which they spring. Many seem to repeat the originals, simply going over the same ground in a similar way. Such is thankfully not the case with Fyodor Tertitskiy’s new book, Pyongyang on the Brink: Sixteen Crises That Shaped North Korea, his sequel to last year’s Accidental Tyrant: The…
Leading the vanguard of his armies across India, Genghis Khan suddenly encountered an uncanny animal, blue‑green in colour, with the body of a bull, the tail of a horse, and a single horn. The Great Khan declared this apparition inauspicious, turned his reins, and led his army back to Mongolia. In The Khan and the Unicorn,…
With the US-Israeli war against Iran into its second month, the publication of Homa Katouzian’s history of the 1979 Iranian revolution couldn’t be timelier. The outcome of the current war may decide the fate of that revolution and the Islamic regime that resulted from it. Katouzian’s conclusion mentions the June 2025 joint US-Israeli attacks targeting…