New Books in Military History
Episodes
Chad L. Williams, “Torchbearers of Democracy: African-American Soldiers in the World War I Era” (The University of North Carolina Press, 2010)
13 May 2011
Contributed by Lukas
One of the great “grey” areas of World War I historiography concerns the African-American experience. Even as the war was ending, white historians...
Robert Citino, “Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942” (UP of Kansas, 2007)
22 Apr 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Robert Citino is one of a handful of scholars working in German military history whose books I would describe as reliably rewarding. Even when one qui...
David J. Silbey, “A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902” (Hill and Wang, 2008)
08 Apr 2011
Contributed by Lukas
The Spanish-American War was not only the beginning of a new imperial period for the United States, David Silbey observes in his book A War of Frontie...
Thomas Bruscino, “A Nation Forged in War: How World War II Taught Americans to Get Along” (University of Tennessee Press, 2010)
25 Mar 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Prior to 1945, the United States was still largely a collection of different ethnic and racial communities, living alongside each other in neighborhoo...
Beth Bailey, “America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force” (Harvard UP, 2009)
18 Mar 2011
Contributed by Lukas
The United States Army is a product of our society and its values (for better and for worse), but it also makes claims to shape our society – and of...
David Day, “Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others” (Oxford UP, 2008)
15 Mar 2011
Contributed by Lukas
People will often say that “this land”–wherever this land happens to be–is theirs because their ancestors “have always lived there.” But y...
Mark Bradley, “Vietnam at War” (Oxford UP, 2009)
14 Mar 2011
Contributed by Lukas
My uncle fought in Vietnam. He flew F-105 Thundercheifs, or “Thuds.” He bombed the heck out of an area north of Hanoi called “Thud Ridge.” He’...
Mark Bradley and Marilyn Young, “Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars” (Oxford UP, 2008)
14 Mar 2011
Contributed by Lukas
What to think about the Vietnam War? A righteous struggle against global Communist tyranny? An episode in American imperialism? A civil war into which...
Gregory J. W. Urwin, “Victory in Defeat: The Wake Island Defenders in Captivity” (Naval Institute Press, 2010)
03 Mar 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Gregory J. W. Urwin’s Victory in Defeat: The Wake Island Defenders in Captivity (Naval Institute Press, 2010) tells the story of the Americans captu...
J. E. Lendon, “Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins” (Basic, 2010)
18 Feb 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Reading J. E. Lendon’s writerly Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins (Basic Books, 2010) took me back to the eventful days of my youth at Pri...
Thomas Weber, “Hitler’s First War: Adolf Hitler, the Men of the List Regiment, and the First World War” (Oxford UP, 2010)
03 Dec 2010
Contributed by Lukas
Here’s something interesting. If you search Google Books for “Hitler,” you’ll get 3,090,000 results. What’s that mean? Well, it means that m...
Joe Maiolo, “Cry Havoc: How the Arms Race Drove the World to War, 1931-1941” (Basic Books, 2010)
12 Nov 2010
Contributed by Lukas
In Cry Havoc: How the Arms Race Drove the World to War, 1931-1941 (Basic Books, 2010), Joe Maiolo proposes (I want to write “demonstrates,” but pl...
Valerie Hebert, “Hitler’s Generals on Trial: The Last War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg” (University Press of Kansas, 2010)
27 Aug 2010
Contributed by Lukas
Clausewitz famously said war was the “continuation of politics by other means.” Had he been unfortunate enough to witness the way the Wehrmacht fo...
Todd Moye, “Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II” (Oxford UP, 2010)
23 Jul 2010
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1940s, the United States military performed an “experiment,” the substance of which was the formation of an all-black aviation unit known t...
Azar Gat, “War in Human Civilization” (Oxford UP, 2006)
15 Jul 2010
Contributed by Lukas
Historians don’t generally like the idea of “human nature.” We tend to believe that people are intrinsically malleable, that they have no innate...
John Steinberg, “All the Tsar’s Men: Russia’s General Staff and the Fate of the Empire, 1898-1914” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010)
09 Jul 2010
Contributed by Lukas
The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was the most important political event of the twentieth century (no Revolution; no Nazis; no Nazis, no World War II; ...
Michael Kranish, “Flight from Monticello: Thomas Jefferson at War” (Oxford UP, 2010)
01 Jul 2010
Contributed by Lukas
The past is always with us, but it’s really always with politicians. Once you put yourself up for office, and particularly national office, everybod...
Heather Cox Richardson, “Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre” (Basic Books, 2010)
03 Jun 2010
Contributed by Lukas
Of all the events in American history, two are far and away the most troubling: slavery and the near-genocidal war against native Americans. In truth,...
Fearghal McGarry, “The Rising: Ireland, Easter 1916” (Oxford UP, 2010)
24 May 2010
Contributed by Lukas
Sometimes when you win you lose. That’s called a Pyrrhic victory. But sometimes when you lose you win. We don’t have a name for that (at least as ...
Jeffrey Reznick, “John Galsworthy and the Disabled Soldiers of the Great War” (Manchester UP, 2009)
18 May 2010
Contributed by Lukas
You may not know who John Galsworthy is, but you probably know his work. Who hasn’t seen some production of The Forsyte Saga? Galsworthy was one of ...
Andrew Donson, “Youth in the Fatherless Land: War Pedagogy, Nationalism, and Authority in Germany, 1914-1918” (Harvard UP, 2010)
23 Apr 2010
Contributed by Lukas
I was a little kid during the Vietnam War. It was on the news all the time, and besides my uncle was fighting there. I followed it closely, or as clos...
Ben Kiernan, “Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur” (Yale UP, 2007)
12 Feb 2010
Contributed by Lukas
Chimps, our closest relatives, kill each other. But chimps do not engage in anything close to mass slaughter of their own kind. Why is this? There are...
Julian E. Zelizer, “Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security From WWII to the War on Terrorism” (Basic Books, 2010)
14 Jan 2010
Contributed by Lukas
Historians are by their nature public intellectuals because they are intellectuals who write about, well, the public. Alas, many historians seem to fo...
Rebecca Manley, “To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War” (Cornell UP, 2009)
20 Nov 2009
Contributed by Lukas
By the time the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the Bolshevik Party had already amassed a considerable amount of expertise in moving ...
Alexander Watson, “Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914-1918” (Cambridge UP, 2008)
06 Aug 2009
Contributed by Lukas
It’s a question I’ve long asked myself: Why and how did common soldiers fight for so long in the First World War? The conditions were awful, death...
Susan Brewer, “Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq” (Oxford UP, 2009)
11 Jul 2009
Contributed by Lukas
Like it or not, governments need to mobilize their populations in times of crisis and one of the ways they do it is to disseminate propaganda. Now thi...
Giles MacDonogh, “After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation” (Basic Books, 2007)
20 Jun 2009
Contributed by Lukas
Many years ago I had the opportunity to spend a summer in Germany, more specifically in a tiny town on the Rhine near Koblenz. The family I stayed wit...
Benjamin Carp, “Rebels Rising: Cities in the American Revolution” (Oxford UP, 2007)
05 Jun 2009
Contributed by Lukas
When I was in college about a million years ago, we used to sit in bars and talk about the Revolution. Actually, it was this bar and something like th...
Norman Stone, “World War One: A Short History” (Basic Books, 2009)
14 May 2009
Contributed by Lukas
When I was in high school, I really didn’t go in for reading. Until, that is, I somehow encountered Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Wester...
Yuma Totani, “The Tokyo War Crimes Trials: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II” (Harvard UP, 2008)
04 Apr 2009
Contributed by Lukas
Most everyone has heard of the Nuremberg Trials. Popular books have been written about them. Hollywood made movies about them. Some of us can even nam...
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, “Jews in the Russian Army, 1827-1917” (Cambridge UP, 2008)
07 Feb 2009
Contributed by Lukas
Every Jew knows the story. The evil tsarist authorities ride into the Shtetl. They demand a levy of young men for the army. Mothers’ weep. Fathers’...
Edwin Burrows, “Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners During the Revolutionary War” (Basic Books, 2008)
15 Nov 2008
Contributed by Lukas
While researching his Pulitzer-Prize-winning Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (with Mike Wallace; Oxford UP 1999), Edwin Burrows uncovered t...
Richard Fogarty, “Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914-1918” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2008)
03 Nov 2008
Contributed by Lukas
The thing about empire building is that when you’re done building one, you’ve got to figure out what to do with it. This generally involves the “...
Mark Mazower, “Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe” (Penguin, 2008)
02 Oct 2008
Contributed by Lukas
It’s curious how historical images become stereotyped over time. One hears the word “Nazi,” and immediately the Holocaust springs to mind. This ...
James Willbanks, “Abandoning Vietnam: How America Left and South Vietnam Lost Its War” (University of Kansas Press, 2008)
19 Sep 2008
Contributed by Lukas
U.S. forces invade a distant country in order to disarm an international threat to American security. They fight well, and win every major battle deci...
Howard Jones, “The Bay of Pigs” (Oxford UP, 2008)
30 Aug 2008
Contributed by Lukas
There is just something about Fidel Castro that American presidents don’t like very much. Maybe it’s the long-winded anti-American diatribes. Mayb...
Christopher Capozzola, “Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of The Modern American Citizen” (Oxford UP, 2008)
26 Jul 2008
Contributed by Lukas
I confess I sometimes wonder where we got in the habit of proclaiming, usually with some sort of righteous indignation, that we have the “right” t...
John Lukacs, “Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: The Dire Warning” (Basic Books, 2008)
18 Jul 2008
Contributed by Lukas
Much has been written about Winston Churchill recently. Some love him, some hate him. But few understand him, at least as well as John Lukacs. That’...
Kimberly Jensen, “Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War” (University of Illinois Press, 2008)
31 May 2008
Contributed by Lukas
Today we have Professor Kimberly Jensen on the show. She teaches in the Department of History and in the Gender Studies Program at Western Oregon Univ...