This Week on History Happy Hour: In 1915 Winston Churchill resigned as Lord of the Admiralty in the wake of the Dardanelles disaster. Struggling to deal with the fallout, he accepted a commission and headed for the front lines – where he began the most extraordinary comeback in political history.

In this encore episode, Chris and Rick discuss this pivotal year in Churchill’s life with J. Furman Daniel, author of Blood, Mud, and Oil Paint: The Remarkable Year that Made Winston Churchill.

Dr. John Furman Daniel III is an associate professor of political science at Concordia University in Chicago. He is the author of 21st Century Patton: Strategic Insights for the Modern Era, The First Space War: How Patterns of History and Principles of STEM Will Shape Its Form, and Patton: Battling with History.

This Week on History Happy Hour: What drove the thinking of Hitler and his followers? How did ordinary Germans come to embrace an ideology of hate and destruction?

Chris and Rick welcome Laurence Rees, award-winning historian and author of the new book The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings from History. Drawing on decades of research and previously unpublished interviews, Rees examines the twisted ideas at the heart of the Third Reich and what they reveal about human behavior.

Laurence Rees is an acclaimed historian, documentary filmmaker, and bestselling author specializing in Nazi Germany and World War II. Former head of BBC TV History, he has written and produced award-winning series such as Auschwitz: The Nazis and the “Final Solution” and The Nazis: A Warning from History. His books, translated worldwide, include Hitler and Stalin: The Tyrants and the Second World War and The Holocaust: A New History. His latest work, The Nazi Mind, explores the beliefs that drove the Third Reich.

This Week on History Happy Hour: In January 1945, as the Battle of the Bulge was coming to an end, the 29th Division readied itself to be at the point of the fourth Allied offensive in eight months. There, along the banks of the Roer River, is where volume five of Joe Balkoski’s epic series on the 29th gets under way.

In this encore episode, Joe joins us for his sixth History Happy Hour to talk about that book, The Last Roll Call: The 29th Intantry Division Victorious, 1945, and the many decades he has spent telling the story of the 29th.

Joe Balkoski is a renowned American military historian who has authored eight books on American involvement in the ETO during World War II. This includes a five-volume series on the history of the 29th Infantry Division in World War II and a two-volume set on American participation in the D-Day invasion. He has appeared as a D-Day expert on MSNBC, and his work has been praised by Joe Scarborough, the New York Post, World War II Magazine, and others.

This Week on History Happy Hour: We’ll explore the history of the British and German war dead buried on enemy soil in the two world wars. How did Germany and Britain remember, commemorate, and reconcile the legacy of their fallen soldiers?

Chris and Rick will speak with our guest, Tim Brady, author of Burying the Dead: Those who Cared for the Dead in Two World Wars.

Sunday at 4PM ET, on History Happy Hour, where history is always on tap.

Tim Grady is professor of modern history at the University of Chester. Much of his research has explored the human experience of the world wars and the contested legacies of conflict. He is the author of A Deadly Legacy, and The German-Jewish Soldiers of the First World War in History and Memory.

This Week on History Happy Hour: We travel back to the six critical months before Adolf Hitler seized power, when the Nazi leader teetered between triumph and ruin. As financial backers withdrew, the Nazi Party threatened to fracture. Hitler talked of suicide. The New York Times declared he was finished. Yet somehow, in a few brief weeks, he was chancellor of Germany.

Our guest is Timothy Ryback, author of Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power, a story of backroom deals, unlikely alliances, stunning betrayals, an ill-timed tax audit, and a fateful weekend that changed our world forever.

Timothy Ryback has written on history and politics for more than three decades. He is the author of Hitler’s Private Library, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, and The Last Survivor, a New York Times Notable Book. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and the Financial Times. He is cofounder and director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague.

This Week on History Happy Hour: Eighty years ago, Japan surrendered to the Allies after three of the most devastating bombing attacks of the war – two nuclear weapons and the fire-bombing of Tokyo. What was the decision-making process in this endgame of World War II? Was it just the atomic bomb that brought about Japan’s surrender?

This week, Chris and Rick will chat with HHH Alum, Richard Overy, author of Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan.

Richard Overy is Professor of History at the University of Exeter, one of Britain's most distinguished historians and an internationally renowned scholar of World War II. (He’s also a History Happy Hour Alum!) He is the recipient of the Hessell-Tiltman Prize, the Wolfson History Prize, the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize and is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Historical Society. His many works include The Bombing War, Dictators and The Morbid Age.

This Week on History Happy Hour: A trip back to the last 12 months of the Civil War, going behind the scenes in the White House, along the battlefronts in Virginia, and into the conspiracies of spies and secret agents.

Our tour guide is Scott Ellsworth, author of Midnight on the Potomac: The Last Year of the Civil War, the Lincoln Assassination, and the Rebirth of America by Scott Ellsworth.

Scott Ellsworth is the New York Times bestselling author of The Secret Game, winner of the 2016 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing. He has written about American history for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. Formerly a historian at the Smithsonian Institution, he is also the author of The World Beneath Their Feet and Death in a Promised Land, his groundbreaking account of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. Scott lives in Ann Arbor, where he teaches at the University of Michigan.

This Week on History Happy Hour: Our guest had technical problems, so Chris and Rick engaged in an hour of History happy Talk, answering questions, chatting about tours, aqueezing in the Ghost Army wherever possible! We will be rescheduling our guest, Tim Brady, author of "A Light in the Northern Sky" for some day in the future!

Sunday at 4PM ET, on History Happy Hour, where history is always on tap.