To many, Russia, and the wider Eurasia, is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. But it doesn’t have to be. Hosted by REEES Digital Scholarship Curator Dr. Sean Guillory, The Eurasian Knot dispels the stereotypes and myths about the region with lively and informative interviews on Eurasia’s complex past, present, and future.
Take a deeper dive into individual lives and stories in the following Eurasian Knot podcast series.
Teddy Goes to the USSR
It’s 1968. The height of the Cold War. Teddy Roe embarks on a remarkable tour to the USSR. What does he discover behind the Iron Curtain?
Americans believed the Soviet Union was cut off from the West. Nothing went in. And very little came out. Yet, tens of thousands of Americans visited their Cold War rival annually. What did they find behind the Iron Curtain? Teddy Goes to the USSR, a five-part podcast series follows one such American, Teddy Roe, to shine light on Soviet tourism, police surveillance, consumerism, race, and everyday life through his extraordinary three-month trip to the Soviet Union in 1968.
Thresholds: Eastern European Immigration to the United States
Over the last century, tens of millions of people quit Eastern Europe for the United States. The push-pull factors were many—war, poverty, instability, persecution at home and opportunity, refuge, and liberty abroad. But manna didn’t simply fall from the sky in America. Immigrants from Eastern Europe confronted many of the same challenges migrants do everywhere—exploitation, hardship, and discrimination.
Thresholds is a REEES podcast series that grapples with these histories through interviews with scholars and immigrants’ personal profiles. What pushed them to leave? What did they discover when they arrived? How did they change and be changed by American society? What opportunities and challenges did they face to become “American”? And what can we learn about immigration today?