Pritzker Military Museum & Library Podcasts

In 1832, the Sauk leader Black Hawk led a thousand followers into Illinois to reclaim their ancestral lands. Federal troops arrived to force their withdrawal.

William A. Foley, Jr. served in Gen. George S. Patton’s “Ghost Corps”, joining the 94th Infantry Division as an eighteen year old in January 1945. The fall of the Third Reich was nearly within grasp, and Foley would see combat immediately.

Hastings focuses on Churchill from the outside in – through the eyes of those around him as well as those of the war-weary British people. It was an image more complicated than the one now remembered; Churchill’s inspiring rhetoric could not resolve the...

Dr. Weinberg is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an advisor to the National World War II Museum. He has held appointments at the U.S. Air Force Academy and Bonn University in Germany, and delivered lectures at the Naval War College,...

Driven to excel by a demanding father, Mullaney graduated second in his class from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. After completing the grueling courses of Ranger School, Mullaney continued to the University of Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, earning...

Born in Chicago, Harold Fritz had been studying to be a veterinarian when he received his draft notice in 1966. Three years later, he was a first lieutenant with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment in Vietnam.

Summing up decades of research on the 28th President, Cooper follows Woodrow Wilson from his youth in the antebellum South – where his family would be divided by the Civil War – through his years at the head of Princeton, where he developed the collegial...

With more than 5,000 sailors living and working on board, aircraft carriers have been described as floating cities. Being an American city in 1972 meant being part of a major social upheaval, as tensions broiled over civil rights, discrimination, and the war...

At the time of his death, in 1885, Ulysses S. Grant held a dramatically different place in the nation’s memory of the Civil War than he does today.

Jeff Shaara is the author of several best-selling works of military historical fiction, including Gods and Generals and The Last Full Measure, which completed the Civil War trilogy that began with his father’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Killer Angels. He...

President Theodore Roosevelt had a knack for handling the press corps, but sending his daughter Alice on a 1905 diplomatic mission to Asia might have been his masterstroke – she was a media darling and a household name, a fashion plate and an endless font...

Using case studies from the Philippines, Vietnam, and other conflicts over the last 150 years, Moyar argues instead that counterinsurgencies succeed or fail based on the leaders involved: their ability to inspire subordinates, adapt to complex situations,...

Lt. Thomas Norris had a dangerous mission to complete, and he had his pick of men to join him. He chose a 23 year old Navy SEAL named Michael Thornton. Norris would later say that was the smartest decision he ever made.

We Were Pirates is adapted from the colorful diaries and recollections of Robert Hunt, an enlisted man who served aboard the USS Tambor during World War II.

Archie Brown is Emeritus Professor of Politics at Oxford University and an Emeritus Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, where he taught for thirty-four years.