Topic: Military

Even though the ban on women serving in combat was only officially lifted last week, women have already been serving on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan. This hour host Craig Cohen talks with Director of the Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs Erica Borggren about what the ban means for women in the military and about her experiences serving in Iraq.

The University of Illinois Press' “The War of 1812” by Wayne State College Professor Donald Hickey offers a comprehensive and authoritative history of the War of 1812.

Timothy McKeown, Professor of Political Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Sheldon Stern, Author of The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths versus Reality and The Week the World Stood Still: Inside the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis

Host: Craig Cohen

Fifty years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and after exhaustive analysis of the events that transpired during a tense 13 day period in the fall of 1962, questions linger about precisely how those events played out. We have the published accounts of many key players, including then Attorney General Robert Kennedy, brother of the President, who recounted his experience in the book Thirteen Days. And a narrative has been woven from that and other accounts – one that presents the Kennedy White House and the military alternately working together and – at times – battling one another, as they sought to address the Cuban and Soviet governments’ secret development of nuclear missile bases in Cuba, which could have been used to strike much of the continental U.S.

We’ll review the events of October 1962 with Political Science Professor Timothy McKeown from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Sheldon Stern, author of The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths versus Reality.

Burma is one of the poorest countries in Asia. A long period of military rule has kept the country from developing either politically or economically. But that may be starting to change. One sign of that change was the recent election to Parliament of the country’s leading opposition figure Aung San Suu Kyi. Next time on Focus our morning talk show we will review recent events in Burma as we talk with Christina Fink, from the Elliot School of International Affairs at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

This is a repeat broadcast from Tuesday, May 22, 2012, 10 am

Two hundred thousand black soldiers were sent to Europe to fight in World War I. Historian Adriane Lentz-Smith says that experience gave many black people their first taste of life outside of the American racial system. She says it led them to imagine a different world, one that they worked to make real when they returned home. In a program from the archives, we’ll look at the ways that World War I shaped the civil rights movement in the United States. That’s the subject of Adriane Lentz-Smith’s book "Freedom Struggles."

This is a repeat broadcast from Thursday, January 14, 2010, 10 am