BiographyWayne Hsieh is a history professor at the United States Naval Academy. He served on the State Department's provincial reconstruction team in Iraq from 2008 to 2009 and is the recipient of multiple awards and honors, including the Army's Commander's Award for Civilian Service and the State Department's Meritorious Honors Award. Hsieh is the author of numerous articles and the co-author of The Savage War: A Military History of the Civil War. Times
01:17 - Introduction
06:50 - Hostility toward studying Robert E. Lee
12:50 - Lee and West Point
15:18 - Senior leadership of Confederate and Union armies at West Point
17:17 - Lee's job as a junior officer in the Army Corps of Engineers
19:17 - Lee's rise during the Mexican War
23:27 - Ulysses Grant
26:21 - Stereotypes and temperaments of Civil War leaders
31:50 - What drives Lee's tactical decision-making
34:07 - Lee's strategic mistake
Recorded October 6, 2021
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This podcast seeks to learn what war teaches. There has been a steady decline in the study of military history and its associated theoretical discipline, strategy.This podcast seeks to fill that gap through in-depth interviews on military and diplomatic history. Our guests have included former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis, and former China Select Committee chairman Mike Gallagher. We discuss the battlefield commanders, diplomats, strategists, policymakers, and statesmen who have had to make wartime decisions in the ancient and modern eras. The subject of an episode may be an historical battle, campaign, o...