New Books in Diplomatic History
Episodes
Victor McFarland, "Oil Powers: A History of the US-Saudi Alliance" (Columbia UP, 2020)
17 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia is a critical feature of the modern international system. It binds the global hegemon to a...
Learning from Rwanda: How 100 Days of Mass Killing Finally Led to International Reform (Part 1)
09 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Rwanda witnessed a 100-day mass genocide back in 1994, when the ethnic Hutu government and its supporters led a campaign that left around 800,000 peop...
Philip Nash, "Breaking Protocol: America's First Female Ambassadors, 1933-1964" (UP of Kentucky, 2020)
01 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
"It used to be," soon-to-be secretary of state Madeleine K. Albright said in 1996, "that the only way a woman could truly make her foreign policy view...
Thomas A. Schwartz, "Henry Kissinger and American Power: A Political Biography" (Hill and Wang, 2020)
26 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Over the past six decades, Henry Kissinger has been America's most consistently praised--and reviled--public figure. He was hailed as a "miracle worke...
Matthew Romaniello, "Enterprising Empires: Russia and Britain in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
24 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In his new book Enterprising Empires: Russia and Britain in Eighteenth-Century Eurasia (Cambridge University Press), Matthew Romaniello examines the w...
Benjamin Talton, "In This Land of Plenty: Mickey Leland and Africa in American Politics" (Pennsylvania UP, 2019)
19 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In This Land of Plenty: Mickey Leland and Africa in American Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press) by Benjamin Talton is a transnational history...
Will Smiley, "From Slaves to Prisoners of War: The Ottoman Empire, Russia, and International Law" (Oxford UP, 2018)
18 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In his book From Slaves to Prisoners of War: The Ottoman Empire, Russia, and International Law (Oxford University Press, 2018), Will Smiley examines t...
Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf, "The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace" (All Point Books, 2020)
06 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Two prominent Israeli liberals argue that for the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians to end with peace, Palestinians must come to terms with...
Roger Moorhouse, "Poland 1939: The Outbreak of World War II" (Basic Books, 2020)
22 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Historian and academic Roger Moorhouse, revisits the opening campaign of World War II, the German invasion of Poland in September 1939., in his new bo...
The Cold War as History
21 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The Cold War, the on again and off again confrontation between the West and the Soviet Union is one of the most famous historical episodes of the shor...
Recording Global Diplomacy: Contextualizing Perspectives
15 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 1999, the Organization of African Unity cited dissatisfaction with the solely “global” approach that the UN had applied in their International ...
Jeremy Black, "War in Europe: 1450 to the Present" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016)
10 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
War in Europe: 1450 to the Present (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) is a masterful overview of war and military development in Europe since 1450, bringing ...
Archie Brown, "The Human Factor: Gorbachev, Reagan, and Thatcher, and the End of the Cold War" (Oxford UP, 2020)
01 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
What brought about an end to the Cold War has long been a subject of speculation and mythology. One prominent argument is that the United States simpl...
Alanna O’Malley, "The Diplomacy of Decolonisation: America, Britain, and the United Nations during the Congo Crisis, 1960-1964" (Manchester UP, 2020)
26 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the summer of 1960, the Republic of the Congo won its independence from Belgium. Only one week later, however, Belgium had already dispatched parat...
Richard Carswell, "The Fall of France in the Second World War: History and Memory" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)
25 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This fascinating book by Richard Carswell looks at how the fall of France in the Second World War has been recorded by historians and remembered withi...
E. Bruce Geelhoed, "Diplomacy Shot Down: The U-2 Crisis and Eisenhower's Aborted Mission to Moscow, 1959–1960" (U Oklahoma Press, 2020)
24 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The history of the Cold War is littered with what-ifs, and in Diplomacy Shot Down: The U-2 Crisis and Eisenhower's Aborted Mission to Moscow, 1959–...
Lauren Turek, "To Bring the Good News to All Nations" (Cornell UP, 2020)
09 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Lauren Turek is an Assistant Professor of History at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. She earned her doctorate from the University of Virgini...
Joyce E. Leader, "From Hope to Horror: Diplomacy and the Making of the Rwanda Genocide" (Potomac Books, 2020)
05 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Earlier this year the world marked the 25th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide. An occasion for mourning and reflection also offered a chance to ref...
Coryne Hall, "Queen Victoria and the Romanovs: 60 Years of Mutual Distrust" (Amberley, 2020)
27 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The balance of power in nineteenth-century Europe was anchored on one end by the redoubtable Queen Victoria (1819 -1901), the doyenne of sovereigns, a...
Courtney J. Fung, "China and Intervention at the UN Security Council: Reconciling Status" (Oxford UP, 2019)
19 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
China is a veto-holding member of the UN Security Council yet Chinese officials have been skeptical of using the powers of the UN to pressure nations ...
Danny Haiphong, "American Exceptionalism and American Innocence" (Skyhorse, 2019)
06 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
“Fake news existed long before Donald Trump…. What is ironic is that fake news has indeed been the only news disseminated by the rulers of U.S. em...
Eric Dursteler, "In the Sultan’s Realm: Two Venetian Reports on the Early Modern Ottoman Empire" (CRRS, 2018)
23 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the Sultan’s Realm: Two Venetian Reports on the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2018) is Professor E...
Asa McKercher, "Canada and the World since 1867" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)
10 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
If you haven’t been able to tell by the way I pronounce the word “about,” I should probably let you know that I’m from Canada. And I have to m...
Carole Fink, "West Germany and Israel: Foreign Relations, Domestic Politics and the Cold War" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
07 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In her new book, West Germany and Israel: Foreign Relations, Domestic Politics and the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Carole Fink examin...
Alexander Mikaberidze, "The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History" (Oxford UP, 2020)
03 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Austerlitz, Wagram, Borodino, Trafalgar, Leipzig, Waterloo: these are the battles most closely associated with the Napoleonic Wars. But how did this p...
Michael Fischbach, "The Movement and the Middle East: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Divided the American Left" (Stanford UP, 2019)
30 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
One of the most divisive international issues in American politics today is over Israel and Palestine. The close ties between Israel and the United St...
Ezequiel Mercau, "The Falklands War: An Imperial History" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
25 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The Falklands War was in many ways the defining event in the premiership of Margaret Thatcher. In many ways it was also the last roar of the British L...
Joseph S. Nye, Jr., "In Do Morals Matter?: Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump" (Oxford UP, 2020)
23 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Americans since the beginning of their history, have constantly made moral judgments about presidents and foreign policy. Unfortunately, many of these...
Mathias Haeussler, "Helmut Schmidt and British-German Relations: A European Misunderstanding" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
19 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt grew up as a devout Anglophile, yet he clashed heavily and repeatedly with his British counterparts W...
Jeffrey James Byrne, "Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order" (Oxford UP, 2016)
04 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In his brilliant, category-smashing book, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order (Oxford University Press, 2016), Jef...
Sarah Stockwell, "The British End of the British Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
20 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
How did de-colonialization impact the United Kingdom itself? That is a topic that Professor of Imperial & Commonwealth History at King’s College, Lo...
Yaakov Katz, "Shadow Strike: Inside Israel’s Secret Mission to Eliminate Syrian Nuclear Power" (St. Martin's Press, 2019)
19 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
With the world’s attention riveted to the nuclear threat from Iran, Yaakov Katz’s new book could not be more timely. In Shadow Strike: Inside Is...
Using Discretion in Response to Political Crises: A Lesson for Diplomats
12 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The 2011 uprisings in Arab countries put their diplomats under scrutiny: they faced unprecedented political situations that could not be resolved thro...
Mark Katz, "Build: The Power of Hip Hop Diplomacy in a Divided World" (Oxford UP, 2019)
28 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In April 2014, a cohort of twenty-five hip hop artists assembled in Washington, D.C. for the first orientation meeting of a new cultural diplomacy pro...
Global Governance “As It Was, Is and Ought to Be”
21 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Governing the world—A critical look at the current state of global governance. We live in a time of profound global crises. So, who exactly is respo...
Graham T. Clews, "Churchill’s Phoney War: A Study in Folly and Frustration" (Naval Institute Press, 2019)
13 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Given the overwhelming amount of books printed in the past ten years on various (usually rather obscure) aspects of Sir Winston Churchill’s glorious...
Susan Schulten, "A History of America in 100 Maps" (U Chicago Press 2018)
03 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In her new book A History of America in 100 Maps (University of Chicago Press 2018), historian Susan Schulten uses maps to explore five centuries of A...
Christopher A. Preble, "Fuel to the Fire: How Trump made America’s Foreign Policy Even Worse" (Cato Institute, 2019)
30 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump broke not only from the Republican Party consensus but also from the bipartisan consensus on the direction o...
The Treaty of Versailles On Hundred Years On
27 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The Versailles Treaty of 1919, celebrates its one-hundred anniversary this year. And, yet unlike the more recent centenaries, such as that of the outb...
Reider Payne, "War and Diplomacy in the Napoleonic Era" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)
26 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Though Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh remains well known today for his role in shaping the post-Napoleonic peace settlement in Europe, his half-...
Beth Fischer, "The Myth of Triumphalism: Rethinking President Reagan's Cold War Legacy" (UP of Kentucky, 2019)
23 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Every time that I teach any portion of a course dealing with Ronald Reagan and the end of the Cold War, I gird myself for the inevitable myth-busting ...
Matthew Lockwood, "To Begin The World Over Again: How the American Revolution Devastated the Globe" (Yale UP, 2019)
20 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Growing up as an American, you’re bound to be all-but-suffused with triumphalist histories of the American Revolution. Those histories might have a ...
Giuliana Chamedes, "A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe" (Harvard UP, 2019)
18 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Giuliana Chamedes' new book A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe (Harvard University Press, 2019) explores h...
Taomo Zhou, “Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War” (Cornell UP, 2019)
17 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
If tales of China’s radical ‘opening up’ to the world over the last 30 years imply that the country was somehow ‘closed’ before this, then o...
Jeremy Yellen, "The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War" (Cornell UP, 2019)
25 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Jeremy Yellen’s The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War (Cornell University Press, 2019) is a challenging transn...
Appeasement Eighty Years On
18 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
According to one dictionary definition, the term means: “to yield or concede to the belligerent demands of (a nation, group, person, etc.) in a conc...
Aurélie Basha i Novosejt, "I Made Mistakes: Robert McNamara's Vietnam War Policy, 1960-1968 (Cambridge UP, 2018)
04 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Speaking to an advisor in 1966 about America's escalation of forces in Vietnam, American Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara confessed: 'We've mad...
Bruce Riedel, "Beirut 1958: How America's Wars in the Middle East Began" (Brookings, 2019)
01 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In July 1958, U.S. Marines stormed the beach in Beirut, Lebanon, ready for combat. Farcically. they were greeted by vendors and sunbathers. Fortunatel...
Michael Mandelbaum, "The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth" (Oxford UP, 2019)
24 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In the twenty-five years after 1989, the world enjoyed the deepest peace in history. In The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth (Oxford Univiersity Press,...
Nianshen Song, "Making Borders in Modern East Asia: The Tumen River Demarcation, 1881-1919” (Cambridge UP, 2018)
17 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Land borders in East Asia have played just as big a role in the region’s social transformations as their more recently debated maritime counterparts...
Matthew A. Sutton, "Double Crossed: The Missionaries Who Spied for the United States During the Second World War" (Basic Books, 2019)
17 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
What makes a good missionary makes a good spy. Or so thought "Wild" Bill Donovan when he secretly recruited a team of religious activists for the Offi...
Geoffrey Parker, "Emperor: A New Life of Charles V" (Yale UP, 2019)
27 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The Emperor Charles V (1500–1558), ruler of Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, the Netherlands, and much of Italy and Central and South America, has long...
Matthew Hughes, "Britain's Pacification of Palestine" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
24 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In his splendid military history of Britain's pacification of the Arab revolt in Palestine, Britain's Pacification of Palestine: The British Army, the...
Keir Giles, "Moscow Rules: What Drives Russia to Confront the West" (Chatham House, 2019)
03 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
From Moscow, the world looks different. It is through understanding how Russia sees the world—and its place in it—that the West can best meet the ...
Jenny Huangfu Day, "Qing Travelers to the Far West: Diplomacy and the Information Order in Late Imperial China" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
29 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Historians in the English-speaking world have long studied how European and American travelers and diplomats conceptualized China, but, especially in ...
James Tharin Bradford, "Poppies, Power, and Politics: Afghanistan and the Global History of Drugs and Diplomacy" (Cornell UP, 2019)
13 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Afghanistan and the United States have a complicated relationship. And poppies have often been at the center of the problem between the two countries....
Michael Beckley, "Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World's Sole Superpower" (Cornell UP, 2018)
07 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The United States has been the world's dominant power for more than a century. Now many analysts and commentators believe that other countries such as...
Robert Crowcroft, "The End is Nigh: British Politics, Power, and the Road to the Second World War" (Oxford UP, 2019)
06 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Few decades have given rise to such potent mythologies as the 1930s. Popular impressions of those years prior to the Second World War were shaped by t...
Martin Edwards, "The IMF, the WTO and the Politics of Economic Surveillance" (Routledge, 2018)
22 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) practice periodic surveillance of member states to ensure they are a...
James W. Pardew, "Peacemakers: American Leadership and the End of Genocide in the Balkans" (U Kentucky Press, 2017)
19 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In his book Peacemakers: American Leadership and the End of Genocide in the Balkans (University of Kentucky Press, 2017), Ambassador James W. Pardew ...
Jeremy Friedman, "Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World" (UNC Press, 2018)
12 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
If today’s geopolitical fragmentation and the complexities of a ‘multipolar’ world order have led some to reminisce about the apparent stability...
Donald Stoker, "Why America Loses Wars: Limited War and US Strategy from the Korean War to the Present" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
08 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In this provocative challenge to United States policy and strategy, former Professor of Strategy & Policy at the US Naval War College, and author or e...
Jeffrey Lantis, "Foreign Policy Advocacy and Entrepreneurship: How a New Generation in Congress Is Shaping U.S. Engagement with the World" (U Michigan Press, 2019)
02 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
With the US in the midst of on-going negotiations with Iran, North Korea, and China, how is Congress playing a part? How is the new generation of Cong...
Sasha D. Pack, "The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Hispano-African Border" (Stanford UP, 2019)
01 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In his new book, The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Hispano-African Border(Stanford, 2019), Sasha D. Pack considers the...
Jonathan D. T. Ward, "China's Vision of Victory" (Atlas Publishing, 2019)
28 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Someday we may say that we never saw it coming. After seventy-five years of peace in the Pacific, a new challenger to American power has emerged, on a...
Tim Bouverie, "Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill and the Road to War" (Tim Duggan Books, 2019)
27 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill and the Road to War(Tim Duggan Books, 2019) is a groundbreaking history of the disastrous years of indecis...
Tobias Straumann, "1931: Debt, Crisis, and the Rise of Hitler" (Oxford UP, 2019)
27 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
What can we learn from the financial crisis that brought Hitler to power? How did diplomatic deadlock fuel the rise of authoritarianism? Tobias Straum...
Stacy Fahrenthold, "Between the Ottomans and the Entente: The First World War in the Syrian and Lebanese Diaspora, 1908-1925" (Oxford UP, 2019)
19 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In her debut book, Between the Ottomans and the Entente: The First World War in the Syrian and Lebanese Diaspora, 1908-1925 (Oxford University Press, ...
David Milne, "Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015)
18 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
There are countless ways to study the history of U.S. foreign policy. David Milne, however, makes the case that it is “often best understood” as “...
Vahram Ter-Matevosyan, "Turkey, Kemalism and the Soviet Union: Problems of Modernization, Ideology and Interpretation" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)
13 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Vahram Ter-Matevosyan new book Turkey, Kemalism and the Soviet Union: Problems of Modernization, Ideology and Interpretation (Palgrave Macmillan, exa...
Ian Saxine, "Properties of Empire: Indians, Colonists, and Land Speculators on the New England Frontier" (NYU Press, 2019)
06 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In Properties of Empire: Indians, Colonists, and Land Speculators on the New England Frontier (NYU Press, 2019), Ian Saxine, Visiting Assistant Profes...
Jennifer Fluri and Rachel Lehr, "The Carpetbaggers of Kabul and Other American-Afghan Entanglements" (U Georgia Press, 2017)
29 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
For most people, geopolitics is something that happens out there, in boardrooms and on battlefields. But critical geographers, and feminist political ...
Timothy A. Sayle, "Enduring Alliance: A History of NATO and the Postwar Global Order" (Cornell UP, 2019)
28 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization regularly appears in newspapers and political science scholarship. Surprisingly, historians have yet to devote ...
Jeremy Black, "The World at War, 1914-1945" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019)
22 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In one of his latest books, The World at War, 1914-1945 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), Professor of History at Exeter University, Jeremy Black, the mos...
Henry Kissinger and Winston Lord, "Kissinger on Kissinger: Reflections on Diplomacy, Grand Strategy, and Leadership" (All Points Books, 2019)
14 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In a series of riveting and in depth interviews, America's senior statesman, former Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, discusses the challenges of d...
Andreas Krieg, "Divided Gulf: The Anatomy of a Crisis" (Palgrave, 2019)
13 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Andreas Krieg’s edited volume, Divided Gulf: The Anatomy of a Crisis(Palgrave, 2019), brings together a group of prominent Gulf scholars to discuss ...
Jeremy Black, "Imperial Legacies: The British Empire Around the World" (Encounter Books, 2019)
01 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Are you tired of the constant refrain from our campus radicals and their bien-pensant allies in the intelligentsia that the United States and the Unit...
Michael J. Mazarr, "Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America’s Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy" (Public Affairs, 2019)
30 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Michael J. Mazarr has written a history of the policy planning process leading up to the Iraq War in 2003. Mazarr has conducted over one hundred inte...
Dilip Hiro, "Cold War in the Islamic World: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Struggle for Supremacy" (Oxford UP, 2018)
16 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In recent years, the concept of a ‘Cold War’ has been revived to describe the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the two most influential stat...
Michael A. Schoeppner, "Moral Contagion: Black Atlantic Sailors, Citizenship, and Diplomacy in Antebellum America" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
04 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Between 1822 and 1857, eight Southern states barred the ingress of all free black maritime workers. According to lawmakers, they carried a 'moral cont...
Kathleen Burk, "The Lion and the Eagle: The Interaction of the British and American Empires, 1783-1972" (Bloomsbury, 2019)
02 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Throughout modern history, British and American rivalry has gone hand in hand with common interests. Now renown diplomatic historian Professor Kathlee...
Philip Zelikow and Ernest May, "Suez Deconstructed: An Interactive Study in Crisis, War, and Peacemaking" (Brookings Institution, 2018)
25 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Experiencing a major crisis from different viewpoints, step by step: the Suez crisis of 1956— one of the major crises of the 1950s offers a potenti...
Andrew Lambert, "Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires and the Conflict That Made the Modern World" (Yale UP, 2018)
23 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Andrew Lambert, Professor of Naval History at King’s College, London, author of eighteen books, and winner of the prestigious Anderson Medal—turns...
Jonathan Fulton, "China's Relations with the Gulf Monarchies" (Routledge, 2018)
17 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Jonathan Fulton's China's Relations with the Gulf Monarchies (Routledge, 2018) sheds light on China’s increasing economic role at a moment that the ...
Julian Jackson, "De Gaulle" (Harvard UP, 2018)
16 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Charles de Gaulle is one of the greatest figures of twentieth century history. If Sir Winston Churchill was (in the words of Harold Macmillan) the "gr...
Michael Cotey Morgan, "The Final Act: The Helsinki Accords and the Transformation of the Cold War" (Princeton UP, 2018)
03 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Just when you thought that you knew everything and anything pertaining to the Cold War and the ending of it, along comes University of North Carolina ...
Audra J. Wolfe, "Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018)
27 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Audra J. Wolfe, is a Philadelphia-based writer, editor and historian. Her book Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science(J...
Rory Cormac, "Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy" (Oxford UP, 2018)
27 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In the decades following the Second World War, the British government increasingly turned to covert operations as a means of achieving their foreign p...
Seth Anziska, "Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo" (Princeton UP, 2018)
17 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The question of Palestinian autonomy has been a key element of Middle Eastern and Arab politics for much of the last century. A new history, by Seth A...
Peter Hitchens, "The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion" (I.B. Tauris, 2018)
12 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Was World War II really the 'Good War'? In the years since the declaration of peace in 1945 many myths have sprung up around the conflict in the victo...
Eric Helleiner, "Forgotten Foundations: International Development and the Making of the Postwar Order" (Cornell UP, 2018)
11 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The story of Bretton Woods has been told by countless historians. We have a good sense of the wartime context, the negotiations themselves, the roles ...
Roland Philipps, “A Spy Named Orphan: the Enigma of Donald Maclean” (W.W. Norton, 2018)
23 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Donald Maclean was one of the most treacherous and productive – for Moscow spies of the Cold War era and a key member of the infamous “Cambridge F...
Gill Bennett, “The Zinoviev Letter: The Conspiracy that Never Dies” (Oxford UP, 2018)
18 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The Zinoviev Affair is a story of one of the most long-lasting and enduring conspiracy theories in modern British politics, an intrigue that still re...
David Pietrusza, “TR’s Last War: Theodore Roosevelt, the Great War, and a Journey of Triumph and Tragedy” (Lyons Press, 2018)
17 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Teddy Roosevelt had one of the most colorful lives in the American history, but few have deeply explored his final years. Historian David Pietrusza do...
Jeffrey D. Sachs, "A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism" (Columbia UP, 2018)
10 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
If you are tired of reading the same, Washington-based, consensus, 'realist' and or 'neo-conservative', critiques of American foreign policy, here is ...
Sir John Elliott, “Scots and Catalans: Union and Disunion” (Yale UP, 2018)
18 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Sir John Elliott, Regius Professor Emeritus of Modern History at Oxford University, one of the premier historians writing in English on Spanish and Eu...
Peter James Hudson, “Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean” (U Chicago Press, 2017)
28 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Histories of banking and finance aren’t particularly well-known for being riveting, adventurous reads: they tend to be technical at the expense of b...
Heather Curtis, “Holy Humanitarians: American Evangelicals and Global Aid” (Harvard UP, 2018)
24 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The study of Christianity, international relations, and the United States is going through something of a boom period at the moment. Scholars are work...
Victor Bulmer‑Thomas, “Empire in Retreat: The Past, Present and Future of the United States” (Yale UP, 2018)
23 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
A respected authority on 19th- and 20th-century Latin American and Caribbean History as well as a past Director at Chatham House, Victor Bulmer‑Tho...
Pekka Hämäläinen, “The Comanche Empire” (Yale UP, 2008)
17 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In his book, The Comanche Empire (Yale University Press, 2008), Pekka Hämäläinen refutes the traditional story that Indians were bit players or un...