Description:

The Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy concludes the Spring 2025 Book Series with a discussion of Gretchen Heefner’s Sand, Snow, and Stardust: How US Military Engineers Conquered Extreme Environments (University of Chicago Press). Deserts, the Arctic, outer space—these extreme environments are often seen as inhospitable places at the edges of our maps. But from the 1940s through the 1960s, the United States defense establishment took a keen interest in these places, spurred by the diverse and unfamiliar regions they’d navigated during World War II, dispatching troops to the Aleutian Islands, North Africa, the South Pacific, and beyond. To preserve the country’s status as a superpower after the war, engineers had to understand and then conquer dunes, permafrost, and even the surface of the moon. Sand, Snow, and Stardust explores how the U.S. military generated a new understanding of these environments and attempted to master them, intending to cement America’s planetary power.

Heefner is Chair and Professor of History at Northeastern University. She teaches and researches the history of the U.S. in the world, with a focus on militarization, the environment, and the surprisingly intimate relations between national security regimes and the everyday. Heefner will be in conversation with Kaete O’Connell, Assistant Director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy and Lecturer in Global Affairs.