Today's special Leap Year guest is World War II social historian and oral history advocate G. Kurt Piehler. Kurt is the Director of the Institute on World War II and the Human Experience at Florida State University. He has held academic appointments at the City University of New York and Drew University, and was the founding director of the Rutgers Oral History Archives and served as Director of the Center for the Study of War and Society at the University of Tennessee. He was a Fulbright Lecturer in American Studies at Kobe University and Kyoto University and served as a National Historical Publications and Records Commission Fellow in Historical Editing at the Peale Family Papers in the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery (that's a mouthful!). Kurt earned his BA in History at Drew University before taking an MA and PhD at Rutgers.

Kurt is the author of A Religious History of the American GI in World War II (Nebraska), Remembering War the American Way (Smithsonian Institution Press) and World War II (Greenwood), which is part of the American Soldiers' Lives series. He edited the Encyclopedia of Military Science (2013) and The United States in World War II: A Documentary Reader (Wiley-Blackwell). He has co-edited at least five volumes, including the Oxford Handbook of World War II. Kurt is the series editor of Fordham University Press' World War II: The Global, Human, Ethical Dimension series and the Legacies of War series at the University of Tennessee Press. He is on the advisory board of the NEH-funded American Soldier Project at Virginia Tech University (Shoutout to GFOP Ed Gitre!) and a member of the editorial board of the Service Newspapers of World War II digital publication. Kurt is an active member of the Society for Military History, and he organized the 2003 annual meeting in Knoxville, Tennessee, and the 2017 conference in Jacksonville, Florida (seriously, he did that TWICE!).

Join us for a fun and fascinating chat with the very affable Kurt Piehler. We'll talk fun shirts, Fresh Meadows, congressional internships, Pink Martini, oral history and veterans' stories, and John le Carré novels, among many other topics. This is a good one (as they all are!)!

Special Discount for our listeners from the University Press of Kansas - 30% off any book purchase! Use discount code 24MILPEOPLE at the ⁠UPK website⁠!

Rec.: 02/29/2024