Here’s a bit more detail: Marco Werman interviews Harvard history professor Andrew Gordon about Japan’s acknowledgement that its ban on nuclear weapons in Japanese waters wasn’t always enforced. David Baron talks revenge with Michele Gelfand, a professor of pyschology at the University of Maryland at College Park. Finally, Erica Hirshler, Croll Senior Curator of Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, tells us how John Singer Sargent was influenced by Diego Velazquez. She’s the author of Sargent’s Daughters: The Biography of a Painting.

Click here for images of the Sargent and Velazquez paintings Hirshler discusses.Download MP3

Here are some links as well:

Amazon geoglyphs:

• Report on pre-Columbian geometric earthworks (pdf)
• Antiquity Journal
• geoglifos.com (Portuguese)

Nelson Mandela:

• BBC Audio slideshow: Long walk to freedom
• Archive video: Nelson Mandela freed after 27 years in prison

Japanese-Peruvians and WWII:

• See photos
• Japanese-Peruvian Oral History Project

Some of the names mentioned in HWGH#37:

Jean-Jacques Dessalines (pictured)

Henri Christophe

Alexandre Petion

Jean-Pierre Boyer

James Weldon Johnson

Dumarsais Estime

Stenio Vincent

Maurice Dartigue

Francois Duvalier “Papa Doc”

Jean-Claude Duvalier “Baby Doc”

Here are some useful links as well:

Daily Life in Yemen: A Photo Essay by Sandy Choi at foreignpolicy.com

Yemen for Dummies at foreignpolicy.com

Waq al-Waq blog about Yemen

Journalist and filmmaker Maziar Bahari discusses his new documentary, An Iranian Odyssey: Mossadegh, Oil, and the 1953 CIA Coup. The film premiered at the Boston Festival of Films from Iran at the Museum of Fine Arts on Saturday January 9th.

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• From Newsweek: 118 Days, 12 Hours, 54 Minutes
• The Boston Festival of Films from Iran
• Jeb Sharp’s 2004 series ‘The US and Iran’

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Download MP3

This week’s history podcast compiles the best of our stories commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall. Alex Gallafent chases down pieces of the original wall; Gerry Hadden returns to a border town he lived in before the wall came down; Susan Stone finds out what young Germans are learning about their past; Laura Lynch gives us Hungary’s version of tearing down the Iron Curtain; and finally, Gerry Hadden takes us to former East Berlin for a night of nostalgia. Download MP3

Download MP3

Who knew there were Soviet women combat pilots in WWII? The BBC’s Lucy Ash tells us how she came to know some of these women and produce a radio documentary and slide show about their lives and exploits. Also, we revisit the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979. Hard to believe it’s been 30 years since the 444-day ordeal began.  And we try to understand the complicated motivations of Pakistan’s military leaders by looking back at how Pakistan was formed and what its early years were like. Lots to chew on this week, much of it riveting.

And a few more useful links from this week’s podcast (HWGH#32):

Slavica Publishers, publisher of Anna Yegorova’s memoir Red Sky, Black Death.

Jeb Sharp’s 2004 radio series on the history of US-Iranian Relations.

BBC background on Pakistan

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On the history podcast this week a compilation of recent stories. Gerry Hadden tells us the story of a Nazi traitor who finally had his conviction overturned. Alex Gallafent tells us about changing U.S. views of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. And Marco Werman interviews Loyola University historian Elizabeth Schmidt about the significance of the September 28th stadium in Guinea.

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On this week’s history podcast you get the uncut version of Marco Werman’s quite riveting interview with James David Robenalt, author of the new book The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage during the Great War.  It’s about President Warren Harding and his long extramarital affair with his friend and neighbor Carrie Phillips.  One reason the story is so intriguing is that Phillips had strong pro-German sympathies in the run-up to World War One and may well have been a spy for Germany during the war itself.  During part of the time she was involved with Harding (this is before he was President), she and her daughter lived in Berlin. Her husband remained in Ohio and she returned to the U.S. periodically for secret trysts with Harding.  The affair is documented in a series of love letters between the two. Harding’s letters are under seal in the Library of Congress but Robenalt, a Cleveland lawyer, got his hands on a microfiche copy. He uses the letters to great effect.

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This week you’ve got How We Got Here at its best–making full use of audio that didn’t make it onto the radio show.  Haleh Esfandiari’s new memoir is called My Prison, My Home. In it she deftly weaves the story of her interrogation and imprisonment in 2007 into the larger narrative of the history of U.S.-Iranian relations. The result is a startling, moving portrait of finding inner strength under duress. Peter Maass also came in to talk about a new book. He spent eight years researching Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil. It shows. He knows the subject inside out and helps the rest of us put the oil we burn in context. It’s a rather devastating picture but with some hope attached. Also on the history podcast this week, Canadian health care expert and former politician Roy Romanow recounts the bitterness that accompanied Canadian health care reform half a century ago. And finally, Anne-Marie Goetz of UNIFEM, the UN Development Fund for Women, tells us why it’s so important that the U.N. Security Council is finally taking sexual violence in conflict and post-conflict zones seriously.

• My Prison, My Home
• Crude World
• How We Got Here on iTunes
• How We Got Here on Facebook

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It was striking this week–with all the talk at the United Nations of getting rid of nuclear weapons–that the rhetoric was coming from the mouths of world leaders rather than the megaphones of demonstrators. It got us wondering what ever happened to the nuclear disarmament movement? Jonathan Schell and Lawrence Wittner have some answers. Schell is a fellow at The Nation Institute and author of The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger. Wittner is Professor of History at the State University of New York, Albany, and author of Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement. That book is an abbreviated version of a much longer trilogy about the movement called The Struggle Against the Bomb.

Both describe the movement as losing steam but not dying at the end of the Cold War, and now experiencing a resurgence in part through the advocacy of  former (heavyweight, bipartisan) national security officials such as George Schultz, Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn and William Perry.

The U.N. General Assembly authorized a new U.N. agency for women last week. We’ll look at the years of advocacy that led to it. The World’s Jason Margolis helps answer a listener’s question about how this economic crisis compares to past ones, especially in terms of U.S. debt. And The World’s Alex Gallafent rereads Bertolt Brecht on the Crash of 1929.

This week’s podcast is a compilation of items from the radio show. First, the 70th anniversary of the start of WWII: Marco Werman interviews Svetlana Savranskaya of The National Security Archive at The George Washington University about Russian memories of WW2. You may remember Savranskaya; she helped us consider the parallels between the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1979 and the U.S.-led invasion in 2001 in HWGH#10. In another story pegged to the 70th anniversary of the start of WW2, The World’s Laura Lynch reports on a reunion of Holocaust survivors in London. And finally, in a footnote to HWGH #19 (about Gabon’s President Omar Bongo), The World’s Marco Werman tells us about the musical career of Bongo’s son and successor, Ali Ben Bongo. >>> Click here to join the “How We Got Here” Facebook Group Page.