This week on History Happy Hour: We welcome back historian John McManus to talk about the third volume of his Pacific War series, To the End of the Earth. From the liberation of the Philippines to the Battle of Okinawa and finally to the end of the war, John chronicles the struggles and triumphs of the US Army in the Pacific. We’ll talk about the march to ultimate victory, from the worm’s eye view of soldiers fighting in the mud to the battles between the generals mapping out the campaign.

As an Amazon Associate, HHH earns from qualifying purchases

John McManus is a military historian, author, and professor of military history at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. He also served as a visiting professor at the U.S. naval Academy McManus has published thirteen books critically acclaimed on numerous American military history topics. This is his fourth appearance on History Happy Hour.

This week on History Happy Hour: President Truman’s choice to drop the atomic bomb is the most debated decision in the 20th Century. But what if he, himself, did not fully understand the decisions being made until after the atomic bomb was used.

Chris and Rick will talk to historian Alex Wellerstein about his highly regarded new book The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age.

Alex Wellerstein is an Associate Professor of Science and Technology at the Stevens Institute of Technology. He is also a visiting researcher at the Nuclear Knowledges program, Center for International Studies, Sciences Po, Paris. He is the author of Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States, and he has written for The New Yorker, Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and many other venues. He is perhaps best known as the creator of the NUKEMAP, the world’s most popular online nuclear weapons effects simulator. He is also the author of the Doomsday Machines blog, and has taught at Harvard, MIT, and Georgetown University.

This week on History Happy Hour: Life in Berlin during World War II. What was it like for the four million people who lived there as things became increasingly desperate?

Our guest is author Ian Buruma, author of Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945. We’ll talk about the experiences of everyday citizens, soldiers, Jews, and slave laborers like his father. How did they deal with the onslaught that swept over them as the war went on?

Ian Buruma was born in the Netherlands. He is a professor at Bard College and lives in New York City. He has also lived and worked in Tokyo, Hong Kong, and London. He has written numerous books and is a regular contributor to Harper’s and The New Yorker.

This week on History Happy Hour: This week on History Happy Hour: Follow the money. That’s one way to discover the real story of America and its founding. Nothing gives a clearer insight into this history than the life of early America's dominant merchant trader, first bank president, and first central banker, Thomas Willing.

Richard Vague is a businessman, banker, and commentator on economics. He is the former Secretary of Banking and Securities for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. His previous books include The Case for a Debt Jubilee, The Paradox of Debt and An Illustrated Business History of the United States.

This week on History Happy Hour: We celebrate America’s 250th birthday to talk about the founders’ drinking! A perfect take for HHH!

Historian Brook Barbier returns to the show to talk with us live about the role that alcohol played in spurring building, and winning the American Revolution and how it shaped the nascent United States. Plus – cocktail recipes! (We’ll try some out.) Her new book is called Cocked and Boozy - An Intoxicating History of the American Revolution.

Brooke Barbier is a public historian who received her PhD in American history from Boston College, specifically researching Boston’s social and cultural life during and after the American Revolution. She has appeared on HHH, and spoke to attendees of the Lexington 250 tour. Two of Brooke’s favorite things are history and beer, so in 2013 she founded Ye Olde Tavern Tours, which offers tours of Boston’s historic sites and taverns (beer is included!). She is the author of several books about revolutionary Boston.

This week on History Happy Hour: Along with Guadalcanal in the Pacific, and Stalingrad in Russia, the Allies victory in North Africa was one of three Axis defeats that changed the course of the war in early 1943. The Africa campaign has sometimes been branded a side show, but it destroyed 40% of the Luftwaffe’s planes, ended Axis sea power in the Mediterranean and led to the surrender of 250 thousand Axis troops.

In this encore episode, Chris and Rick dig into it with HHH Alum Saul David, author of Tunisgrad: Victory in Africa.

Saul David is a professor military history at the University of Buckingham, and the author of numerous history books. He was on History Happy Hour in 2020 to talk about his Okinawa book, Crucible of Hell, and came on again in 2022 to talk about Sky Warriors: British Airborne Forces in the Second World War. Other non-fiction titles include The Indian Mutiny, 1857, Operation Thunderbolt, and The Force: The Legendary Special Ops Unit and WWII’’s Mission Impossible. He has also written three bestselling historical novels, Zulu Hart, Hart of Empire and, The Prince and the Whitechapel Murders. He has appeared in numerous documentaries in the UK.

This week on History Happy Hour: The Declaration of Independence came to life in a boarding house in Philadelphia under the hand of Thomas Jefferson, captured the spirit of the American cause, and lives to this day.

Scholar Michael Auslin has written a history of the Declaration of Independence that starts with its writing and winds through a long afterlife of 250 years. We’ll talk with him about his new book, National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America.

As an Amazon Associate, HHH earns from qualifying purchases.

Michael Auslin, PhD is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and is also a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The best-selling author of four non-fiction books, he is a longtime contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and his writing appears in leading publications including The Washington Post and The Spectator. Formerly an associate professor of history at Yale, he was elected a member of the Royal Historical Society, and is a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Library of Congress and a fellow at the Society of the Cincinnati's American Revolution Institute.

This week on History Happy Hour: World War II was unprecedented in its scope and ferocity. The heroism of the men and women who won the war may be well documented, but we know too little about the pain and hardships the veterans endured upon their return home

In this encore episode, we discuss this with David Nasaw, author of the new book The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II.

David Nasaw is a professor of history at the City University of New York City. He has written ten books, two of which, Andrew Carnegie and The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Time of Joseph P Kennedy, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. He has also written for The New Yorker, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal among others.