The American History Podcast, bonus episode.

Welcome to the American History Podcast.

Hosted by Sean Worswick.

Okay, so how are you doing today?

It's a beautiful blue day in Chicago, so.

Great, great.

Nice day here, so I can't complain. So let's just dig into this book. As I said, in the intro, we've got Dr. Deborah Cohen here, and we're going to be talking about her latest book,

and I'm so excited. So how did you come across the folks in the book and basically just tell the

audience, what's the book about?

So I had been given as a high schooler. I had been given personal history, Vincent Sheehan's

landmark 1935 book by my dad, for whom it was a really important book in his youth. And actually,

by my mother, I had been given Death Be Not Proud John Gunther's

book, which she was assigned as required civics reading in local Kentucky in 10th grade.

And so I'd always kind of had them in the back of my mind and used them for, you know, in other pieces of work.

But then I went to John Gunther's archive, which was at the University of Chicago.

And I just started digging around in there and found incredible stuff, just amazing, you know, notes that he had taken when he was interviewing Trotsky in 1932.

And things people had told him when they were interviewing Stalin or Hitler or Mussolini, you know, friends of his who had made those trips.

And then lots and lots of his own reflections on the relationship between what he saw as his life unraveling amidst the crises of the early 1930s and the sorts of reporting that he was doing.

So he goes off to find Hitler's relatives in a backwater Austrian

village in the summer of 1933. And again, making notes all the while. So that's how I started.

And so what the book is about is about a pioneering group of young American reporters who become

the most famous international correspondence of their day.

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