October 31, 2023

Colloquium Topic: Tower of Skulls: A History of the Asia-Pacific War

In 1937, the swath of the globe east from India to the Pacific Ocean encompassed half the world’s population. That year, Japan’s onslaught into China unleashed a tidal wave of events that fundamentally transformed this region and killed about twenty-five million people. This extraordinary World War II narrative vividly portrays the battles across this entire region and links those struggles on many levels with their profound twenty-first-century legacies. In this first volume of a trilogy, award-winning historian Richard B. Frank draws on rich archival research and recently discovered documentary evidence to tell an epic story that gave birth to the world we live in now.

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Colloquium Speaker: Richard B. Frank

Richard B. Frank is an internationally recognized leading authority on the Asia-Pacific War.  He published his first book Guadalcanal in 1990.  His second work, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire, appeared in 1999 and has been called one of the six best books in English about World War II.  Both Random House books won awards and became main selections of the History Book Club.  In 2007, he completed MacArthur as part of the Palgrave Great Generals series.   Besides his numerous appearances on television and radio, he was a consultant for the epic HBO miniseries, “The Pacific.”  He serves on the Board of Presidential Councilors of the National World War II Museum, including a term as head of that body.  The first volume of his trilogy on the Asia Pacific War 1937-1945, Tower of Skulls, published in March 2020, was a finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History 2021.