Historians and Journalists: Shirer Reading Group
Historians and Journalists: "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich"
Podcast ep. 5: What American Reporters Saw That Others Didn't (Audio Only)
0:00
-47:03

Podcast ep. 5: What American Reporters Saw That Others Didn't (Audio Only)

A conversation with Professor Deborah Cohen about her book Last Call at the Hotel Imperial and the reporters who covered the rise of fascism

Last week, I posted my interview with Dr. Deborah Cohen as both video (for paid subscribers) and audio (for everyone), but I am realizing that the audio is not super intuitive to find (there’s a little icon of headphones on the left). So, like the interview with Professor Socolow, I’m reposting the audio now, so it is available to everyone.


Professor Deborah Cohen is a historian of European history at Northwestern University as well as the director of the Buffett Center. A few years ago, she published Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War, which won some prizes and got great reviews in all the usual places.

We covered a lot of ground, including:

  • The inseparable connections between reporters’ personal lives and the bigger stories that they cover

  • What American reporters saw that European reporters did not

  • A reporter who had a bar named after him in Baghdad

  • What Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film Foreign Correspondent gets right about mid-century American journalism

  • The back stories of the individual American journalists who covered Gandhi (and who were made into a composite in the biopic)

  • How a reporter’s husband feels when the President calls his wife for advice, and…

  • What happens when reporters undergo psychoanalysis

Hope you enjoy!


If there’s someone you think might enjoy reading, please consider sharing.

Give a gift subscription

Discussion about this episode

User's avatar