Historian Deborah Cohen Discusses WWII War Correspondents

Chesterfield MO

29 March, 2022

7:38 AM

Description

Press release from the St. Louis County Library: March 25, 2022 St. Louis County Library Foundation's Westfall Politics and History Series presents historian Deborah Cohen for a discussion and signing of "Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War." The event will take place on Friday, April 1, at 7:00 p.m. at Library Headquarters, 1640 S. Lindbergh Blvd. The program is free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase at the event from Left Bank Books. Face masks will be required for all attendees. Prize-winning historian Deborah Cohen presents a revelatory account of a close-knit band of wildly famous American reporters who, in the run-up to World War II, took on dictators and rewrote the rules of modern journalism. They were an astonishing group: glamorous, gutsy, and irreverent to the bone. As cub reporters in the 1920s, they roamed across a war-ravaged world, sometimes perched atop mules on wooden saddles, sometimes gliding through countries in the splendor of a first-class sleeper car. While empires collapsed and fledgling democracies faltered, they chased deposed empresses, international financiers, and Balkan gun-runners, and then knocked back doubles late into the night. "Last Call at the Hotel Imperial" is the extraordinary story of John Gunther, H. R. Knickerbocker, Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson. In those tumultuous years, they landed exclusive interviews with Hitler and Mussolini, Nehru and Gandhi, and helped shape what Americans knew about the world. Told with the immediacy of a conversation overheard, this revelatory book captures how the global upheavals of the twentieth century felt up close. Deborah Cohen is the author of "The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany," "Household Gods," and "Family Secrets." She is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Humanities and Professor of History at Northwestern University, focusing on modern Europe. Program sites are accessible. With at least two weeks' notice, accommodations will be made for persons with disabilities. Call 314-994-3300 or contact us. This press release was produced by the St. Louis County Library. The views expressed here are the author's own.