Modern History

(Note: This interview first aired last year.) Our guest is David Nasaw, the bestselling author and noted historian. He joins us to discuss his book, "The Last Million: Europe's Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War." It offers a far-reaching history of the one million refugees left behind in Germany after WWII, a disparate group that Nasaw refers to as "the last million." As explained in this careful documentation of postwar displacement and statelessness, the fate of "the last million" has been largely unknown, or hidden, until now.

In the first two decades of the 21st century, New York City has experienced a terrorist attack, a blackout, a hurricane, an historic recession, widespread social injustice, and, of course, the current pandemic. How has all of this affected the lives of New Yorkers? Our guest is the bestselling author Craig Taylor, whose new book draws on years of interviews with hundreds of NYC residents in order to render an indelible group portrait of the city. As per Publishers Weekly: "[This is] an engrossing, multihued 'oral portrait' of New York City as told by the people who live there....

(Note: This interview first aired last summer.) Our guest is Colin Dickey, a writer perhaps best known for his popular nonfiction book from years ago, "Ghostland." Dickey is a regular contributor to The LA Review of Books and Lapham's Quarterly; he also co-edited "The Morbid Anatomy Anthology." An active cultural historian and associate professor of creative writing at National University, he joins us to discuss his latest book.

Our guest is Tamara Payne, who's the primary researcher and co-author (along with her late father, the esteemed investigative journalist Les Payne) of "The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X." The recipient of the 2020 National Book Award, this biography draws upon countless interviews in order to contextualize Malcolm's life not only within the Nation of Islam but also within the broader sweep of modern American history.

(Note: This interview originally aired back in June.) Our guest is Sonia Shah, a science journalist who's long covered the intersection of science, politics, culture, and human rights for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other outlets. Her latest book, which she tells us about, takes on many of our centuries-long assumptions about migration. That book is "The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move." Per The New York Times Book Review, it focuses "with compassion and insight a deeply complex and challenging subject....

Our guest on ST is Bina Venkataraman, a journalist and former adviser in the Obama administration who has helped communities and businesses prepare for climate change. She tells us about her book, "The Optimist's Telescope," which is now out in paperback. This work explores why we as human beings tend NOT to think ahead -- and what can be done to change that.

Our guest is the widely celebrated novelist and nonfiction writer Nicholson Baker, whose new book is an engrossing mash-up of history, journalism, and memoir. The book is called "Baseless," and it's focused on the modern-day Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA. Baker's gripping and typically candid account carefully documents what it feels like to try to write about major historical events in a world of pervasive redactions, witheld records, widespead cover-ups, and glacially slow governmental responses.

Our guest is Colin Dickey, a writer perhaps best known for his popular nonfiction book from a years ago, "Ghostland." Dickey is a regular contributor to The LA Review of Books and Lapham's Quarterly; he also co-edited The Morbid Anatomy Anthology.

Our guest is Pam Fessler, an award-winning correspondent with NPR News who mainly covers poverty, philanthropy, and voting issues. She joins us to discuss her new book, "Carville's Cure," which is tells the fascinating and little-known story of the only leprosy colony in the continental United States. This facility, located in remote Carville, Louisiana, somehow became -- over the course of the 20th century -- much more of a refuge than a prison.

(Note: This interview first aired back in December.) Our guest is Phil Keith, the co-author of a remarkable biography titled "All Blood Runs Red: The Legendary Life of Eugene Bullard -- Boxer, Pilot, Soldier, Spy." As was noted of this compelling work in a starred review in Publishers Weekly: "This dazzling biography, drawing on the subject's unpublished memoir, explores the incredible life and times of the first African-American fighter pilot: Eugene 'Gene' Bullard.

Our guest is Sonia Shah, a science journalist who's long covered the intersection of science, politics, culture, and human rights for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Scientific American, and other outlets. Her new book, which she tells us about, takes on many of our centuries-long assumptions about migration. The book is called "The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move." This work, per The New York Times Book Review, focuses "with compassion and insight a deeply complex and challenging subject....

On this edition of ST, a discussion from our archives. In 2017, we spoke with Richard Rothstein, a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute and a Fellow at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Widely seen as a leading authority on U.S.

Our guest is Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, whose new book is a primer on world history -- specifically, world history as it's understood in our current global era. As the COVID-19 pandemic has made all too clear, we live in an age when things happening thousands of miles away can directly (and drastically) affect our own lives. As Haass explains on StudioTulsa, he wrote this book in order to help readers of all backgrounds make sense of this complicated, interconnected, crisis-laden world.

Our guest is Ariana Neumann, a journalist born and raised in Venezuela who's now based in London. She joins us to discuss her first book, just out, which is a work of memoir/history that digs deeply into the secrets of her own father's past. That is, the years he spent hiding from the Nazis in Berlin, the murder of many of his family members in the Holocaust, and the brave choice he finally made to create a new life for himself. As noted in a starred reviw of this work in Booklist: "Profound, gripping, and gut-wrenching....

On this edition of ST, we speak with the scholar who will deliver the free-to-the-public 2020 Cadenhead-Settle Memorial Lecture here at TU tonight (Tuesday the 3rd). Our guest is is Dr. Christy L. Pichichero, whose work focuses on the racial (geo)politics of the early modern era in France. Her talk is titled "Black | Power: Race, Empire, & Privilege in Enlightenment France." Dr.

Our guest on ST is Dr. Sally Roesch Wagner, one of America's leading experts on women's history, who is on the faculty at Syracuse University (among other schools) and has been teaching college-level women's studies courses for more than 45 years. She'll be speaking tomorrow, Friday the 21st, at 7pm in the Helmerich Center for American Research (on the campus of Gilcrease Museum). Dr. Wagner's talk, titled "Forgotten Champions of Women's Liberty," is free and open to the public. More info is posted here.

Our guest is Phil Keith, who is the co-author of a remarkable new biography titled "All Blood Runs Red: The Legendary Life of Eugene Bullard -- Boxer, Pilot, Soldier, Spy." As was noted of this compelling work in a starred review in Publishers Weekly: "This dazzling biography, drawing on the subject's unpublished memoir, explores the incredible life and times of the first African-American fighter pilot: Eugene 'Gene' Bullard. At 12, he ran away from Columbus, Ga., to escape the vicious racism of the early-20th-century South for France, the country revered by his formerly enslaved father.

Our guest is Dr. Matthew Restall, a Professor of Latin American History and Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. He tells us about his 2018 book, "When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story Behind the Meeting that Changed History." As was noted in the pages of The New Yorker: "Restall skillfully describes a subtler story of relationships both loving and coercive." And further, from The Wall Street Journal: "Restall has a well-earned reputation as a myth-buster in the history of the New World....

The acclaimed journalist and bestselling author Daniel Okrent is our guest; he tells us about his new book, "The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America." This book looks back to the 1920s is reveal a dark and forgotten chapter of American history -- a troubling era with serious implications for the present day.

The 22nd Annual Yom HaShoah, which is a yearly Interfaith Holocaust Commemoration, will happen in Tulsa on Monday the 6th at Temple Israel (located at 2004 E. 22nd Place). The event begins at 7pm and is free to the public. This year's gathering, co-presented by the Tulsa Council for Holocaust Education and the Tulsa City-County Library, is titled "Survival in the Shadows: Hidden Children of the Holocaust." Our guest on ST is the keynote speaker for this gathering: Abraham H.

Our guest is David Treuer, an Ojibwe writer from the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota, whose previous books include four novels and two books of nonfiction. He joins us to discusshis new book, a well-regarded historical study called "The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present." As was noted of this work in a front-page appreciation in The New York Times Book Review: "An informed, moving, and kaleidoscopic portrait....

On this installment of ST, a discussion of the history of race relations in America -- and of a landmark Supreme Court decision that profoundly shaped this history. Steve Luxenberg is our guest; he is a longtime senior editor at The Washington Post, and his new book is "Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America's Journey from Slavery to Segregation." As Louis Menand of The New Yorker Magazine has noted: "Luxenberg has chosen a fresh way to tell the story of Plessy.... 'Separate' is deeply researched, and it wears its learning lightly. It's a storytelling kind of book....

Our guest is Sarah Archer, a writer and curator who contributes to Slate, The Atlantic, Architectural Digest, and other publications. She tells us about her book, "Midcentury Christmas," which explores what Archer thinks of as the turning-point of Christmas in America -- i.e., the years just after WWII. This was an era when when new technologies, changing social and economic roles, and off-the-charts prosperity altered everything about American life -- including the Yuletide season.

Our guest is the award-winning British author and journalist William Atkins, whose new book -- a dense and engrossing blend of history, memoir, geography, and travel writing -- is called "The Immeasurable World: Journeys in Desert Places." It's a work that, per The Wall Street Journal, "courts comparisons with the capaciously learned nature writing of John McPhee. But there's also an open-ended spiritual quest to Mr.

Looking for a great book or three to relax with this summer? Of course you are. We've got lots of surefire suggestions on that score from Nancy Pearl, our longtime book reviewer here on StudioTulsa. A widely beloved literary critic, editor, author, and now-retired librarian -- and a former resident of Tulsa -- Nancy shares with us new and recent works of fiction, mystery, history, and more. Here, in order, are the books that she chats with us about:

1) "1947: Where Now Begins" by Elisabeth Asbrink

2) "Mozart's Starling" by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

(Note: This interview originally aired back in February.) The author and journalist Mark Whitaker is our guest on StudioTulsa. A former managing editor of CNN Worldwide, and a previous Washington bureau chief for NBC News, Whitaker has a new book out, which he tells us about.

Since the end of World War II, the Atlantic Alliance between the countries of Western Europe and the United States has been a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy. Despite various strains over the years, my guest today has said: "We've always argued about the 'means,' not the 'ends,' of policy. Now we seem to want very different end results." He was referring in this comment to the Trump Administration's decision to withdraw from the Iranian nuclear deal, despite near-unanimous European opposition.

Our guest is the California-based seismologist, Dr. Lucy Jones, whose new book is "The Big Ones." It offers a bracing look at some of the history's greatest natural disasters, world-altering events whose reverberations we continue to feel today. At Pompeii, for example, Dr. Jones explores how a volcanic eruption in the first century AD challenged prevailing views of religion. Later in the book, she examines the California floods of 1862 and how they show that memory itself can change or fade over successive generations.

Tulsa Ballet will soon offer, on May 3rd through the 6th, its season-ending Signature Series production, a gathering of three distinct yet thought-provoking works on themes cultural, social, and political. Alongside ballets by Nacho Duato and Ma Cong, the 1932 anti-war piece "The Green Table" will be staged. Our guests on ST are two internationally respected dancers who are both in town to handle the staging of "The Green Table" -- Jeanette Vondersaar and Claudio Schellino.

Our guest on this edition of StudioTulsa is Eric Schlosser, the well-regarded American journalist and filmmaker whose bestselling books include "Fast Food Nation" (2001), "Reefer Madness" (2003), "Chew on This" (2006), and "Command and Control" (2013). This last-named title reveals the details of America's ongoing efforts to prevent nuclear weapons from being stolen, sabotaged, or detonated by accident.