New Books In Military History

Feminist Perspective on Russia’s War in Ukraine: Hear Our Voices came out with Lexington Books at the two-year’s mark of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in February 2024. This volume undertakes an exploration of how gender norms have been transgressed and cultural expectations of womanhood and manhood evolved within the context of the war in Ukraine, ongoing since 2014. Edited by Maryna Shevtsova, it gives voice to feminist scholars and practitioners from Ukraine and the wider Central and Eastern European region who share their perspectives on the complex interconnection between gender and warfare.  Table of contents is available here. Maryna Shevtsova is a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow of the Flanders Research Foundation at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. Tatiana Klepikova is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Regensburg, where she leads a research group on queer literatures and cultures under socialism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support ou

Over the course of the Vietnam War, the United States dropped 500,000 tons of bombs over Cambodia—more than the combined weight of every man, woman, and child in the country. Fifty years after the last sortie, residents of rural Cambodia are still coping with the unexploded ordnance that covers their land. In When the Bombs Stopped: The Legacy of War in Rural Cambodia (Princeton UP, 2024), Erin Lin investigates the consequences of the US bombing campaign across postconflict Cambodia. Drawing on interviews, original econometric analysis, and extensive fieldwork, Lin upends the usual scholarly perspective on the war and its aftermath, presenting the viewpoint of those who suffered the bombing rather than those who dropped the bombs. She shows that Cambodian farmers stay at a subsistence level because much of their land is too dangerous to cultivate—and yet, paradoxically, the same bombs that endanger and impoverish farming communities also protect them, deterring predatory elites from grabbing and commodifying

Building a Nation at War: Building a Nation at War: Transnational Knowledge Networks and the Development of China during and after World War II (Harvard UP, 2022) argues that the Chinese Nationalist government’s retreat inland during the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), its consequent need for inland resources, and its participation in new scientific and technical relationships with the United States led to fundamental changes in how the Nationalists engaged with science and technology as tools to promote development. The war catalyzed an emphasis on applied sciences, comprehensive economic planning, and development of scientific and technical human resources—all of which served the Nationalists’ immediate and long-term goals. It created an opportunity for the Nationalists to extend control over inland China and over education and industry. It also provided opportunities for China to mobilize transnational networks of Chinese-Americans, Chinese in America, and the American government and businesses. These group

In our interview, I spoke with Donald Stoker about the changes in American grand strategy over the past 250 years and the major themes from his new book: Purpose and Power: US Grand Strategy from the Revolutionary Era to the Present (Cambridge UP, 2024). Across the full span of the nation’s history, Stoker challenges our understanding of the purposes and uses of American power. From the struggle for independence to the era of renewed competition with China and Russia, he reveals the grand strategies underpinning the nation’s pursuit of sovereignty, security, expansion, and democracy abroad. He shows how successive administrations have projected diplomatic, military, and economic power, and mobilized ideas and information to preserve American freedoms at home and secure US aims abroad. He exposes the myth of American isolationism, the good and ill of America’s quest for democracy overseas, and how too often its administrations have lacked clear political aims or a concrete vision for where they want to go. Und

In Holding Their Breath: How the Allies Confronted the Threat of Chemical Warfare in World War II (Cornell UP, 2023), M. Girard Dorsey uncovers just how close Britain, the United States, and Canada came to crossing the red line that restrained poison gas during World War II. Unlike in World War I, belligerents did not release poison gas regularly during the Second World War. Yet, the looming threat of chemical warfare significantly affected the actions and attitudes of these three nations as they prepared their populations for war, mediated their diplomatic and military alliances, and attempted to defend their national identities and sovereignty. The story of chemical weapons and World War II begins in the interwar period as politicians and citizens alike advocated to ban, to resist, and eventually to prepare for gas use in the next war. Molly Dorsey reveals, through extensive research in multinational archives and historical literature, that although poison gas was rarely released on the battlefield in World

Widespread anti-Jewish pogroms accompanied the rebirth of Polish statehood out of World War I and Polish-Soviet War. In Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914-1920 (Cambridge UP, 2018), William W. Hagen offers the pogroms' first scholarly account, revealing how they served as brutal stagings by ordinary people of scenarios dramatizing popular anti-Jewish fears and resentments. While scholarship on modern anti-Semitism has stressed its ideological inspiration ('print anti-Semitism'), this study shows that anti-Jewish violence by perpetrators among civilians and soldiers expressed magic-infused anxieties and longings for redemption from present threats and suffering ('folk anti-Semitism'). Illustrated with contemporary photographs and constructed from extensive, newly discovered archival sources from three continents, this is an innovative work in east European history.  Using extensive first-person testimonies, it reveals gaps - but also correspondences - between popular attitudes and those of the political elit

Hundreds of thousands of individuals perished in the epic conflict of the American Civil War. As battles raged and the specter of death and dying hung over the divided nation, the living worked not only to bury their dead but also to commemorate them. President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address perhaps best voiced the public yearning to memorialize the war dead. His address marked the beginning of a new tradition of commemorating American soldiers and also signaled a transformation in the relationship between the government and the citizenry through an embedded promise and obligation for the living to remember the dead. In Death at the Edges of Empire: Fallen Soldiers, Cultural Memory, and the Making of an American Nation, 1863-1921 (U Nebraska Press, 2020) Shannon Bontrager examines the culture of death, burial, and commemoration of American war dead. By focusing on the Civil War, the Spanish-Cuban-American War, the Philippine-American War, and World War I, Bontrager produces a history of collective memor

The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Destruction of the Old Ottoman World (Basic Book, 2024) recreates one of the watershed moments in the history of the Middle East: the ferocious outbreaks of disorder across the Levant in 1860 which resulted in the massacre of thousands of Christians in Damascus. Eugene Rogan brilliantly recreates the lost world of the Middle East under Ottoman rule. The once mighty empire was under pressure from global economic change and European imperial expansion. Reforms in the mid-nineteenth century raised tensions across the empire, nowhere more so than in Damascus. A multifarious city linked by caravan trade to Baghdad, the Mediterranean and Mecca, the chaos of languages, customs and beliefs made Damascus a warily tolerant place. Until the reforms began to advantage the minority Christian community at the expense of the Muslim majority. But in 1860 people who had generally lived side by side for generations became bitter enemies as news of civil war in Mount Lebanon arrive

Germany’s winter campaign of 1941–1942 is commonly seen as the Wehrmacht's first defeat. In Retreat from Moscow: A New History of Germany's Winter Campaign, 1941-1942 (FSG, 2019), David Stahel argues that it was in fact their first strategic success in the east. The mismanaged Soviet Counteroffensive became a phyrric victory as both sides struggled with strategic leadership and supply. German generals, caught between Stalin's hammer and Hitler's anvil, found loopholes in increasingly irrational orders to hold at all costs. Drawing on official war diaries, journals, memoirs, and correspondence, Stahel's latest installment in his reevaluation of the eastern front delivers a vivid account that challenges what you thought you knew about the war in the Soviet Union. David Stahel is the author of five previous books on Nazi Germany's war against the Soviet Union. He completed an MA in war studies at King's College London in 2000 and a PhD at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2009. His research primarily concent

How was the Roman way of war unique, and what were the virtues that defined the Roman Republic? Are there lessons for modern Republics from the Roman one? Annika sits down with 2022-2023 James Madison Program Garwood Visiting Fellow Dr. Steele Brand, a professor of history and director of the Politics, Philosophy, and History Program at Cairn University. Dr. Brand, Professor of History at Cairn University and former U.S. Army tactical intelligence officer to discuss his book Killing for the Republic: Citizen-Soldiers and the Roman Way of War (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019). Dr. Brand shares why, while serving in Afghanistan, he felt compelled to write a book about ancient citizen-soldiery. He discusses the virtues that defined Roman citizen-soldiers and how these virtues contributed to Rome's resilience and success, how these Classical virtues intersect with modern Christian virtues, and the fall of the Republic. The conversation also touches on the challenges of maintaining these virtues in modern democracies and t

For two centuries, the Xiongnu people–a vast nomadic empire that covered modern-day Siberia, Inner Mongolia, Gansu and Xinjiang—were one of the Han Dynasty’s fiercest rivals. They raided the wealthy and prosperous Chinese, and even forced the Han to treat them as equals—much to the chagrin of those in the imperial court. There’s not much known about the Xiongnu: Even their name is in Chinese, which literally translates to “"fierce slave", which is unlikely to be what the actual people called themselves. But writer and historian Scott Crawford set himself the challenge of writing about the over two-centuries of politics, alliances and conflict between Han China and the Xiongnu empire, in his book The Han-Xiongnu War, 133 BC–89 AD: The Struggle of China and a Steppe Empire Told Through Its Key Figures (Pen & Sword, 2023). In this interview, Scott and I talk about the Xiongnu people, the threat they presented to Han China, political shenanigans at the imperial court, and just how far geographically the conflict

History has tended to measure war's winners and losers in terms of its major engagements, battles in which the result was so clear-cut that they could be considered "decisive." Marathon, Cannae, Tours, Agincourt, Austerlitz, Sedan, Stalingrad--all resonate in the literature of war and in our imaginations as tide-turning. But were they? As Cathal J. Nolan demonstrates in The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost (Oxford University Press, 2019), victory in major wars usually has been determined in other ways. Even the most legendarily lopsided of battles did not necessarily decide their outcomes. Nolan also challenges the hoary concept of the military "genius," even of the Great Captains--from Alexander to Frederick and Napoleon--mapping instead the decent into total war. The Allure of Battle systematically recreates and analyzes the major campaigns among the Great Powers, from the Middle Ages through the 20th century, from the fall of Byzantium to the defeat of the Axis powers, tracing

In December 1948, a panel of 12 judges sentenced 23 Japanese officials for war crimes. Seven, including former Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, were sentenced to death. The sentencing ended the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, an over-two-year-long trial over Imperial Japan’s atrocities in China and its decision to attack the U.S. But unlike the trials at Nuremberg, now seen as one of the touchstones of modern international law, the trials at Tokyo were a messy affair. The ruling wasn’t unanimous, with two judges dissenting. Indian judge Radhabinod Pal even chose to acquit everybody. The judges couldn’t agree on anything, the prosecution made significant mistakes, and the defense constantly complained about not having enough time and resources. Gary Bass tells the entire story of the trials at Tokyo—from their formulation at the end of a long World War by a triumphant yet weary U.S., to the eventual decision to let many sentenced defendants out on parole as Japan became a close Cold War ally of Wa

Informed Western understanding of Imperial Japan still often conjures up images of militarism, blind devotion to leaders, and fanatical pride in the country. But, as Imperial Japan and Defeat in the Second World War: The Collapse of an Empire (Bloomsbury, 2020)reveals, Western imagination is often reductive in its explanation of the Japanese Empire and its collapse. In his analysis of the Emperor, Imperial Japanese Army and Navy during the Second World War, Peter Wetzler examines the disconnect between nation and state during wartime Japan and in doing so offers a much-needed nuanced and sensitive corrective to existing Western scholarship. Rooted in the perspective of the Japanese, Wetzler makes available to readers vital primary and secondary Japanese archival sources; most notably, this book provides the first English assessment of the recently-released Actual Record of the Showa Emperor. This book is an important advance in English-language studies of the Second World War in Asia, and is thus essential re

Witnesses to the brutal murder of their families and neighbors and the violent destruction of their communities, a cadre of Jewish women in Poland--some still in their teens--helped transform the Jewish youth groups into resistance cells to fight the Nazis. With courage, guile, and nerves of steel, these "ghetto girls" paid off Gestapo guards, hid revolvers in loaves of bread and jars of marmalade, and helped build systems of underground bunkers. They flirted with German soldiers, bribed them with wine, whiskey, and home cooking, used their Aryan looks to seduce them, and shot and killed them. They bombed German train lines and blew up a town's water supply. They also nursed the sick, taught children, and hid families. Yet the exploits of these courageous resistance fighters have remained virtually unknown. As propulsive and thrilling as Hidden Figures, In the Garden of Beasts, and Band of Brothers, The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos (William Morrow, 2021) at

"The Polish Police, commonly called the Blue or uniformed police in order to avoid using the term “Polish,” has played a most lamentable role in the extermination of the Jews of Poland. The uniformed police has been an enthusiastic executor of all German directives regarding the Jews." -Emanuel Ringelblum, Warsaw, 1943. Shortly after the occupation of Poland in the fall of 1939, the Germans created the Blue Police, consisting mainly of prewar Polish police officers. Within a short time, this police force was responsible for enforcing many anti-Jewish regulations issued by the Nazis. Who were these policemen, and how did they transform from ordinary policemen to murderous executioners? And what was the role of the Germans in this horrifying picture? In On Duty: The Role of the Polish Blue and Criminal Police in the Holocaust (Yad Vashem, 2024) addresses these questions and more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwor

Russia's actions in and around Ukraine in 2014, as well as its activities in Syria and further afield, sparked renewed debate about the character of war and armed conflict, and whether it was undergoing a fundamental shift. One of the enduring features of conflict over the centuries has been its state of flux. This perpetual state of evolution requires states to regularly monitor how military force is being wielded, either by allies or adversaries, in order to be able to plan and prepare for future war. Tracey German's Russia and the Changing Character of Conflict (Cambria Press, 2023) explores Russian views of the changing character of conflict and the debates that have emerged about how future wars might evolve. Since 2014 there has been wide-ranging discussion about Russia's "new way of war", with labels such as hybrid warfare, grey-zone operations and the Gerasimov doctrine dominating Western analyses. However, there has been scant analysis of Russian perspectives on the changing character of conflict and

During the Second World War, Mennonites in the Netherlands, Germany, occupied Poland, and Ukraine lived in communities with Jews and close to various Nazi camps and killing sites. As a result of this proximity, Mennonites were neighbours to and witnessed the destruction of European Jews. In some cases they were beneficiaries or even enablers of the Holocaust. Much of this history was forgotten after the war, as Mennonites sought to rebuild or find new homes as refugees. The result was a myth of Mennonite innocence and ignorance that connected their own suffering during the 1930s and 1940s with earlier centuries of persecution and marginalization. European Mennonites and the Holocaust (U Toronto Press, 2021) identifies a significant number of Mennonite perpetrators, along with a smaller number of Mennonites who helped Jews survive, examining the context in which they acted. In some cases, theology led them to accept or reject Nazi ideals. In others, Mennonites chose a closer embrace of German identity as a str

The crusade movement needed women: their money, their prayer support, their active participation, and their inspiration. Helen J. Nicholson's book Women and the Crusades (Oxford UP, 2023) surveys women's involvement in medieval crusading between the second half of the eleventh century, when Pope Gregory VII first proposed a penitential military expedition to help the Christians of the East, and 1570, when the last crusader state, Cyprus, was captured by the Ottoman Turks. It considers women's actions not only on crusade battlefields but also in recruiting crusaders, supporting crusades through patronage, propaganda, and prayer, and as both defenders and aggressors. It argues that medieval women were deeply involved in the crusades but the roles that they could play and how their contemporaries recorded their deeds were dictated by social convention and cultural expectations. Although its main focus is the women of Latin Christendom, it also looks at the impact of the crusades and crusaders on the Jews of west

Adam Zientek, Assistant Professor of History at UC Davis joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, A Thirst for Wine and War: The Intoxication of French Soldiers on the Western Front (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2024). Beginning in the fall of 1914, every French soldier on the Western Front received a daily ration of wine from the army. At first it was a modest quarter litre, but by 1917 it had increased to the equivalent of a full bottle each day. The wine ration was intended to sustain morale in the trenches, making the men more willing to endure suffering and boredom. The army also supplied soldiers with doses of distilled alcohol just before attacks to increase their ferocity and fearlessness. This strategic distribution of alcohol was a defining feature of French soldiers’ experiences of the war and amounted to an experimental policy of intoxicating soldiers for military ends. A Thirst for Wine and War explores the French army’s emotional and behavioral conditioning of soldiers through the distri