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saying that because I work here. Get started today at vanta.com. Hello, Prestige heads, and welcome to I'm Danny Bessner, here as always with my friend and comrade, Derek Davidson,

and we're very excited to welcome to the podcast today. Gretchen Heifner, Gretchen is a professor of history and also chair of the history department at Northeastern University, and the author of the recently released Sand, Snow, and Stardust, How U.S. military engineers conquered extreme environments. So Gretchen, thank you so much for joining us.

I'm absolutely delighted to be here. Thank you. So why don't we get into the first question,

which is what made you want to write about the military conquering extreme environments? How is it relevant to what's going on today? Obviously, space travel. But where, where did this

idea come from and how does it emerge from your recent work? Well, to begin with, it did not

start where one might have thought it. So I actually started out writing a book about

military engineers constructing bases around the world in the

1950s. And so I was really interested in the fact that by sort of the late 1940s, the U.S.

Army Corps of Engineers largely has been tasked with constructing hundreds of bases, semi-permanent

bases around the world in unusual, in sort of new and novel ways.

Before World War II, the United States just had sort of 14 military bases. During the war, it has

tons of overseas military bases. These are overseas bases. And then by the early 1950s,

there's a thousand. And I was interested in that process, that sort of transformation. And so I started

tracking the work of military engineers as they moved from the continent of the United States out

into these places. And the first place I was looking at was northern Africa. And I was poking

around the bases the Corps of Engineers were building for the Air Force in Morocco and Libya,

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