New Books In Military History

Proxy wars like those in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and now Ukraine have played major roles in military history. Historian Paul Rahe takes us back to one of the earliest yet most influential proxy wars in the West: Athens' invasions of Spartan-backed Sicily. Here, he discusses his most recent book, Sparta's Sicilian Proxy War (Encounter Books, 2023), the fifth in his series "The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta." Along the way, he explores the structure of ancient Sparta as compared with Athens and with modern America, and what lessons proxy wars in the ancient world can teach us about modern conflicts. Paul A. Rahe is the Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in the Western Heritage at Hillsdale College, and Professor of History. In addition to his series The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta, his books include Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution, Against Throne and Altar: Machiavelli and Political Theory under the English Republic, and Soft Despotism, Democracy’s

When the Nazis came to power, they used various strategies to expel German Jews from social, cultural, and economic life. Fighter, Worker, and Family Man: German-Jewish Men and Their Gendered Experiences in Nazi Germany, 1933–1941 (U Toronto Press, 2022) focuses on the gendered experiences and discrimination that German-Jewish men faced between 1933 and 1941. Sebastian Huebel argues that Jewish men's gender identities, intersecting with categories of ethnicity, race, class, and age, underwent a profound process of marginalization that destabilized accustomed ways of performing masculinity. At the same time, in their attempts to sustain their conceptions of masculinity these men maintained agency and developed coping strategies that prevented their full-scale emasculation. Huebel draws on a rich archive of diaries, letters, and autobiographies to interpret the experiences of these men, focusing on their roles as soldiers and protectors, professionals and breadwinners, and parents and husbands. Fighter, Worker,

The inspiration for Christopher Nolan’s major motion picture, Oppenheimer, this Pulitzer Prize-winning biography explores the life and times of J. Robert Oppenheimer – the “Father of the Atomic Bomb” – who, like the mythological Prometheus, brought atomic fire to mankind. In deep detail, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Vintage, 2006) explores Oppenheimer’s early career at the forefront of quantum physics, his associations with left-wing politics and the Communist Party, his leadership of the Manhattan Project, and his confrontations with the moral and political consequences of scientific progress during the Cold War. Twenty-five years in the making, this definitive biography charts the rise and fall of one of the twentieth century’s most iconic and paradoxical characters and restores Oppenheimer’s legacy and his humanity. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of moral dilemmas of US foreign relations and an adjunct professor of history at Salt L

World War I was the first great general conflict to be fought between highly industrial societies able to manufacture and transport immense quantities of goods over land and sea. Yet the armies of the war were too vast in scale, their movements too complex, and the infrastructure upon which they depended too specialized to be operated by professional soldiers alone. In Civilian Specialists at War: Britain's Transport Experts and the First World War (U London Press, 2020), Christopher Phillips examines the relationship between industrial society and industrial warfare through the lens of Britain's transport experts. Phillips analyzes the multiple connections between the army, the government, and the senior executives of some of prewar Britain's largest industrial enterprises, revealing that civilian transport experts were a key component of Britain's strategies in World War I. This book also details the application of recognizably civilian technologies and methods to the prosecution of war, and documents how t

As increasingly contentious politics in the United States raise concerns over the "politicization" of traditionally non-partisan institutions, many have turned their attention to how the American military has been--and will be--affected by this trend. Since a low point following the end of the Vietnam War, the U.S. military has experienced a dramatic reversal of public opinion, becoming one of the most trusted institutions in American society. However, this trend is more complicated than it appears: just as individuals have become fonder of their military, they have also become increasingly polarized from one another along partisan lines. The result is a new political environment rife with challenges to traditional civil-military norms. In a data-driven analysis of contemporary American attitudes, Dangerous Instrument: Political Polarization and US Civil-Military Relations (Oxford UP, 2022) examines the current state of U.S. civil-military affairs, probing how the public views their military and the effect th

In this interview military historian Jeremy Black examines ongoing Israeli-Hamas conflict in Israel and the Gaza Strip in historical perspective. Black is the author of Insurgency Warfare: A Global History to the Present (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023).  Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

The conquest of Indigenous land in the eastern United States through corrupt treaties and genocidal violence laid the groundwork for the conquest of the American West. In Gallop Toward the Sun: Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison's Struggle for the Destiny of a Nation (Random House, 2023), acclaimed author Peter Stark exposes the fundamental conflicts at play through the little-known but consequential struggle between two extraordinary leaders. William Henry Harrison was born to a prominent Virginia family, the son of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He journeyed west, became governor of the vast Indiana Territory, and sought statehood by attracting settlers and imposing one-sided treaties. Tecumseh, by all accounts one of the nineteenth century's greatest leaders, belonged to an honored line of Shawnee warriors and chiefs. His father, killed while fighting the Virginians flooding into Kentucky, extracted a promise from his sons to "never give in" to the land-hungry Americans. An eloquent speaker,

Parks M. Coble's book The Collapse of Nationalist China: How Chiang Kai-shek Lost China's Civil War (Cambridge UP, 2023) revisits one of the most stunning political collapses of the twentieth century. When Japan surrendered in September 1945, Chiang Kai-shek seemed triumphant—one of the Big Four Allied leaders of the war and head of a government firmly allied with the United States. Yet less than four years later he would be forced into a humiliating exile in Taiwan. It has long been recognized that hyperinflation was a critical factor in this collapse. As revenues plummeted during the war against Japan, Chiang’s government simply printed currency to cover its debts resulting in rapid inflation. When World War II ended it was assumed that with eastern China returned, ports opened, and financial support from the U.S. assured, the currency could be stabilized. But in fact, Chiang was obsessed with defeating the communists and the printing presses accelerated the production of banknotes which rapidly lost value.

In 1812 the French emperor Napoleon decided to invade Russia. For this purpose, he gathered an army of half a million men and women, consisting of soldiers from all nationalities, including French, German and Italian. Serving in this army was Carel Johannes Wagevier, an officer in the 125th Regiment of the Line, which was staffed by mostly Dutch soldiers. Full of confidence, they went to war and began the long journey to the East. What followed was a horrific expedition deep into the Russian interior, a chaotic retreat, and captivity. Just like his fellow soldiers, Wagevier endured the cold, the stresses of combat, and the hunger that besieged the army. After fighting at the battle of Berezina in November 1812, he was taken prisoner and transported all the way to the Russian interior. In 1814 he and his remaining fellow officers were released, and together they started the journey back home.  During his travels across Russia, he made notes of events that occurred or meetings that seemed memorable, including o

Blood of Others: Stalin's Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity (U Toronto Press, 2022) offers a cultural history of Crimea and the Black Sea region, one of Europe’s most volatile flashpoints, by chronicling the aftermath of Stalin’s 1944 deportation of the Crimean Tatars in four different literary traditions. In the spring of 1944, Stalin deported the Crimean Tatars, a small Sunni Muslim nation, from their ancestral homeland on the Black Sea peninsula. The gravity of this event, which ultimately claimed the lives of tens of thousands of victims, was shrouded in secrecy after the Second World War. What broke the silence in Soviet Russia, Soviet Ukraine, and the Republic of Turkey were works of literature. These texts of poetry and prose – some passed hand-to-hand underground, others published to controversy – shocked the conscience of readers and sought to move them to action. Blood of Others presents these works as vivid evidence of literature’s power to lift our moral horizons. In bringing these re

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, three violent national conflicts rocked the Americas: the Wars of Unification in Argentina, the War of the Reform and French Intervention in Mexico, and the Civil War in the United States. The recovery efforts that followed reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In Civil Wars and Reconstructions in the Americas, Evan C. Rothera uses both transnational and comparative methodologies to highlight similarities and differences among the wars and reconstructions in the US, Mexico, and Argentina. In doing so, he uncovers a new history that stresses the degree to which cooperation and collaboration, rather than antagonism and discord, characterized the relationships among the three countries.  Civil Wars and Reconstructions in the Americas: The United States, Mexico, and Argentina, 1860-1880 (Louisiana State University Press, 2022) serves as a unique assessment of a crucial period in the history of the Americas and speaks to the perpetual battle between visions of international

The Republic Will Be Kept Clean: How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Antileft Repression (University of Illinois Press, 2023) by Dr. Tariq D. Khan examines the long relationship between America’s colonising wars and virulent anticommunism. The colonising wars against Native Americans created the template for anticommunist repression in the United States. Dr. Khan’s analysis reveals bloodshed and class war as foundational aspects of capitalist domination and vital elements of the nation’s long history of internal repression and social control. Dr. Khan shows how the state wielded the tactics, weapons, myths, and ideology refined in America’s colonising wars to repress anarchists, labour unions, and a host of others labelled as alien, multi-racial, multi-ethnic urban rabble. The ruling classes considered radicals of all stripes to be anticolonial insurgents. As Dr. Khan charts the decades of red scares that began in the 1840s, he reveals how capitalists and government used much-practised counterinsurgency rhet

Conflict and trauma remain among the most prevalent themes in film and literature. Comics has never avoided such narratives, and comics artists are writing them in ways that are both different from and complementary to literature and film. Harriet E. H. Earle brings together two distinct areas of research—trauma studies and comics studies—to provide a new interpretation of a long-standing theme. Focusing on representations of conflict in American comics after the Vietnam War, Earle claims that the comics form is uniquely able to show traumatic experience by representing events as viscerally as possible. Using texts from across the form and placing mainstream superhero comics alongside alternative and art comics, Earle suggests that comics are the ideal artistic representation of trauma. Because comics bridge the gap between the visual and the written, they represent such complicated narratives as loss and trauma in unique ways, particularly through the manipulation of time and experience. Comics can fold time

Harriet Murav and Gennady Estraikh's book Soviet Jews in World War II: Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering (Academic Studies Press, 2018) discusses the participation of Jews as soldiers, journalists, and propagandists in combating the Nazis during the Great Patriotic War, as the period between June 22, 1941, and May 9, 1945 was known in the Soviet Union. The essays included here examine both newly-discovered and previously-neglected oral testimony, poetry, cinema, diaries, memoirs, newspapers, and archives. This is one of the first books to combine the study of Russian and Yiddish materials, reflecting the nature of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which, for the first time during the Soviet period, included both Yiddish-language and Russian-language writers. This volume will be of use to scholars, teachers, students, and researchers working in Russian and Jewish history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.suppo

Clothing Goes to War: Creativity Inspired by Scarcity in World War II (Intellect, 2022) by Nan Turner is the story of clothing use when manufacturing for civilians nearly stopped and raw materials and workers across the globe were shifted to war work. Governments mandated rationing programmes in many countries to regulate the limited supply, in hopes that the burden of austerity would be equally shared. Unfortunately, as the war progressed and resources dwindled, neither ration tickets nor money could buy what did not exist on store shelves. Many people had to get by with their already limited wardrobes, often impacted by the global economic depression of the previous decade. Creativity, courage and perseverance came into play in caring for clothing using handicraft skills including sewing, knitting, mending, darning and repurposing to make limited wardrobes last during long years of austerity and deprivation. This fascinating page-turner is the first cross-cultural account of the difficulties faced by common

Perhaps no other single day in US history was as threatening to the survival of the nation as August 24, 1814, when British forces captured Washington, DC. This unique moment might have significantly altered the nation’s path forward, but the event and the reasons why it happened are little remembered by most Americans.  Robert P. Watson's book When Washington Burned: The British Invasion of the Capital and a Nation's Rise from the Ashes (Georgetown UP, 2023) narrates and examines the British campaign and American missteps that led to the fall of Washington during the War of 1812. Watson analyzes the actions of key figures on both sides, such as President James Madison and General William Winder on the US side and Rear Admiral George Cockburn and Major General Robert Ross on the British side. He pinpoints the reasons the campaign was such a disaster for the United States but also tells the redeeming stories of the courageous young clerks and the bold first lady, Dolley Madison, who risked their lives to save

Covering political, military, economic and social history, Norway in the Second World War: Politics, Society and Conflict (Bloombury, 2020) is the most authoritative book on the subject in the English language. This innovative study describes how the Germans conquered Norway in 1940 and the type of government that was then imposed. German organisations such as the Wehrmacht, the SS and the civilian Reichskommissariat are all presented, along with how they operated during the occupation. Ole Kristian Grimnes examines the Norwegian Nazi Party and the important role that it played during the period, as well as analysing how the Norwegian economy became integrated into the German war economy. The Norwegian resistance (including the Communists) and the Norwegian government-in-exile are explored in detail, while a separate chapter on the Holocaust in both Norwegian and international contexts is also included. As such, Norway in the Second World War is the definitive text on war and Nazi occupation in a nation that

Under the Swastika in Nazi Germany (Bloomsbury, 2023) begins in flames in 1933 with Adolf Hitler taking power and ends in the ashes of total defeat in 1945. Kristin Semmens tells that story from five different perspectives over five chronologically distinct phases in the Third Reich's lifespan. The book offers a much-needed integrated history of insiders and outsiders - Nazis, accomplices, supporters, racial and social outsiders and resisters - that captures the complexity of Germans' lives under Hitler.  Incorporating recent research and the voices of those who often remain silent in histories of this period, Under the Swastika in Nazi Germany delivers an up to date, engaging and accessible introduction. Its narrative is further supported by well-chosen images, some familiar and others rarely seen. By revealing the potent combination of coercion and consent at work during the dictatorship, the book allows a deeper understanding of Nazi Germany and provides a vital platform for further inquiry into these twel

Before email, when long distance telephone calls were difficult and expensive, people wrote letters, often several each day. Today, those letters provide an intimate and revealing look at the lives and loves of the people who wrote them. When the author is a brilliant writer who lived an exciting, eventful life, the letters are especially interesting. Martha Gellhorn was a strong-willed, self-made, modern woman whose journalism, and life, were widely influential at the time and cleared a path for women who came after her. An ardent anti-fascist, she abhorred "objectivity shit" and wrote about real people doing real things with intelligence and passion. She is most famous, to her enduring exasperation, as Ernest Hemingway's third wife. Long after their divorce, her short tenure as "Mrs. Hemingway" from 1940 to 1945 invariably eclipsed her writing and, consequently, she never received her full due. Gellhorn's work and personal life attracted a disparate cadre of political and celebrity friends, among them, Sylv

Moscow's Heavy Shadow: The Violent Collapse of the USSR (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Dr. Isaac Mckean Scarborough tells the story of the collapse of the USSR from the perspective of the many millions of Soviet citizens who experienced it as a period of abjection and violence. Mikhail Gorbachev and the leaders of the USSR saw the years of reform preceding the collapse as opportunities for rebuilding (perestroika), rejuvenation, and openness (glasnost). For those in provincial cities across the Soviet Union, however, these reforms led to rapid change, economic collapse, and violence. Focusing on Dushanbe, Tajikistan, Dr. McKean Scarborough describes how this city experienced skyrocketing unemployment, a depleted budget, and streets filled with angry young men unable to support their families. Tajikistan was left without financial or military resources, unable and unprepared to stand against the wave of populist politicians of all stripes who took advantage of the economic collapse and social discontent t