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On War & Society

48 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 2 years ago - ★★★★★ - 1 rating

From LCMSDS Productions, The On War & Society podcast features interviews with the most prominent historians of war and society. Host Eric Story sits down with his guests to discuss their cutting-edge research, the challenges associated with doing history, and life 'behind the book.'

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Episodes

Oh! What a Visual War with Beatriz Pichel

September 07, 2021 19:18 - 32 minutes - 44.9 MB

The First World War was a literary conflict producing some of the most memorable poems, novels and plays of the twentieth century. While the Second World War left behind a striking visual record, including famous pictures such as Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima and Wait for Me Daddy, the First World War is not generally remembered as a visual conflict. But the war’s visual record is massive. States promoted the use of photography at the front for their historical and propaganda value. Kodak’s p...

Oh What Visual War with Beatriz Pichel

September 07, 2021 19:18 - 32 minutes - 44.9 MB

The First World War was a literary conflict producing some of the most memorable poems, novels and plays of the twentieth century. While the Second World War left behind a striking visual record, including famous pictures such as Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima and Wait for Me Daddy, the First World War is not generally remembered as a visual conflict. But the war’s visual record is massive. States promoted the use of photography at the front for their historical and propaganda value. Kodak’s p...

The American War in Vietnam with Rob Thompson

August 01, 2021 13:00 - 32 minutes - 45.1 MB

In 1965, in the coastal province of Phú Yên, US Armed Forces embarked on an effort to pacify one of the least-secured regions of South Vietnam. Often described as the “other war” to win the “Hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese, pacification was, in reality, a destructive process that relied on the means of conventional warfare to succeed. Clearing, holding, and destroying communist incursions in the provinces would win the loyalty of the South Vietnamese and therefore the war. Nearly a decad...

In the Path of War with David Borys

July 09, 2021 13:00 - 28 minutes - 38.7 MB

Canada’s military history in Northwest Europe has been told many times. On 6 June 1944, Canadian forces landed on Juno Beach as part of Operation Overlord, before quickly establishing a bridgehead and moving inland where they encountered, but ultimately overcame, stiff resistance. As the German Reich shrunk in the face of the Allied advance, the Canadians were tasked with liberating the Netherlands. Images of jubilant crowds greeting the  Canadians have been seared in the collective memory. ...

Broken Promises with Christopher Capozzola

June 03, 2021 04:00 - 30 minutes - 42.1 MB

The United States and the Philippines have been intimately bound by conflict. A US colony from 1898 to 1946, it remained an important US ally in the Pacific. In that time, hundreds of thousands of Filipinos fought and died for the United States, including against fellow Filipinos who opposed their US colonizers and against the Japanese occupation. Filipino immigrants also enlisted to serve on the Western Front in 1917, joined the US Navy in the 1920s, and served in American regiments during ...

A Curious Case of Shell Shock with Joy Porter

May 04, 2021 13:00 - 32 minutes - 44.7 MB

In April 1918, Canadian soldier Frank Toronto Prewett was buried alive on the Western Front. Managing to claw his way out of the earth, Prewett was reborn but with a lasting trauma that manifested in a curious way. while recuperating alongside Siegfried Sassoon and W.H.R. Rivers at Lennel House, Prewett started to act and identify as an Iroquois man. A gifted poet, his writing attracted the attention of some of the greatest literary figures of the war generation, including Sassoon, Robert Gr...

A War of Emotions with Lucy Noakes

April 06, 2021 15:25 - 28 minutes - 39.7 MB

The first half of Britain’s twentieth century was shaped by death. Between 1914 and 1918, over 700,000 men died in the First World War, followed by another 250,000 between 1918 and 1919 from the influenza pandemic. Over three decades later, another 380,000 were killed fighting in the Second World War as well over 60,000 civilians from German air raids. The shockingly high death toll of the Great War has often overshadowed that of the Second. Tales of hardships and tragedies left in the wake ...

The Great War at Home with Martha Hanna

March 01, 2021 18:32 - 30 minutes - 41.8 MB

For a long time historians studying the First World War had to rely on the memoirs of soldiers, but over the last several decades, more and more letters have made their way into the archives as family members inherit and donate the written material of their relatives. These sources have initiated a new wave of scholarship devoted to identifying how civilian relationships were maintained, nurtured and interrupted by the war. But much remains to be learned. While we have long wondered about th...

Biodefense and the War on Terror with Gwen D'Arcangelis

February 01, 2021 14:00 - 23 minutes - 32 MB

In the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, five people were killed and another seventeen were injured from anthrax spores as part of a deliberate attack against members of the US media and Senate. Fears quickly spread that this was another incident of Islamic terrorism. As part of the US-led War on Terror, large sums of money and resources were mobilized in the name of biodefense and security, altering the ways in which medicine was practised on a domestic and global scale. Howe...

Disaster in Halifax, 1917 with Roger Sarty

January 01, 2021 14:00 - 29 minutes - 40.4 MB

On the morning of 6 December 1917 two cargo vessells, the SS Mant Blanc and SS Imo collided in Halifax Harbour. The resulting catastrophic explosion occurred thousands of miles away from the Western Front but it was a direct result of the First World War. The war was also essential for what followed. Of the 3000 troop garrison located at Halifax, 1500 were awaiting transport to Europe and provided vital support and resources in the immediate aftermath of the explosion. In this episode, Profe...

Reclaiming Canada's Second World War with Tim Cook

December 01, 2020 14:00 - 27 minutes - 37.8 MB

In his new book The Fight for History: 75 Years of Forgetting, Remembering and Remaking Canada’s Second World War, Tim Cook reminds us that "if we do not tell our own stories, no one else will." But the ways in which Canadians have chosen to remember the Second World War has been far from consistent. Once viewed as the necessary war, the country quickly put the conflict behind itself. Cenotaphs built in the shadow of the Great War were simply given an addendum. There was no national Second W...

The Black Watch Snipers with David O'Keefe

November 02, 2020 13:22 - 24 minutes - 33.3 MB

David O’Keefe is the author of One Day in August: The Untold Story Behind Canada’s Tragedy at Dieppe and his most recent book, Seven Days in Hell: Canada’s Battle for Normandy and the Rise of the Black Watch Snipers. Never one to shy away from public exposure, O’Keefe has also been prolific in film and television, creating and collaborating in more than fifteen documentaries. In this wide-ranging interview, O’Keefe discusses the thirty-year journey behind his research into the Black Watch sn...

Episode 35 - Writing Public History with Tim Cook

October 01, 2020 13:00 - 24 minutes - 34.2 MB

Tim Cook is a historian at the Canadian War Museum a two-time winner of the CP Stacey Award for the best book in the field of Canadian history, the 2009 winner of the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, the 2013 winner of the Pierre Berton Award for popularizing Canadian history and a member of the Order of Canada. With such a long list of public and academic honours, Tim is that rare historian who has managed to find success both within and beyond the academy. With a scarcity of ...

Episode 34 - The Medic's Tale with Ted Barris

September 01, 2020 12:56 - 39 minutes - 53.6 MB

At the age of 13, Ted Barris asked his father a common question: “Dad what did you do in the war?” This began a fifty-seven-year investigation into his father’s war experiences as a sergeant medic in the US Army during its bloodiest campaign during the liberation of Europe. The book that grew out of this question: Rush To Danger: Medics in the Line of Fire shares stories of combat medics from the American Civil War to more recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I sat down with Ted to discuss h...

Episode 33 - Voicing Dissent during the First World War

July 02, 2020 12:05 - 24 minutes - 56.4 MB

Henri Bourassa was a French Canadian nationalist, politician, journalist, and “one of the most…vocal voices of dissent in Canada during the First World War.” Despite Bourassa’s significance on the Canadian home front and within the international pacifist movement, his story is little-known outside of Quebec. Geoff Keelan sits down with Kyle Falcon to discuss Bourassa’s life and legacy, and how the methods of biography can help us appreciate this uniquely Canadian figure’s place amongst an in...

Episode 32 - The American Civil War: Under the Knife

June 01, 2020 12:08 - 35 minutes - 80.8 MB

Approximately 750,000 people were killed over four years during the American Civil War, two-thirds of these fatalities were caused by disease. This staggering death count was a shock to American physicians who were unregulated, undertrained and operating in the dark. But the war also offered opportunities. In the laboratory of the battlefield, medical practitioners gained access to an abundance of cadavers as well as demand for more efficient structures of organisation and dissemination of k...

Episode 31 - Haunted by Hitler

January 17, 2020 13:40 - 25 minutes - 58.7 MB

In the summer of 1937, Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon MacKenzie King spent four days in Berlin. He arrived at Friedrichstrasse Station, home of the impressive U-bahn subway which was built in preparation for the 1936 Berlin Olympics; a year later this same station would transport Jewish children to Britain. During his time in Berlin, King visited a Hitler Youth Camp, which was later absorbed into the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Before he returned to Canada, King sat face to face ...

Episode 30 - Malplaquet: The Myth of Decisive Battle

December 02, 2019 01:23 - 37 minutes - 85 MB

Bankruptcy, famine in the countryside, and a starving army were just some of the crises facing Louis XIV in 1709. Eight years into the War of the Spanish Succession, the allied armies led by the Duke of Marlborough, had also managed to breach the French defences on the Flanders frontier. Threatened with the prospect of invasion, Marshal Villars and his French forces met Marlborough in the field resulting in the climactic Battle of Malplaquet, halting the allied advance and changing the cours...

Episode 29 - Making a Historian

October 01, 2019 05:00 - 33 minutes - 50.1 MB

On this month's episode Of On War and Society, Kyle Pritchard sits down with Dr Roger Sarty to discuss the life and career of CP Stacey. Sarty explains how CP Stacey went from being a young student with no interest in research to the founding father of Canadian military history. Throughout his career Stacey faced considerable set backs in the form of limited finances, a tight job market, a public initially hostile to his work and personal tragedy. But through his own hard work and the consid...

Episode 28 - The Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists

September 01, 2019 12:00 - 43 minutes - 98.8 MB

As Canadians, there is a sense that international collaboration has acted and continues to act as a positive force in the world today. Yet certain events serve as a reminder that the foundations of our international relationships have sometimes developed not out of cooperation, but out of aggression and intervention. The Boxer Rebellion unfolded during the high tide of imperialism at the turn of the 20th century. In response to pressure from foreign diplomatic and religious influences, the B...

Episode 27 - Assault on the Winter Line

August 01, 2019 04:00 - 32 minutes - 74.8 MB

The Italian Campaign during the Second World War remains a subject of controversy—whether it was “Normandy’s Long Right Flank” or a costly stalemate continues to be debated by historians to modern day. Terry Copp, director emeritus of the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies, believes he has found a new multinational approach to studying the Italian Campaign as he zeroes in on the late 1943/early 1944 Allied assault on the Axis Winter Line. The Winter Line was the si...

Episode 26 - Nazis, Canadian Jews and the Second World War

July 01, 2019 04:00 - 38 minutes - 87.6 MB

Jewish people are traditionally depicted as victims in the Second World War literature. This should come as no surprise, as six million Jews were killed at the hands of the Nazis during the Holocaust. Ellin Bessner, in her new book Double Threat, insists that at least in the case of Jewish Canadians, they were not just victims of the war but also active players in the eventual victory of the Allies against Germany and the Axis powers during the Second World War. Canadian Jews enlisted at the...

Episode 25 - Ted Barris and the Dam Busters

June 01, 2019 04:00 - 30 minutes - 70.3 MB

Sometimes we find Canadians in the most unlikely of places. During the Second World War, within the crews of airmen responsible for breaching the Ruhr dams of Nazi Germany, there were thirty Canadians. In 1943, these men, along with about a hundred others, took to the skies in May 1943 aboard nineteen Lancaster Bombers to drop the now infamous bouncing bombs that would devastate enemy power plants, factories and German infrastructure after blowing up several dams. Now known as the Dam Buster...

On War & Society Special: D-Day in 14 Stories with Elliot Halpern

May 27, 2019 17:54 - 24 minutes - 57.1 MB

As the Second World War fades from living memory, D-Day, the Allied operation whose success led to the liberation of France and the rest of Western Europe from Axis forces, continues to serve as a microcosm for the preservation of democratic values in the world today. For those who fought, D-Day has important lessons to teach about how the past is remembered and what stories we tell to future generations. In this On War and Society Special Episode, guest host Kyle Pritchard talks with produc...

Episode 24 – Ambitions Unrealized

May 01, 2019 04:00 - 26 minutes - 37 MB

The contribution of nurses to attend to the wounded was essential to military care and recovery during the First World War. Less noted is the role of the middle class and educated, though largely unqualified, women who assisted in filling in the gaps at overburdened hospitals and convalescent homes as voluntary nurses. In this episode, guest host Kyle Pritchard sits down with Linda Quiney to discuss her research on the Canadian Voluntary Aid Detachment in her new book, This Small Army of Wom...

Episode 23 – Stalin's Gulag

April 01, 2019 04:00 - 31 minutes - 72.5 MB

Sometimes we forget that the field of war and society encompasses so much more than Canada. Many of the guests we've had on our show study the history of war and society in Canada, but in this episode, Wilson Bell speaks about the Soviet Gulag system during the Second World War and his new book, Stalin's Gulag at War. Wilson Bell is an associate professor of history at Thompson Rivers University. He is the author of numerous articles on the Gulag, and his first book, Stalin’s Gulag at War,...

Episode 22 – Shell Shock

March 01, 2019 05:00 - 41 minutes - 38.2 MB

Shell shock has become a stand-in for the experience of all soldiers of the First World War. And it has also become one of the most popular topics of inquiry for historians of the First World War. Mark Humphries, associate professor history at Wilfrid Laurier University and Director of the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies, has contributed another addition to the ever-growing literature on the topic with his new book on shell shock in the Canadian Expeditionary Fo...

Episode 21 – Rural Canada at War

January 31, 2019 05:00 - 33 minutes - 77.3 MB

We know a lot about the urban experience during the First World War in Canada but far less about the rural equivalent. Canadian historians sometimes assume––and quite wrongly––that the urban Canadian experience of the war can stand in for the rural. But it can't. Jonathan Vance's new book A Township at War shows that the conventional narrative of the First World War in Canada did not match that of East Flamborough from 1914 to 1918. Prohibition, conscription, suffrage, enemy alien internment...

Episode 20 – Uncovering the Secret History of Soldiers

December 31, 2018 05:00 - 28 minutes - 41.8 MB

Since the late 1990s, Canadian historian Tim Cook has carved out a niche in the field of First World War history. In his two-volume social history of the war, he spoke of a soldiers’ culture, which bound Canadians together on the battlefields and helped them cope with the immense stress and strain of war from 1914 to 1918. This year, published with Allen Lane, Tim released The Secret History of Soldiers, a book dedicated solely to this soldiers’ culture that has become his most significant c...

Episode 19 – How to Write 7,000 Words in a Week

November 30, 2018 21:38 - 23 minutes - 35.4 MB

Tim Cook loves to write. As many Canadian historians will attest, Tim is one of the most prolific writers in the profession––both in terms of volume and content. Since 1998, Tim has published a dozen books on the First and Second World Wars, greatly advancing our knowledge of both. But how does he do it? In this month’s episode, Tim discusses the process of researching and writing, as well as his new book, The Secret History of Soldiers, published with Allen Lane this year. In a jaw-dropping...

Episode 18 – Why Military Families Matter, Pt. 2

October 31, 2018 04:00 - 29 minutes - 27.9 MB

Military families are essential to the care of veterans in both the past and present. Yet current veteran policies and programs do not fully provide the necessary services military families require for the process of healing and recovery. For the final episode of our four-part series on the past and present experiences of veterans in Canada, two scholars, a veteran and a caregiver continue their discussion of the effects of military service on veterans’ families. Drawing comparisons between ...

Episode 17 - Why Military Families Matter, Pt. 1

October 01, 2018 20:22 - 41 minutes - 37.8 MB

Soldiers returning from the battlefield rarely return unscathed. Yet veterans’ families continue to be inadequately prepared for the difficulties of military life. For episode three of four on the past and present experiences of veterans in Canada, two scholars and two veterans discuss the effects of veteran deployment and eventual discharge on military family well-being. Their discussion reveals the need to listen to military family advocates to better inform policy, but also how many milit...

Episode 16 – Unpacking the Trauma Kit, Pt. 2

August 31, 2018 04:00 - 40 minutes - 37.5 MB

Wars often time come home. Reintegration into civilian life comes with a whole new set of challenges for veterans. For the second part of our four-part series on the past and present experiences of veterans in Canada, two historians and two veterans discuss the instability of civilian life for many veterans after having served in the military. Mental trauma, both sustained on the battlefield and even after returning home, contributes to this instability, as the government and larger Canadian...

Episode 15 – Unpacking the Trauma Kit, Pt. 1

July 31, 2018 04:00 - 29 minutes - 26.9 MB

Too often we forget the casualties of war. Whether on film, in novels and even in writing history, scenes of soldiering and warfare pervade while the aftermath is ignored. Nationalism is deeply intertwined with many twenty and twenty-first century wars, making it sometimes difficult to acknowledge war’s painful legacies. Over the next few months, we are hoping to counter that narrative by bringing the historical and contemporary experiences of Canadian veterans to the fore.  This episode i...

Episode 14 – Rewriting the Great War

June 29, 2018 18:53 - 30 minutes - 28.3 MB

Since 2014, there has been an outpouring of literature on the First World War that has moved the field in exciting new directions. Over thirty books have been released by Canadian academic presses over the past almost four years, including titles on conscription, shell shock, and the memory of the war. But before these books were published, Mark Humphries wrote an intriguing 2014 article in the Canadian Historical Review about the historiography of the First World War in Canada and where he ...

Episode 13 – Family at the Front

May 30, 2018 19:04 - 29 minutes - 27.3 MB

Nearly 660,000 bags of mail were sent to Canada from soldiers in France and Belgium during the First World War. In this episode, Dr. Kristine Alexander sits down with Kyle Pritchard to discuss her research on the topic of families, children, and letter-writing during the First World War. Kristine is an associate professor in history, a Canadian Research Chair, and Director of the Institute for Child and Youth Studies at the University of Lethbridge. Her book Guiding Modern Girlspublished in ...

Episode 12 – A Microhistory of an Ace

April 30, 2018 20:38 - 26 minutes - 24.7 MB

Billy Bishop is one of the most recognizable names in the military history of Canada. He was Canada’s top ace during the First World War, credited with over seventy victories during his career as a pilot with Royal Flying Corps. But there were many other pilots whose names have been forgotten because of Bishop’s looming shadow. Graham Broad, associate professor of history at King’s College at Western University, has uncovered the story of another ace, Eddie McKay, from London, Ontario. In th...

Episode 11 – Civil War and Identity

April 02, 2018 15:18 - 33 minutes - 30.8 MB

Discussions of the First World War in Europe are dominated by the events that transpired in France, Great Britain and Germany. But on the periphery of Europe, fascinating local, regional, national and international conflicts were also at play. The Finnish Civil War was one of these interesting, peripheral events. Fought between the socialist Reds and the anti-Russian Whites, the civil war began with a Red coup d’état and a White-led mass imprisonment of thousands of Russian army soldiers in ...

Episode 10 – Destruction and Dissent in the Marshall Islands

February 28, 2018 15:40 - 27 minutes - 25.3 MB

The image of the mushroom cloud, commonly associated with a nuclear explosion, provides a stark reminder of the power and devastation of the atomic age. Aware of the horrible circumstances involving Hiroshima and Nagasaki, few may realize the full extent of nuclear weapons testing in the postwar period. Dr. Martha Smith-Norris, an associate professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan, explores this topic in her recent book, Domination and Resistance: The United States and the Mars...

Episode 9 – Treating Wounds of the Mind

January 22, 2018 18:42 - 30 minutes - 28.3 MB

Post-traumatic stress order (or PTSD) remains a prominent issue within the Canadian military and has affected thousands of veterans who returned home. At the end of 2017, the Nova Scotia government announced that an inquiry will be made after a veteran shot and killed his daughter, wife and mother, then hanged himself in 2016. It is suspected that he had PTSD. Cases such as these have been featured in the media after many wars in the past, not just the more recent conflicts in Iraq and Afgha...

Episode 8 – In Search of the Canadian Officer

December 16, 2017 06:02 - 30 minutes - 28 MB

Many have fallen down the rabbit hole of over-researching. Telling the entire story is tempting, but it is an unattainable standard. Reconstructing the past out a series of texts simply cannot measure up to the multifaceted and dynamic realities of an all-encompassing history. And so it is imperative that historians abandon this idealized goal––if not for the sake of time, at least then for one’s sanity. Dr. Geoff Hayes, an associate professor of history at the University of Waterloo, visi...

Episode 7 – The Conscripted

November 27, 2017 21:46 - 23 minutes - 21.3 MB

The Conscription Crisis was the central political conflict of the First World War, affecting not only the Canadian government but having an immediate impact on over 400,000 Canadians who were registered for conscription with the intention of being sent overseas. Historians have focused on national divisions between English and French, rural and urban, and the working and middle class, but what has often been lost in these debates are those most directly impacted by conscription – the conscri...

Episode 6 – Dunkirk

October 25, 2017 01:19 - 28 minutes - 25.8 MB

Christopher Nolan’s film Dunkirk hit theatres this past summer. It was met with critical acclaim and made hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office. It is arguably one of the greatest war films Hollywood has ever produced and certainly gave its viewers an authentic portrayal of the Battle of Dunkirk from the air, the water and the beach in the spring of 1940. It was a film that as Terry Copp explains “makes your blood boil.” But what we learn from Dunkirk is more raw emotion, fear ...

Episode 5 – Did You Fall Into The Vimy Trap?

September 18, 2017 15:14 - 30 minutes - 28 MB

The Battle of Vimy Ridge was fought in April 1917 during the First World War. Four divisions of the Canadian Expeditionary Force attacked the German stronghold of Hill 145 on the morning of 9 April, and three days later, had successfully pushed the German army off of the ridge. Since those cold and wet April days one hundred years ago, Vimy has for many Canadians emerged as a symbol of Canadian nationhood. Ian McKay and Jamie Swift last year published The Vimy Trap: Or, How We Learned to S...

Episode 4 – Canada's Arctic Laboratory

August 18, 2017 15:07 - 32 minutes - 29.3 MB

Dr. Matthew Wiseman just finished his Ph.D. on Canadian science during the early Cold War. And he is a bit concerned about the developing nuclear crisis between the United States and North Korea, as many of us are too. President Donald Trump’s fiery rhetoric has agitated Kim Jong Un and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the point where they are threatening to bomb Guam, an unincorporated territory of the United States. Matthew explains how Canada has responded to nuclear crises in...

Episode 3 – Complicating History

July 01, 2017 04:10 - 26 minutes - 23.9 MB

Who is Wilfrid Laurier University’s Cleghorn Fellow in War and Society? Mary Chaktsiris dropped by the studio this month to talk about her new position, teaching in a different environment, and her research into Toronto and the Great War. Mary became the Cleghorn Fellow in 2016, following a two-year stint at the Council of Ontario Universities. Teaching four classes at a new university this past year, Mary still finds that community-building is one of the most important parts of being a prof...

Episode 2 – Somewhere Between War and Society

June 11, 2017 20:42 - 25 minutes - 23 MB

What happened to Montreal during the Great War? For the past three years, distinguished military historian Terry Copp has been researching Canada’s metropolis––Montreal––from 1914 to 1918. In our conversation, Terry discusses the various social, religious and political cleavages within the city beyond the divide between English and French-speaking populations. Although the war intensified many of these cleavages and sewed deep divisions between communities residing within Montreal, Terry is ...

Episode 1 – The War Junk Historian

May 02, 2017 20:51 - 25 minutes - 35.9 MB

Eric Story sits down with Dr. Alex Souchen, a post-doctoral fellow at the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies in Waterloo, ON, to discuss his research on munitions dumping in Canada during the 1940s. Alex helps explain the destructive environmental legacies of munitions dumping in Canada and around the world, and speaks about the growing scientific debate surrounding these legacies. Where does the historian fit in these discussions? In a small role, perhaps, says ...

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