56: Jeremy Black writes about WWII maps

Retired historian Dr. Jeremy Black has now allowed me to interview him three times. THREE TIMES. He gets an award for entertaining my curiosity.  

In each interview, he dances through a historian’s perspective and answers both detailed questions about fiddly bits of the world’s past as well as giving detailed and thoughtful big-picture answers about war, religion and life in general. 

In this episode, Jeremy discusses A History of the Second World War in 100 Maps (2020, The University of Chicago Press). He kicks off by explaining some wanted the book to be yet another chronological map book (1939, 1940, etc., etc.), but he pushed back to organize it along thematic threads and made sure many countries’ maps were represented. 

Interested in history, maps, World War II, propaganda, racism, why German Nazis weren’t as great as some say they were (including themselves), and, lastly, why we ignore old-fashioned weapons like artillery in favor of obsessing over drones? Jeremy Black will interest you. 

P.S. Jeremy likes maps so much, he’d make a map book a year (he’s already got a rail map idea). Publishers, he’s proven his prolific output (he has published 11 history books in 2022 alone). 

Caveat: There’s a delightful grandfather clock chiming a few minutes in. I left it in, because the chiming is really charming. Why am I suffering with these terrible smartphone beeps when the time could be announced in this way in my own apartment? 

To Feed Further Curiosity:  

• Jeremy talked with me about Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes here. He talked about the big picture of war throughout human history here.
• Jeremy recommends other books of his at the end of the podcast. Here are some samples from his corpus: 
  • A Short History of War (I read it; I liked it)
  • Strategy and the Second World War
  • Rethinking World War Two: The Conflict and Its Legacy
• I talked about maps (and old books) with college professor John Krygier here.