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Podcast: New Books in American Studies
Episode: Paul Thomas Chamberlin, "Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II" (Basic Books, 2025)
Description: In popular memory, the Second World War was an unalloyed victory for freedom over totalitarianism, marking the demise of the age of empires and the triumph of an American-led democratic order. In Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II (Basic Books, 2025), historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin opens a longer and wider aperture on World War II and recasts the war as a brutal conflict for survival and hegemony between declining and ascendant imperial powers.
Scorched Earth dismantles the myth of World War II as a “good war.” Instead, Chamberlin depicts the conflict as a massive battle beset b...