New Books in Military History
Episodes
N. M. Sambaluk, “The Other Space Race: Eisenhower and the Quest for Aerospace Security” (Naval Institute Press, 2015)
29 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Many people place the beginning of the American space program at 7:28pm, October 4, 1957 – the moment the Soviet Union launched the first satellite,...
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...
Nathaniel Philbrick, “In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown” (Viking, 2018)
16 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Most Americans do not appreciate the extent to which victory in the American Revolution was due to the leadership of a French aristocrat. As Nathanie...
Susan Carruthers, “The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace” (Harvard UP, 2016)
15 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In her new book, The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace (Harvard University Press, 2016), Dr. Susan Carruthers, professor of...
Brian VanDeMark, “The Road to Disaster: A New History of America’s Descent Into Vietnam” (Harper Collins, 2018)
09 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Many books have been written on the tragic decisions regarding Vietnam made by the young stars of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Yet despite...
Joan E. Cashin, “War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War” (Cambridge UP, 2018)
28 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The Civil War was even more disastrous than we thought. Joan Cashin, already a distinguished scholar of the period, looks afresh at the war through th...
Giulio Ongaro, “Peasants and Soldiers: The Management of the Venetian Military Structure in the Mainland Dominion between the 16th and 17th Centuries” (Routledge, 2017)
25 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. Giulio Ongaro, currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Economics Department at the University of Milan-Bicocca has just published Peasants and Sol...
Stephen R. Platt, “Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age” (Knopf, 2018)
24 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The reason for Great Britain’s war against China in the First Opium War (1839-42) is often taken as a given. British merchants wanted to “open” ...
Brian D. Laslie, “Architect of Air Power: General Laurence S. Kuter and the Birth of the U.S. Air Force” (UP of Kentucky, 2017.
14 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
We have all seen pictures of the “Big Three” (Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin) at their historic meeting Yalta in February 1945. The three leaders co...
Peter Heather, “Rome Resurgent: War and Empire in the Age of Justinian” (Oxford UP, 2018)
10 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In the 6th century CE, the Roman emperor Justinian embarked upon a series of wars that seemed to herald the restoration of the Roman empire in the wes...
N.A.J. Taylor and R. Jacobs, eds., “Reimagining Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Nuclear Humanities in the Post-Cold War” (Routledge, 2017)
05 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
N.A.J. Taylor and Robert Jacobs,’s edited volume Reimagining Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Nuclear Humanities in the Post-Cold War (Routledge, 2017) deve...
Gerald Gems, “Sport and the American Occupation of the Philippines: Bats, Balls, and Bayonets” (Lexington Books, 2016)
14 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Today we are joined by Gerald Gems, Professor of Kinesiology at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, and the author of several books on spor...
Nick Dybek, “The Verdun Affair: A Novel” (Scribner, 2018)
14 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In a break with protocol, I decided to interview a novelist rather than a military historian. Nick Dybek, a creative writing professor at Oregon State...
John M. Curatola, “Bigger Bombs for a Brighter Tomorrow: The Strategic Air Command and American War Plans at the Dawn of the Atomic Age, 1945-1950” (McFarland, 2016)
01 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Conventional wisdom has long held the position that between 1945 and 1949, not only did the United States enjoy a monopoly on atomic weapons, but that...
William D. Godsey, “The Sinews of Habsburg Power: Lower Austria in a Fiscal-Military State, 1650-1820” (Oxford UP, 2018)
17 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
During the 17th and 18th centuries, Austria established itself as one of the dominant powers of Europe, despite possessing much more limited fiscal re...
Guy Laron, “The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East” (Yale UP, 2017)
16 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The title of Guy Laron’s The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East (Yale University Press, 2017) says it all. As Laron notes in this intervi...
Marc Ambinder, “The Brink: President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1983” (Simon & Schuster, 2018)
11 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The Brink: President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1983 (Simon & Schuster, 2018), by Marc Ambinder, is a history of US-Soviet Relations under Ro...
Steve R. Dunn, “Bayly’s War: The Battle for the Western Approaches in the First World War” (Naval Institute Press, 2018)
09 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Though Great Britain’s warships ruled the waves throughout the First World War, their greatest challenge came from just underneath them. Nowhere was...
Craig Symonds, “World War II at Sea: A Global History” (Oxford UP, 2018)
06 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Though there are numerous books about the naval history of the Second World War, very few of them attempt to cover the span of the conflict within the...
Joy Rohde, “Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research During the Cold War” (Cornell UP, 2013)
27 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research During the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2013), Joy Rohde discusses th...
Andrew J. Huebner, “Love and Death in the Great War” (Oxford UP, 2018)
26 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Coincident with the hundredth anniversary of the first American engagements in the First World War, Andrew J. Huebner joins New Books in Military Hist...
Lisa M. Todd, “Sexual Treason in Germany during the First World War” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
22 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The First World War is usually associated with Trench Warfare, industrial mobilization, and the Lost Generation. In her recent book, Sexual Treason in...
Jacob N. Shapiro, “Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict” (Princeton UP, 2018)
07 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict (Princeton University Press, 2018), Eli Berman, Joseph H. Felter, and Jacob N. Sha...
Janet E. Croon, “The War Outside My Window: The Civil War Diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham, 1860-1865” (Savas Beatie, 2018)
31 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Sit alongside a disabled teenage Southerner as he records his experience in The War Outside My Window: The Civil War Diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham, 186...
Jonathan Boff, “Haig’s Enemy: Crown Prince Rupprecht and Germany’s War on the Western Front” (Oxford UP, 2018)
28 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
There has been historiographical revolution in the literature of the war on the Western Front in the past thirty years. In Haig’s Enemy: Crown Princ...
Simeon Man, “Soldiering through Empire: Race and the Making of the Decolonizing Pacific” (U California Press, 2018)
25 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Simeon Man‘s book Soldiering through Empire: Race and the Making of the Decolonizing Pacific (University of California Press, 2018) focuses on the ...
Tarak Barkawi, “Soldiers of Empire: Indian and British Armies in World War II” (Cambridge UP, 2017)
25 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Tarak Barkawi, a Reader in International Relations at the London School of Economics, has written an important book that will cause many of us to reth...
James Wright, “Enduring Vietnam: An American Generation and its War” (Thomas Dunne Books, 2017)
17 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
There’s been something of a revival of interest in the Vietnam War in the past years. Perhaps it’s the influence of Ken Burns’ documentary min...
Jessica Elkind, “Aid Under Fire: Nation Building and the Vietnam War” (U Kentucky Press, 2016)
09 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
As any scholar of the Vietnam War can tell you, the field doesn’t lack for study: it’s one of the most-studied fields for both military and diplom...
Steven L. Ossad, “Omar Nelson Bradley: America’s GI General, 1893-1981” (University of Missouri Press, 2017)
04 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Steven L. Ossad joins New Books at Military History to talk about his award-winning biography, Omar Nelson Bradley: America’s GI General, 1893-1981 ...
Harlan Ullman, “Anatomy of Failure: Why America Loses Every War It Starts” (Naval Institute Press, 2017)
02 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Since 1945, the United States has lost every war it started. Why? A Vietnam War veteran, Tufts University Ph. D. and intimate of many of the leading f...
Aidan Forth, “Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876-1903” (U California Press, 2017)
24 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In his new book, Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876-1903 (University of California Press, 2017), Aidan Forth employs a compar...
Max Boot, “The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam” (Liveright, 2018)
13 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Counterinsurgency doctrine, the Vietnam War, and the vagaries of politics all come together in Max Boot‘s latest work, The Road Not Taken: Edward La...
Steven Gray, “Steam Power and Sea Power: Coal, the Royal Navy, and the British Empire, c. 1870-1914” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
10 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In Steam Power and Sea Power: Coal, the Royal Navy, and the British Empire, c. 1870-1914 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Steven Gray examines the pivotal ...
Sandra Ott, “Living with the Enemy: German Occupation, Collaboration and Justice in the West Pyrenees, 1940-1948” (Cambridge UP, 2017)
09 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In her new book, Living with the Enemy: German Occupation, Collaboration and Justice in the West Pyrenees, 1940-1948 (Cambridge University Press, 2017...
Katrin Paehler, “The Third Reich’s Intelligence Service: The Career of Walter Schellenberg” (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
06 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Who was the spymaster of the Third Reich? How did Nazi ideology influence intelligence collection? Katrin Paehler answers these questions with the fir...
Tore T. Petersen, “The Military Conquest of the Prairie” (Sussex Academic Press, 2016)
20 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Tore T. Petersen, Professor of International and American Diplomatic History at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, studies the final ...
Christina Twomey, “The Battle Within: POWs in Postwar Australia” (NewSouth Books, 2018)
13 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In her new book, The Battle Within: POWs in Postwar Australia (NewSouth Books, 2018), Christina Twomey, Professor of History at Monash University, exp...
James Reston, Jr., “A Rift in the Earth: Art, Memory and the Fight for a Vietnam War Memorial” (Arcade Publishing, 2017)
07 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
My students don’t remember Vietnam. That’s hard to believe, for someone born in 1968. But it’s true, nonetheless. High school history courses r...
Anthimos Tsirigotis, “Cybernetics, Warfare, and Discourse” Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
06 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
On this episode, we will be talking to Anthimos Alexandros Tsirigotis about his book Cybernetics, Warfare, and Discourse: The Cybernetisation of Warfa...
David Armitage, “Civil Wars: A History in Ideas” (Yale UP, 2017)
02 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Civil wars are among the most intractable conflicts in the world. Yet exactly distinguishes civil war from other types of armed struggle? In his book ...
John Broich, “Squadron: Ending the African Slave Trade” (Overlook Duckworth Press, 2017)
01 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Despite the British being early abolitionists, a significant slave trade remained in the western Indian Ocean through the mid-1800s, even after the ce...
Mahon Murphy, “Colonial Captivity during the First World War: Internment and the Fall of the German Empire, 1914-1919” (Cambridge UP, 2017)
14 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The First World War was not limited the trenches on the Western Front. Nor was the system of internment camps it spawned. In his new book, Colonial Ca...
Thomas Whigham, “The Road to Armageddon: Paraguay versus the Triple Alliance, 1866-1870” (U Calgary Press, 2017)
14 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Paraguay’s intervention in a crisis between Uruguay and Brazil in November 1864 began the bloodiest and most destructive conflict in South American ...
Christopher Hager, “I Remain Yours: Common Lives in Civil War Letters” (Harvard UP, 2018)
12 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In I Remain Yours: Common Lives in Civil War Letters (Harvard University Press, 2018), Christopher Hager trains our attention to “the cell-level tra...
Gregory A. Daddis, “Westmoreland’s War: Reassessing America’s Strategy in Vietnam” (Oxford UP, 2014)
09 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In the wake of Ken Burns’ most recent series, The Vietnam War, America’s fascination with the conflict shows no sign of abating. Fortunately the f...
Robert Aquinas McNally, “The Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America’s Gilded Age” (Bison Books, 2017)
09 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
On a cold, rainy dawn in late November 1872, Lieutenant Frazier Boutelle and a Modoc Indian nicknamed Scarface Charley leveled firearms at each other....
David W. Grua, “Surviving Wounded Knee: The Lakotas and the Politics of Memory” (Oxford UP, 2016)
05 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
It’s a sad story known well. In dead of winter at Wounded Knee Creek in 1890, U.S. soldiers with the Seventh Cavalry Regiment gunned down over two h...
Laura Engelstein, “Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914-1921” (Oxford University Press, 2017)
31 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914-1921 (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a masterful account of the Russian revolutionary era by Lau...
Daniel J. Sharfstein, “Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War” (Norton, 2017)
24 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law and History at Vanderbilt University, narrates a postbellum struggle that raged in the Northern Rockies in Thun...
What Role Did World War I Play in Women Gaining the Right to Vote?
23 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In the fifth podcast of Arguing History, Lynn Dumenil and Christopher Capozzola consider the relationship between America’s involvement in World War...
David Stevenson, “1917: War, Peace, and Revolution” (Oxford UP, 2018)
22 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In 1917: War, Peace, and Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2018), David Stevenson examines a pivotal chapter of the First World War. Two and a half...
Russell Shorto, “Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom” (Norton, 2017)
13 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Russell Shorto‘s Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom (Norton, 2017) is a history of many revolutions, kaleidoscopic turns through six indiv...
Vanya E. Bellinger, “Marie von Clausewitz: The Woman Behind the Making of On War” (Oxford UP, 2016)
03 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Marie von Clausewitz: The Woman Behind the Making of On War (Oxford University Press, 2016) is an important and fascinating book that not only tells t...
Jonathan W. White, “Midnight in America: Darkness, Sleep, and Dreams during the Civil War” (UNC Press, 2017)
15 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
What were the dreams of the Civil War? Find out by listening to my conversation with Jonathan White about his new book Midnight in America: Darkness, ...
Steven P. Remy, “The Malmedy Massacre: The War Crimes Trial Controversy” (Harvard UP, 2017)
13 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In his new book, The Malmedy Massacre: The War Crimes Trial Controversy (Harvard University Press, 2017), Steven Remy, professor of history at City Un...
David Head, “Privateers of the Americas: Spanish American Privateering from the United States in the Early Republic” (U. Georgia Press, 2015)
12 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
When the nations of Latin America fought for their independence in the early 19th century, they commissioned privateers stationed in the United States...
Monica Ricketts, “Who Should Rule? Men of Arms, the Republic of Letters, and the Fall of the Spanish Empire” (Oxford UP, 2017)
07 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Monica Ricketts’ new book Who Should Rule? Men of Arms, the Republic of Letters, and the Fall of the Spanish Empire (Oxford University Press, 2017) ...
Paul Magid, “The Gray Fox: George Crook and the Indian Wars” (U. Oklahoma Press, 2015)
07 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
With the end of the Civil War, George Crook’s decision to continue serving in the United States Army meant reverting to a lower rank and assuming a ...
David G. Morgan-Owen, “The Fear of Invasion: Strategy, Politics, and British War Planning, 1880-1914” (Oxford University Press, 2017)
05 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
David Morgan-Owen‘s The Fear of Invasion: Strategy, Politics, and British War Planning, 1880-1914 (Oxford University Press, 2017) tells a complex st...
Guenter Lewy, “Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers” (Oxford UP, 2017)
29 Nov 2017
Contributed by Lukas
“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous.” Thus begins Guenter Lewy’s latest book, Perpetrators: The World of the ...
Judith Giesberg, “Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of American Morality” (UNC Press, 2017)
13 Nov 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Judith Giesberg, an expert on the history of women and gender during the Civil War, is professor and director of graduate studies in the history depar...
Mark Dapin, “Jewish Anzacs: Jews in the Australian Military” (New South Press, 2017)
27 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In his new book, Jewish Anzacs: Jews in the Australian Military (New South Press, 2017), author, journalist and historian Mark Dapin explores the litt...
Christian Ingrao, “Believe and Destroy: Intellectuals in the SS War Machine” (Polity Press, 2015)
26 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
How did a generation of Germany’s best and brightest become radicalized? What convinced young intellectuals to join the SS and perpetrate genocide i...
Ricardo A. Herrera, “For Liberty and the Republic: The American Citizen as Soldier, 1775-1861” (NYU Press, 2015)
17 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Citizenship, identity, and legitimacy are the cornerstones of Ricardo A. Herrera’s book, For Liberty and the Republic: The American Citizen as Soldi...
Leigh Straw, “After the War: Returned Soldiers and the Mental and Physical Scars of World War I” (UWA Publishing, 2017)
13 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In her new book, After the War: Returned Soldiers and the Mental and Physical Scars of World War I (UWA Publishing, 2017), Leigh Straw, a Senior Lectu...
Alexander Prusin, “Serbia under the Swastika: A World War II Occupation” (U. Illinois Press, 2017)
11 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In Serbia under the Swastika: A World War II Occupation (University of Illinois Press, 2017), Alexander Prusin delineates the Nazi occupation of Yugos...
Steve Sheinkin, “The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights” (Roaring Brook, 2014)
06 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
On July 17, 1944, a massive explosion rocked the segregated Navy base at Port Chicago, California, killing more than 300 sailors who were at the docks...
Harry Bennett, “The Royal Navy in the Age of Austerity, 1919-1922: Naval and Foreign Policy under Lloyd George” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016)
27 Sep 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Great Britain’s victory in the First World War brought with it the competing challenges of defending an expanded empire while reducing military expe...
Paige Bowers, “The General’s Niece: The Little-Known de Gaulle Who Fought to Free Occupied France” (Chicago Review Press, 2017)
19 Sep 2017
Contributed by Lukas
When Charles de Gaulle issued his famous call in June 1940 for the French people to continue fighting Nazi Germany, among those within Occupied France...
Tom Carhart, “The Golden Fleece: High-Risk Adventure at West Point” (Potomac Books, 2017)
15 Sep 2017
Contributed by Lukas
If you were a cadet at West Point and knew with virtual certainty that upon graduation you would be sent into the teeth of the Vietnam war, what would...
Was Presidential Leadership Decisive in Determining the Outcome of the Civil War?
12 Sep 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In the third podcast of Arguing History, historians William J. Cooper and Richard Carwardine address the question of the role presidential leadership ...
Asher Orkaby, “Beyond the Arab Cold War: The International History of the Yemen Civil War, 1962-68” (Oxford UP, 2017)
05 Sep 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The civil war in Yemen today harkens back to a similar conflict half a century ago, when the overthrow of the ruling imam, Muhammad al-Badr, in 1962 s...
Wendy Pearlman, “We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria” (Custom House, 2017)
30 Aug 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In the wake of the Arab Spring and the ensuing Syrian Civil War, the stories of the millions displaced by the conflict as well as the millions Syria h...
Anthony Kaldellis, “Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood: The Rise and Fall of Byzantium, 955 A.D. to the First Crusade” (Oxford UP, 2017)
23 Aug 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In the 10th century, a succession of Byzantine rulers reversed centuries of strategic policy by embarking on a series of campaigns that dramatically r...
Hussein Fancy, “The Mercenary Mediterranean: Sovereignty, Religion, and Violence in the Medieval Crown of Aragon” (U of Chicago Press, 2016)
12 Aug 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Hussein Fancy’s book The Mercenary Mediterranean: Sovereignty, Religion, and Violence in the Medieval Crown of Aragon (University of Chicago Press, ...
Richard Rubin, “Back Over There” (St. Martin’s Press, 2017)
06 Aug 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The majority of the books we profile on New Books in Military History are traditional research narratives, monographs written by historians and author...
Gerben Zaagsma, “Jewish Volunteers, the International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017)
24 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In Jewish Volunteers, the International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), Gerben Zaagsma, Senior researcher at the centr...
Peter Eisner, “MacArthur’s Spies: The Solider, the Singer, and the Spymaster Who Defied the Japanese in WWII” (Viking, 2017)
20 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The conquest of the Philippines in 1942 brought thousands of Americans under the control of the empire of Japan. While most of them were interned or i...
Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez, “The Soviet-Israeli War, 1967-1973: The USSR’s Intervention in the Egyptian-Israeli Conflict” (Oxford UP, 2017)
19 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The title of Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez‘s The Soviet-Israeli War, 1967-1973: The USSR’s Intervention in the Egyptian-Israeli Conflict (Oxford...
Jennifer T. Roberts, “The Plague of War: Athens, Sparta, and the Struggle for Ancient Greece” (Oxford UP, 2017)
16 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The Peloponnesian War was one of the first subjects of historical inquiry, and one that has been the subject of many works ever since Thucydides wrote...
Patrick N. Hunt, “Hannibal” (Simon and Schuster, 2017)
13 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In 218 BCE, the Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca launched an invasion of Italy designed to bring the Roman Republic to its knees. Yet for all of hi...
Robert M. Browning Jr., “Lincoln’s Trident: The West Gulf Blockading Squadron during the Civil War” (U. of Alabama Press, 2015)
10 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Though the U.S. Navy’s blockade of the Confederacy has not received the attention devoted to the bloody campaigns on land, it was an important contr...
Should the U.S. Have Entered World War One?
24 Jun 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In the inaugural podcast of Arguing History, historians Michael S. Neiberg and Brian Neumann address the question of Americas decision in 1917 to decl...
Gary Kulik, “War Stories: False Atrocity Tales, Swift Boaters, and Winter Soldiers” (Potomac Books, 2009)
15 Jun 2017
Contributed by Lukas
One often hears stories of World War II and Korean War veterans who came back from the war and refused to talk about what they had experienced in comb...
Andrew Boyd, “The Royal Navy in Eastern Waters: The Linchpin of Victory, 1935-1942” (Seaforth Publishing, 2017)
14 Jun 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1930s the Royal Navy faced the problem of defending its empire in eastern Asia and Australia against the formidable naval power of Japan. How t...
John P. Langellier, “Fighting for Uncle Sam: Buffalo Soldiers in the Frontier Army” (Schiffer, 2016)
08 Jun 2017
Contributed by Lukas
From the American Revolution to the present day, African Americans have stepped forward in their nation’s defense. Fighting for Uncle Sam: Buffalo S...
Patrick J. Hayes, “The Civil War Diary of Rev. James Sheeran, Confederate Chaplain and Redemptorist” (Catholic Univ. of America Press, 2016)
23 May 2017
Contributed by Lukas
During the Civil War Father James Sheeran served as a Catholic chaplain for the 14th Louisiana Infantry. Between his various responsibilities Sheeran ...
Michael Bryant,” A World History of War Crimes: From Antiquity to the Present,” (Bloomsbury, 2016)
18 May 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Michael Bryant’s book is both less and more ambitious than its title. He’s writing less of a history of war crimes than he is a history of the ide...
Steve Dunn, “Securing the Narrow Sea: The Dover Patrol, 1914-1918” (Seaforth/US Naval Institute, 2017)
15 May 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Most accounts about the naval battles of the First World War focus upon the stalemate between the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet, ...
Lynn Dumenil, “The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I” (UNC Press, 2017)
18 Apr 2017
Contributed by Lukas
When America went to war against Germany in 1917, the scale of the conflict required the mobilization of women as well as men in order to achieve vict...
Phil Gurski, “Western Foreign Fighters: The Threat to Homeland and International Security” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016)
17 Apr 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Phil Gurski‘s Western Foreign Fighters: The Threat to Homeland and International Security (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) is his second recent monogr...
Seth Barrett Tillman, “Ex Parte Merryman: Myth, History, and Scholarship,” Military Law Review 481 (2016)
04 Apr 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Seth Barrett Tillman has written “Ex Parte Merryman: Myth, History and Scholarship,” an article about the famous case that is popularly thought to...
Norman Ohler, “Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017)
08 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Norman Ohler’s Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) explores the drug culture of Nazi Germany. Far from being a natio...
Edward Westermann, “Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars: Comparing Genocide and Conquest” (U. Oklahoma Press, 2016)
02 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The intersection of colonialism and mass atrocities is one of the most exciting insights of the past years of genocide studies. But most people don’...
Michael S. Neiberg, “The Path to War: How the First World War Created Modern America” (Oxford UP, 2016)
28 Feb 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In The Path to War: How the First World War Created Modern America (Oxford University Press, 2016), acclaimed historian Michael Neiberg examines the ...
David Curtis Skaggs, “William Henry Harrison and the Conquest of the Ohio Country: Frontier Fighting in the War of 1812” (JHU Press, 2014)
14 Feb 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Though best remembered today for his brief tenure as the ninth president of the United States, William Henry Harrison’s most significant contributio...
Paul Pedisich, “Congress Buys a Navy: Politics, Economics, and the Rise of American Naval Power, 1881-1921” (Naval Institute Press, 2016)
30 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In the forty years between 1881 and 1921, the United States Navy went from a small force focused on coastal defense to one of the world’s largest fl...
Ellen Eisenberg, “The First to Cry Down Injustice?: Western Jews and Japanese Removal during WWII” (Lexington Books, 2008)
27 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The mass incarceration of Japanese Americans in the Pacific West is one of the most shameful episodes in our nation’s history. As the United States ...
Tim Brady, “His Father’s Son: The Life of General Ted Roosevelt, Jr.” (NAL, 2017)
19 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Tim Brady’s book His Father’s Son: The Life of General Ted Roosevelt, Jr. (NAL, 2017) is not just the biography of the eldest son and namesake of ...