New Books In Military History

Hell on Earth: The 30 Years War and the Violent Birth of Capitalism is a new 10-part series from the creators of Hell of Presidents — one of Entertainment Weekly’s best podcasts of 2021 — and Chapo Trap House, the political podcast that they claim has made more people angrier than any other podcast. Hell on Earth tells the story of the Thirty Years War, 1618–1648. Including the long crisis of the 17th century, the birth of Protestantism and the collapse of Catholic Christendom, and ultimately, “the gleaming T-800 Terminator skeleton of capitalism emerging from the rotting corpse of feudalism”. In addition to tales of lurid violence from a bygone age, of hot death on the battlefield, and cool palace intrigue, Christman and Wade explore climate change, financial collapse, moral panics, speculative bubbles, pandemic, crisis in institutional legitimacy, of conspiracy theories driving policy, and an information revolution that changes the way everyday people relate to their political leaders. Sound familiar? This

The US military didn't just conquer its way across the US West and the Pacific - it also collected and categorized across these spaces too. In Taking the Field: Soldiers, Nature, and Empire on American Frontiers (U Nebraska Press, 2023), Colorado College's Amy Kohout examines the role of soldiers in the construction of imperial knowledge. By examining how soldiers interpreted the people and places they encountered in the West and in the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth century, Kohout explains how science and the military worked hand in hand to define ideas like wilderness and nature in places newly acquired and explored by the growing American empire. The book addresses a range of topics, from birds to the Black Hills to World's Fairs, and shows how following one's sources can lead a historian to some very interesting, as well as messy, places and conclusions.  Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices.

Fort Breendonk was built in the early 1900s to protect Antwerp, Belgium, from possible German invasion. Damaged at the start of World War I, it fell into disrepair . . . until the Nazis took it over after their invasion of Belgium in 1940. Never designated an official concentration camp by the SS and instead labeled a "reception" camp where prisoners were held until they were either released or transported, Breendonk was no less brutal. About 3,600 prisoners were held there--just over half of them survived. As one prisoner put it, "I would prefer to spend nineteen months at Buchenwald than nineteen days at Breendonk." In The Prisoners of Breendonk: Personal Histories from a World War II Concentration Camp (Mariner Books, 2020), , James M. Deem pieces together the story of the camp by telling the stories of its victims--Jews, communists, resistance fighters, and common criminals--for the first time in an English-language publication. Leon Nolis's haunting photography of the camp today accompanies the wide rang

In the middle of the twentieth century, in South Africa, Nelson Mandela organized a group of revolutionary freedom fighters to openly denounce the racist apartheid regime. Mandela and MK (Umkhonto we Sizwe) embarked on a dangerous, but revolutionary campaign of sabotage that fueled the burgeoning global anti-apartheid struggle.  In Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries (Ohio University Press, 2022) Paul Landau explores the pivotal years that led up to the Rivonia trial in which Mandela was given a life sentence in prison while many of his comrades were either killed, imprisoned or exiled. Landau does this by exploring Mandela’s leadership role in MK as well as by highlighting the motives and actions of the people around him. Landau complicates the whitewashed “grandpa” figure so many of us have come to know Mandela to be. He gives us a detailed glimpse into the mind of the revolutionary and oftentimes violent Nelson Mandela that we so anxiously want to know. Robrecus Toles is a Ph.D. student in the Departmen

In 1974, India surprised the world with “Smiling Buddha”: a secret underground nuclear test at Pokhran, Rajasthan. India called it a “peaceful nuclear explosion”—but few outside of India saw it that way. The 1974 nuclear tests became a symbol of India’s ability to help itself, especially given how the country was left out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, an agreement the country argued was colonial. But, as Jayita Sarkar’s Ploughshares and Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022) points out, India’s nuclear program was in fact the product of Cold War tensions and international networks–including some foreign sources of nuclear knowledge and material. (An open-access version of Jay’s book can be found here) Jayita Sarkar is Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow and the Founding Director of the Global Decolonization Initiative. She can be followed on Twitter at @DrJSarkar, and her Linktree can be found here. In this int

Many African Americans of the Civil War era felt a personal connection to Abraham Lincoln. For the first time in their lives, an occupant of the White House seemed concerned about the welfare of their race. Indeed, despite the tremendous injustice and discrimination that they faced, African Americans now had confidence to write to the president and to seek redress of their grievances. Their letters express the dilemmas, doubts, and dreams of both recently enslaved and free people in the throes of dramatic change. For many, writing Lincoln was a last resort. Yet their letters were often full of determination, making explicit claims to the rights of U.S. citizenship in a wide range of circumstances. Jonathan W. White's To Address You as My Friend: African Americans' Letters to Abraham Lincoln (UNC Press, 2021) presents more than 120 letters from African Americans to Lincoln, most of which have never before been published. They offer unflinching, intimate, and often heart-wrenching portraits of Black soldiers' a

How do states and societies confront the legacies of war and occupation, and what do truth, guilt, and justice mean in that process?  In Ghosts of War: Nazi Occupation and Its Aftermath in Soviet Belarus (Cornell UP, 2022), Franziska Exeler examines people's wartime choices and their aftermath in Belarus, a war-ravaged Soviet republic that was under Nazi occupation during the Second World War. After the Red Army reestablished control over Belarus, one question shaped encounters between the returning Soviet authorities and those who had lived under Nazi rule, between soldiers and family members, reevacuees and colleagues, Holocaust survivors and their neighbors: What did you do during the war? Ghosts of War analyzes the prosecution and punishment of Soviet citizens accused of wartime collaboration with the Nazis and shows how individuals sought justice, revenge, or assistance from neighbors and courts. The book uncovers the many absences, silences, and conflicts that were never resolved, as well as the truths

On September 2, 1945, Japan surrendered to the United States, ending the Second World War. Yet the Japanese invasion had upended the old geopolitical structures of European empires, leaving old imperial powers on the decline and new groups calling for independence on the rise. That unsteady situation sparked a decade of conflict: in Indonesia, in Vietnam, in China and in Korea, as esteemed military historian Professor Ronald Spector writes about in his latest book, A Continent Erupts: Decolonization, Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, 1945–1955, published by W. W. Norton in 2023. In this interview, Ronald and I talk about the decade of conflict following the Second World War–and whether these conflicts were inevitable in the postcolonial, Cold War world. Ronald H. Spector, professor emeritus of history and international relations at George Washington University, is the author of seven books, including Eagle Against the Sun: The American War With Japan (Free Press: 1984) and In the Ruins of Empire: The J

Violent Islamic extremism is affecting a growing number of countries in sub-Saharan Africa. In some, jihadi Salafi organizations have established home bases and turned into permanent security challengers. However, other countries have managed to prevent the formation or curb the spread of homegrown jihadi Salafi organizations. In Salafism and Political Order in Africa (Cambridge UP, 2021), Sebastian Elischer provides a comparative analysis of how different West and East African states have engaged with fundamentalist Muslim groups between the 1950s and today. In doing so, he establishes a causal link between state-imposed organizational gatekeepers in the Islamic sphere and the absence of homegrown jihadi Salafism. Sebastian Elischer is an associate professor of political science at the University of Florida. His research is focused on political Islam, violent extremism, and ethnicity, and democratization in sub-Saharan Africa. He is the author of Political Parties in Africa: Ethnicity and Party Formation (Ca

On February 24 2022, Vladimir Putin shocked the world by invading Ukraine. In this short interview, veteran military historian Jeremy Black looks at the conflict from a military point of view. Why have the Russians done so badly? Why have the Ukrainians done so well? And what are the prospects for victory by either side? 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 essential handbook for doing historical research in the twenty-first century The Princeton Guide to Historical Research (Princeton UP, 2021) provides students, scholars, and professionals with the skills they need to practice the historian's craft in the digital age, while never losing sight of the fundamental values and techniques that have defined historical scholarship for centuries.  Zachary Schrag begins by explaining how to ask good questions and then guides readers step-by-step through all phases of historical research, from narrowing a topic and locating sources to taking notes, crafting a narrative, and connecting one's work to existing scholarship. He shows how researchers extract knowledge from the widest range of sources, such as government documents, newspapers, unpublished manuscripts, images, interviews, and datasets. He demonstrates how to use archives and libraries, read sources critically, present claims supported by evidence, tell compelling stories, and much more. Featuring a wealth of

This week on International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey is joined by Jason Stearns, assistant professor of international studies at Simon Fraser University, who discusses how the Congolese government is invested in conflict on its territory. Stearns traces the current conflict back to the Belgian colonial heritage that created an ethnic disbalance in the population that was then exploited by the authoritarian leader, Mobutu Sese Seko, to maintain power. It later triggered the regional invasion of Congo in which the territory was divided between neighboring countries until the country was finally reunified in 2003. When former rebels lost power in a democratic process and tried to regain it through military means, neighboring countries scrambled to profit from extraction and influence. This left little incentive to put an end to the conflict, and forced the incumbent president to side with the military establishing a system of clientelistic networks in order to stay in power. Finally, Stearns comments on

Among the Jewish writers who emigrated from Eastern Europe to France in the 1910s and 1920s, a number chose to switch from writing in their languages of origin to writing primarily in French, a language that represented both a literary center and the promises of French universalism. But under the Nazi occupation of France from 1940 to 1944, these Jewish émigré writers—among them Irène Némirovsky, Benjamin Fondane, Romain Gary, Jean Malaquais, and Elsa Triolet—continued to write in their adopted language, even as the Vichy regime and Nazi occupiers denied their French identity through xenophobic and antisemitic laws. In Writing Occupation: Jewish Émigré Voices in Wartime France (Stanford UP, 2020), Julia Elsky argues that these writers reexamined both their Jewishness and their place as authors in France through the language in which they wrote. The group of authors Elsky considers depicted key moments in the war from their perspective as Jewish émigrés, including the June 1940 civilian flight from Paris, life

In the chaos of the end of WWI, the Russian Civil War, and a brief period of Ukrainian independence there occurred a series of massacres of German Mennonites. Sean Patterson's recent book Makhno and Memory: Anarchist and Mennonite Narratives of Ukraine's Civil War, 1917-1921 (University of Manitoba Press, 2020) analyzes the varying historical memories of these massacres. Patterson's book raises numerous and timely issues of national memory and identity, and contains much poignant reflection on the problems faced by an historically pacifist community facing down violent circumstances. What it means to be a member of a national community is an interesting and important question in any circumstances, but the construction of Ukrainian national identity is a subject of more-than-casual interest, in 2022. Makhno and Memory discusses a complicated and important series of event in accessible fashion, and usefully circumscribes what can and cannot be known about Nestor Makhno's specific role in those events. Aaron Wei

In the fall of 1942, only the city of Stalingrad stood between Soviet survival and defeat as Hitler’s army ran rampant. With the fate of the USSR hanging in the balance, Soviet propaganda chiefs sent their finest writers into the heat of battle. After six months of terrifying work, these men succeeded in creating an enduring epic of Stalingrad. Their harrowing tales of valour and heroism offered hope for millions of readers. “Stalingrad lives!” went the rallying cry: the city had to live if the nation was to stave off defeat.  In Stalingrad Lives!: Stories of Combat and Survival (McGill-Queen's Press, 2022) Ian Garner brings together a selection of short stories written at and after the battle. They reveal, for the first time in English, the real Russian narrative of Stalingrad - an epic story of death, martyrdom, resurrection, and utopian beginnings. Following the authors into the hellish world of Stalingrad, Garner traces how tragedy was written as triumph. He uncovers how, dealing with loss and destruction

Justin Dolan Stover is Associate Professor of transnational European history at Idaho State University, where he teaches courses on war and violence, modern Irish history, and the world wars. He holds a doctorate in history from Trinity College Dublin and has held several research fellowships throughout Ireland. He is currently a research fellow with the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Amsterdam. In this interview, he discusses his new book, Enduring Ruin: Environmental Destruction During the Irish (U College Dublin Press, 2022), which uncovers the environmental and spatial history of the Easter Rising and Irish War of Independence. The Irish Revolution inflicted unprecedented damage to built-up and natural landscapes between 1916 and 1923. Destruction transcended national and ideological divisions and remained a fixture within Irish urban and rural landscapes years after independence, presenting an Ireland politically transformed yet physically disfigured. Enduring Ruin: Environmental Destruction

Object Lessons is a Bloomsbury series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. This interview focuses on Trench Coat by Dr. Jane Tynan, published in 2022. We think we know the trench coat, but where does it come from and where will it take us? From its origins in the trenches of WW1, this military outerwear came to project the inner-being of detectives, writers, reporters, rebels, artists and intellectuals. The coat outfitted imaginative leaps into the unknown. Trench Coat tells the story of seductive entanglements with technology, time, law, politics, trust and trespass. Readers follow the rise of a sartorial archetype through media, design, literature, cinema and fashion. Today, as a staple in stories of future life-worlds, the trench coat warns of disturbances to come. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qua

Over one million Black men and women served in World War II. Black troops were at Normandy, Iwo Jima, and the Battle of the Bulge, serving in segregated units and performing unheralded but vital support jobs, only to be denied housing and educational opportunities on their return home. Without their crucial contributions to the war effort, the United States could not have won the war. And yet the stories of these Black veterans have long been ignored, cast aside in favor of the myth of the “Good War” fought by the “Greatest Generation.” Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad (Viking, 2022) is American history as you’ve likely never read it before. In these pages are stories of Black heroes such as Thurgood Marshall, the chief lawyer for the NAACP, who investigated and publicized violence against Black troops and veterans; Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., leader of the Tuskegee Airmen, who was at the forefront of the years-long fight to open the Air Force to Black pi

What worlds take root in war? In A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon (U California Press, 2022), anthropologist Munira Khayyat describes life along the southern border of Lebanon, where resistant ecologies thrive amid a terrain of perennial war. A Landscape of War takes us to frontline villages where armed invasions, indiscriminate bombings, and scattered land mines have become the environment where everyday life is waged. This book dwells with multispecies partnerships such as tobacco farming and goatherding that carry life through seasons of destruction. Neither green-tinged utopia nor total devastation, these ecologies make life possible in an insistently deadly region. Sourcing an anthropology of war from where it is lived, this book decolonizes distant theories of war and brings to light creative practices forged in the midst of ongoing devastation. In lyrical prose that resonates with imperiled conditions across the Global South, Khayyat paints a portrait of war as

Kiril Feferman's The Holocaust in the Crimea and the North Caucasus (Yad Vadhem, 2016) presents a comprehensive account of the Jews in the Crimea and the North Caucasus in the Holocaust years. Based on extensive archival research, Feferman covers the life and destruction of the Jewish population in the region and describes in detail the relations between Jews and non-Jews before and during the war; the evacuation of Jews into these regions and out of them; the German occupation and the annihilation of the Ashkenazi Jewish population; the fate of non-Ashkenazi Jews in the area; Jewish responses; and reactions of local populations, including Cossacks, devout Orthodox Christians and Muslims. Objective factors, such as the availability of German manpower and food, weather and geographic conditions, in addition to subjective factors, such as the attitudes of Wehrmacht commanders, left their imprint on the implementation of the “Final Solution” policy in these areas. By the time the Germans occupied the Crimea in N