New Books In Military History

Tore T. Petersen, Professor of International and American Diplomatic History at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, studies the final wars on the prairie from the Native American perspective in The Military Conquest of the Prairie: Native American Resistance, Evasion and Survival, 1865-1890 (Sussex Academic Press, 2016). When the reservation system took hold about one-third of tribes stayed permanently there, one-third during the harsh winter months, and the last third remained on what the government termed un-ceded territory, which Native Americans had the right to occupy by treaty. For the Federal government it was completely unacceptable that some Indians refused to submit to its authority. Both the Red River war (1874-75) in the south and the great Sioux war (1876-77) in the north were the direct result of Federal violation of treaties and agreements. At issue was the one-sided violence against free roaming tribes that were trying to maintain their old way of life, at the heart of which w

In her new book, The Battle Within: POWs in Postwar Australia (NewSouth Books, 2018), Christina Twomey, Professor of History at Monash University, explores the “battle within,” the individual and collective challenge of rehabilitating Australian prisoners of war in the post-war decades. Using a variety of sources, including memoirs and the archives of the Prisoners of War Trust Fund, Twomey argues that the commemorations of the 1980s and more recent decades were actually a change from the quiet decades of mid century, when the country struggled to address the needs of its returning servicemen.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 rarely make it past World War Two. The Cold War and the Berlin Wall are mysteries. And Vietnam, unless someone in their family fought there, is just a country. But most, if not all, of my students have heard of the Vietnam Memorial. They may not know what or who it commemorates. But they’ve seen it on class trips, or in textbooks. And they universally praise its power and simplicity. So, unless you’re my age, it’s hard to imagine the bitterness and divisions which greeted Maya Lin’s memorial. In his new book A Rift in the Earth: Art, Memory and the Fight for a Vietnam War Memorial (Arcade Publishing, 2017), James Reston, Jr. retells this story in a way that brings it alive again. Reston brings a journalist’s eye for character and narrative to the book. Several authors have told this tale, but Reston is by far the best at b

On this episode, we will be talking to Anthimos Alexandros Tsirigotis about his book Cybernetics, Warfare, and Discourse: The Cybernetisation of Warfare in Britain (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017). Given the significant efforts of the field’s founder, Norbert Wiener, to distance cybernetics from military research and application, as well as the ethical stances of some of the field’s later leading lights such as Heinz von Foerster, Humberto Maturana, Herbert Brun, Ranulph Glanville and Larry Richards, it should not be surprising if some contemporary cyberneticians might find the particular combination of words in the books title somewhat disconcerting. However, far from producing a strictly first-order technological study or strategic “how to” manual, Greek military officer Tsirigotis has carried out a decidedly second-order examination of the subject that supplants the mainstream assumption of cyberspace as a set of technologies with a notion of cyberspace as a set of social practices produc

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 Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (Vintage Books, 2017), David Armitage examines the evolution of the concept over the centuries while explaining the relevance of that debate for today. As Armitage demonstrates, the Romans were the first to define civil wars as we understand them, giving us the name we use today. Their efforts were reflected in the works of authors in early modern Europe, who drew upon the classical tradition in order to comprehend the conflicts of their own day. Precision in defining war became increasingly relevant, both to distinguish civil wars from the newly recognized phenomenon of revolutions and with the emergence of efforts in the nineteenth century to regulate war through treaties and legal codes. This effort continues down to the present day, with the question of whether a conflict is or is not a civil war often determining how the inter

Despite the British being early abolitionists, a significant slave trade remained in the western Indian Ocean through the mid-1800s, even after the cessation of most imperial slave trading activities in the Atlantic World. The British Royal Navy’s response was to dispatch a squadron to patrol East Africa’s coast. Following what began as a simple policing action, Squadron: Ending the African Slave Trade (Overlook Duckworth Press, 2017) is the story of four Royal Naval officers who witnessed and wrote about the rampant slave trading in this region, while attempting to capture slaving vessels and recover enslaved peoples. The book grew from historian John Broich’s passion to hunt down firsthand accounts of these untold stories. Through research at archives throughout the U.K., Broich tells a tale of defiance in the face of political corruption, while delivering thrills in the tradition of high seas heroism. John Broich is the author of London: Water and the Making of a Modern British City, for

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 Captivity during the First World War: Internment and the Fall of the German Empire, 1914-1919 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Mahon Murphy looks at the experiences of German colonial settlers interned by the Entente Powers, particularly the British, during World War I. Challenging Europe-centric interpretations of the conflict and internment, Murphy uses a wide range of sources, illustrating both the global integrated camp network, and how experiences of internment varied according to social class, gender and race. He also explores the effects of internment on Germans’ national identity, and how their experiences of post-colonial, Weimar Germany led many to believe that true Germanness was only to be found in the colonies. A must read for anyone interested in the global dimensions of internment and First World War. Anyone in London on 19 March is cordial

Paraguay’s intervention in a crisis between Uruguay and Brazil in November 1864 began the bloodiest and most destructive conflict in South American history. Thomas Whigham begins his book The Road to Armageddon: Paraguay versus the Triple Alliance, 1866-1870 (University of Calgary Press, 2017), the second volume of his epic two-volume history of the war, with the allied powers of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay having driven Paraguayan forces out of Argentina and preparing their invasion of Paraguay. While heavily outnumbered by their enemies, Whigham credits the Paraguayan population with a cohesion and endurance that defied Brazilian, Argentinian, and Uruguayan expectations of a swift victory. Despite the formidable defenses constructed by his men, however, the Paraguayan leader, Francisco Solano Lopez, repeatedly ordered attacks in the Alliance forces that debilitated the Paraguayan ranks. By 1868 the Alliance captured the Paraguayan capital Asuncion, yet the conflict dragged on for another year and a

In I Remain Yours: Common Lives in Civil War Letters (Harvard University Press, 2018), Christopher Hager trains our attention to “the cell-level transfers that created the meaning of the Civl War.” He follows the correspondence of a group of soldiers, and their family members, many of whom had never written letters before in their life. These people were largely illiterate. They had to learn how to spell as they were trying to compose their thoughts on paper. Yet Hager leaves their letters ‘uncorrected.’ In their struggle to put their feelings and thoughts into words—a struggle we also feel in reading those words—the words themselves gain an immediacy and directness. They grow in importance for being chosen. The repetition of phrases throbs with feeling. The emotional dynamics of union and disunion—the fear of being forgotten, the assurance of love, no matter the soldier’s side in the war—congeal around individual words, phrases, even marks on the page. As

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 flood of popular retellings of old narratives is supplemented by a number of well-researched and reasoned efforts aimed at garnering a better sense of how our presumptions about the Vietnam War are in need of reinterpretation and revision. Returning to New Books in Military History is historian Gregory A. Daddis, author of two recent accounts of the war that together offer a sharp reassessment of the American effort. In Westmoreland’s War: Reassessing America’s Strategy in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Withdrawal: Reassessing America’s Final Years in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2017) Daddis challenges many existing perceptions of the readiness and roles of MACV’s two most prominent commanders, Generals William Westmoreland and Creighton Abrams, as well as their struggles with the Washington defense establishment

On a cold, rainy dawn in late November 1872, Lieutenant Frazier Boutelle and a Modoc Indian nicknamed Scarface Charley leveled firearms at each other. Their duel triggered a war that capped a decades-long genocidal attack that was emblematic of the United States’ conquest of Native Americas peoples and lands. California author and editor Robert Aquinas McNally tells the wrenching story of this conflict in The Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America’s Gilded Age (Bison Books, 2017). The 1872-73 Modoc War was one of the nation’s costliest campaigns against North American Indigenous peoples, in which the army placed nearly one thousand soldiers in the field against some fifty-five Modoc fighters. Although little known today, the Modoc War dominated national headlines for an entire year. Fought in south-central Oregon and northeastern California, the war settled into a siege in the desolate Lava Beds and climaxed the decades-long effort to dispossess and destroy the Modocs. The wa

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 hundred Lakota men, women, and children. Their crime? Taking part in the Ghost Dance ritual. What happened afterwards is a story told less often. David W. Grua, historian and editor with the Joseph Smith Papers project, tells about the competing memory and counter-memory of Wounded Knee as the U.S. Army first shaped the narrative, and later, Lakotas attempted to have their side of the story heard. In his Robert M. Utley Prize winning book, Surviving Wounded Knee: The Lakotas and the Politics of Memory (Oxford University Press, 2016), Grua argues that race, official memory, and public memorialization served the purposes of white supremacy on the northern Great Plains throughout much of the early twentieth century. Official army reports as well as physical memorialization at the massacre site spun a narrative of Indian savagery and white innocence that helped m

Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914-1921 (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a masterful account of the Russian revolutionary era by Laura Engelstein, Professor Emerita at Yale University. Spanning the pre-revolutionary period immediately prior the First World War to the end of the Russian Civil War, Russia in Flames provides a rich and comprehensive view of the whys and the wherefores of Revolutionary Russia. Russia in Flames provides both the academic and the general reader with a rich and flowing account of the seminal event of the twentieth century. All from the historian who is in the words of the periodical Kritika: “one of the most important figures in the field of Russian history” today. Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law and History at Vanderbilt University, narrates a postbellum struggle that raged in the Northern Rockies in Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War (W.W. Norton and Company, 2017). In the summer of 1877, General Oliver Otis Howard, a champion of African American civil rights during Reconstruction, ruthlessly pursued hundreds of Nez Perce families who resisted moving onto a reservation. Standing in his way was Chief Joseph, a young leader who never stopped advocating for Native American sovereignty and equal rights. Thunder in the Mountains is the spellbinding story of two legendary figures and their epic clash of ideas about the meaning of freedom and the role of government in American life. Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges, universities, and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World

In the fifth podcast of Arguing History, Lynn Dumenil and Christopher Capozzola consider the relationship between America’s involvement in World War I and the granting of women the right to vote. As they note, when the war broke out women were enjoying considerable momentum at the state level, having won the right in several states. Together they discuss the impact of the war upon their efforts, looking at how the war fractured some organizations, led to the creation of new ones, and introduced new concepts of citizenship and participating into the public discourse that challenged both the suffrage movement and its opponents. Lynn Dumenil is Robert Glass Cleland Professor of American History, Emerita at Occidental College and the author of The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I; The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s; and Through Women’s Eyes, which she coauthored with Ellen Carol DuBois. Christopher Capozzola is associate professor at the Massachusetts In

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 years of death and destruction had brought the belligerents to new nadirs of attrition and zeniths of strategic calculation. Deeply invested in the war, with unprecedented losses of blood and treasure, and no longer optimistic about their chances of victory, all sides were looking for a quick exit but had few prospects of finding one. In 1917, the Germans gambled in escalating their submarine warfare, which drew the hesitant Americans into the conflict, the French faced mutinies, and the Russians plunged the throes of Revolution. The war thus raged, spreading across two oceans to four continents, finally turning toward its conclusion. In this episode of the podcast, David Stevenson discusses the causes, course, and effects of these events with us, and shares his insights about judging historical forces and human agency, evaluating counterfactuals, and drawing c

Russell Shorto‘s Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom (Norton, 2017) is a history of many revolutions, kaleidoscopic turns through six individual lives. There is Cornplanter, a leader of the Seneca Indians; George Germain, who led the British war strategy during the Revolution; Margaret Moncrieffe Coghlan, the daughter of a British major; the always worried and wearied George Washington; Venture Smith, an African slave who eventually purchased his freedom in Connecticut; and Abraham Yates, the self-taught rabble rouser from Albany who helped shape the politics of New York, and the country. With each turn in their stories, these six lives continuously remerge and recolor the text, and together make one Revolution. Shorto keeps the reader on the ground, so that we can see how the term “freedom,” among other concepts of the time, gained its meaning and importance. We feel each individual’s fight for self-determinacy, including its ugly and oppressive aspects, across their life spa

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 the story of a remarkable woman’s life during the tumultuous years of the French Revolution and Restoration. Based on a recently discovered cache of letters between Marie von Clausewitz and her renowned husband, Carl, it also dramatically expands our understanding of the process by which Carl’s famous treatise, On War, came to be. Vanya E. Bellinger, currently a visiting professor at the United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, argues that Marie was a crucial foil for the development of Carl’s ideas over many years. Marie’s connections to the Prussian court (she was born into the prominent von Bruhl family) also helped to secure her husband’s often precarious position. Bellinger freely acknowledges Carl’s military genius but places Marie alongside her husband as an intellectual partner and political confidante,

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, Sleep, and Dreams during the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Jonathan W. White is associate professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University. He is the author of several books and almost one hundred articles, essays, and reviews about the Civil War. His earlier book, Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln, was the winner and finalist for a number of book prizes. Now he has written a book about a subject few, if anyone, has known much about—and that in itself is a feat for Civil War history. Midnight in America surveys the dreams of soldiers, civilians, African Americans, the dying, and Abraham Lincoln, including how those dreams were represented in popular culture. The dreams he includes are truly strange, with all the wacky juxtapositions we expect in our own dreaming. Indeed, what White

In his new book, The Malmedy Massacre: The War Crimes Trial Controversy (Harvard University Press, 2017), Steven Remy, professor of history at City University of New York, examines the Malmedy massacre which took place on December 17, 1944 and the trial that followed after the conclusion of World War II. Remy effectively demonstrates how in the decade following the trial how a network of German and American sympathizers succeeded in discrediting the trial. Remy directly looks at the accusations of torture, which the defendants and their allies alleged led to false confessions. Although these allegations were false, Remy demonstrates how amnesty advocates used them successfully to not only discredit the trial, but distorted our understanding of one of the most brutal massacres in American military history.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices