The Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy Spring 2025 Book Series presents
Gretchen Heefner, hair and Professor of History at Northeastern University:
“Sand, Snow, and Stardust: How US Military Engineers Conquered Extreme Environments.”
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 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.