In this episode of the America at 250 podcast, Professors Joanne Freeman and David Blight question Professor Beverly Gage about her recent DeVane Lecture installments on the Second World War and the early Cold War. The conversation extends the classroom lectures on wartime mobilization, postwar anticommunism, and the emerging national security state, offering additional context and debate among the three Yale historians. Part of the companion podcast series to Yale's America at 250: A History course, the episode supplements the formal Battell Chapel lecture series on United States history from 1776 to the present.