New Books in Military History

In his new book, Mussolini and Hitler: The Forging of the Fascist Alliance (Yale University Press, 2018), Christian Goeschel, Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Manchester, examines the relationship between Hitler and Mussolini and how their relationship developed and affected both countries. In this highly readable book, Goeschel, revisits all of Mussolini and Hitler’s key meetings and asks how these meetings constructed a powerful image of a strong Fascist-Nazi relationship that still resonates with the general public. The first comprehensive study of the Mussolini-Hitler relationship, this book is a must-read for scholars and anyone interested in the history of European fascism, World War II, or political leadership. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Histories of the British occupation of Havana in 1762 have focused on imperial rivalries and the actions and decisions of European planters, colonial officials, and military officers. In her stunning revision, The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade and Slavery in the Atlantic World (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Elena Schneider restores the central roles of enslaved Africans in all stages of the story. The relevance of the slave trade and the multiple and essential roles of African and African descended people in battle and in urban life emerge in this beautifully written account. In the aftermath, their valor and loyalty were omitted from contemporary accounts and the ensuing historiography. This book draws from a wide range of sources and multiple archives in a careful narrative that connects the Atlantic worlds of Spain, London, Havana, Kingston and the colonial United States, and zooms in on the enslaved individuals that made that world possible. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on his manuscript. Additionally, his book will be Open Access (OA) since the date of publication. We discuss with him how do MOPR and OA work, how he managed to combine both of them and how these initiatives can contribute to the democratization of knowledge. You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/ Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

This episode of the New Books in Military History podcast is something of a sea change, so to speak, as we turn our attention to naval policy and strategy. Institutional reform is a well-established topic in studies of the ground and air forces of the United States, ranging from Alexander Hamilton and John C. Calhoun through to Emory Upton and Billy Mitchell. By comparison, with the noted exception of Alfred Thayer Mahan, much less has been written about the growing professionalism and institutional transformation of the United States Navy in the late nineteenth century. Our guest for this episode addresses this gap directly. Scott Mobley is a former naval officer and University of Wisconsin PhD who has written Progressives in Navy Blue: Maritime Strategy, American Empire, and the Transformation of U.S. Naval Identity, 1873-1898 (Naval Institute Press, 2018). Not only does Scott address many open question about the technological transformation of the Navy, from a wooden hulled, sail and steam powered force into one built around steel armored cruisers, he goes far to put Mahan into his proper context as one of a growing community of intellectuals willing to reassess the mission and global reach of the institution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Insurgent Women: Female Combatants in Civil Wars (Georgetown University Press, 2019), investigates the mobilization of female fighters, women’s roles in combat, and what happens to women when conflicts end. The book focuses on three case studies of asymmetric conflicts. Jessica Trisko Darden contributes research looking at Ukraine, Alexis Henshaw discusses the civil war in Columbia, and Ora Szekley provides insights into conflict involving Kurdish groups. The book includes lessons for policy makers on women’s motivations for joining armed groups and unique issues facing female combatants during reintegration. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

The Macedonian king Alexander III is best remembered today for his many martial accomplishments and the empire he built from them. Yet as Fred S. Naiden details in Soldier, Priest, and God: A Life of Alexander the Great (Oxford University Press, 2018), this ignores what for his subjects were his even more important responsibilities as a religious figure. Alexander’s religious practices were a vital part of his legitimacy as a ruler of his people, and were interwoven into his daily activities. As his armies advanced into southwestern Asia, Alexander insinuated himself into the religions of the lands he conquered, which aided the acceptance of his rule. This became increasingly difficult the further east he marched, however, as the religious systems he encountered there often contained obligations often at variance from the traditions which he had accepted. As Naiden describes, Alexander’s increasing disregard for the religions he encountered contributed to the difficulties he faced with his later campaigns, fueling both local resistance and rebellions by his own men. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Monica Kim provides a fresh look at the Korean War with a people-centered approach that studies the experiences of prisoners of war. As the first major conflict after the 1949 Geneva Conventions, POW repatriation during the Korean War became a new battleground for the recognition of state sovereignty and a larger tool for political propaganda. The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History (Princeton University Press, 2019) opens with a captured Korean solider who must navigate what identities and documentation to leverage depending on his captor. The extraordinary stories of everyday people involved in the Korean War illustrate how the effects of war span past and future conflicts. The thoroughly researched book is full of fascinating stories and sheds light on lessons from the Korean War that are still relevant today. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Noah Coburn's Under Contract: The Invisible Workers of America's Global War (Stanford University Press, 2018) is about the hidden workers of American’s foreign wars: third country nationals who while not serving in their country’s militaries, still work to support the American war effort. These men and women serve as laborers, cooks, logisticians, engineers and security guards. They bear the burden of service in a war zone with the hopes of good pay, but are sometimes, maybe even often, disappointed. Prof Coburn explains in this book how they come to be in America’s wars, why they want to sign on a contract, how America’s government incentivizes and perpetuates the contracting system and what that means for the world both in the present and future. In our talk, we discussed how Prof. Coburn came to this project, his personal experience in Afghanistan, what it means to be a contractor and how contracts are established as well as what happens to these contractors when they no longer have America’s wars to fight. Jeffrey Bristol is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Boston University and a JD candidate at the University of Michigan Law School. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Andrew Lambert, Professor of Naval History at King’s College, London, author of eighteen books, and winner of the prestigious Anderson Medal—turns his attention in a book that historian Felipe Fernandez Armesto describes as full of ‘ambition’, ‘verve’ and at times ‘brilliance’ - to Athens, Carthage, Venice, the Dutch Republic, and Britain. In Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires and the Conflict That Made the Modern World (Yale UP, 2018), Professor Lambert, examines how each of these polities identities as “seapowers” informed and determined their individual histories and enabled them to achieve success disproportionate to their size. Lambert by delving into the intricacies of each of these seapowers is able to show how creating maritime identities made these states more dynamic, open, and inclusive than their lumbering continental rivals. Only when they forgot this aspect of their identity did these states begin to decline. Recognizing that the United States and China are modern naval powers—rather than seapowers—is essential to understanding current affairs, as well as the long-term trends in world history. This volume is a highly original “big think” analysis of five states whose success—and eventual failure—is a subject of enduring interest, by a someone who is perhaps the leading naval scholar in the Anglophone world to-day. 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 European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Even now, eighty years after its beginning in Europe, the Second World War continues to exert tremendous cultural and social influence on American historical writing. Perhaps one of the best testaments to this phenomenon is the increased interest in biographies of the war’s primary and secondary army commanders. Remarkably there are still quite a number of misplaced or even “lost” personalities who exerted tremendous impact on the course of the war. The guest for this episode of New Books in Military History, Mark T. Calhoun, directly engages the mysteries and legacies of one such individual in his book, General Lesley J. McNair: Unsung Architect of the U.S. Army (University Press of Kansas, 2018). In this pioneering study of one of the World War Two era US Army’s primary architects of victory, Calhoun presents a portrait of a deeply intellectual and loyal commander who took on responsibility for many unpopular doctrinal and ToE choices. From his early career as a young first lieutenant before the First World War, through to his sensationalized death in one of the war’s most infamous friendly fire incidents, McNair is presented first and foremost as a dedicated civil military servant, devoted to the institution and the welfare of the enlisted men and junior officers who depended upon his expertise and judgment. Mark T. Calhoun is currently attached with the United States Army Command and General Staff College, where he is an associate professor at the School of Advanced Military Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

I don’t know about the colleges and universities you’re familiar with, but the U.S. military has a pretty visible presence on my campus—through the ROTC, a newly remodeled Veterans Resource Center, and the student veterans themselves who enroll in my classes each semester. So I was immediately intrigued when I heard about the book Grateful Nation: Student Veterans and the Rise of the Military-Friendly Campus (Duke University Press, 2017) by Ellen Moore. In Grateful Nation, Moore uses interviews and observations to document the experiences of student veterans, the challenges they face re-integrating into academic life, strategies they use to navigate that experience, and the nature of the resources available to them along the way. Moore considers an interesting paradox—that despite the presence of overtly military-friendly programs and practices on most US campuses today, there is still a perception, stemming from the Vietnam War era, that college campuses are anti-military and anti-veteran spaces; this misperception serves to silence or censor discussions of contemporary military conflicts on campus, even among veterans themselves. If you find this all as interesting as I do, you’ll want to listen to my upcoming interview with Dr. Ellen Moore about her book. Carrie Lane is a Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton and author of A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment (Cornell University Press, 2011). Her research concerns the changing nature of work in the contemporary U.S. She is currently writing a book on the professional organizing industry. To suggest a recent title or to contact her, please send an email to [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

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 "greatest Englishman In history", then Charles de Gaulle was without a doubt, the greatest Frenchman since Napoleon Bonaparte. Why so? In the early summer of 1940, when France was overrun by German troops, one junior general who had fought in the trenches in Verdun refused to accept defeat. He fled to London, where he took to the radio to address his compatriots back home. “Whatever happens,” he said, “the flame of French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished.” At that moment, Charles de Gaulle entered history. For the rest of the war, de Gaulle insisted he and his Free French movement were the true embodiment of France. Through sheer force of his personality and the grandeur of his vision of France, he inspired French men and women to risk their lives to resist the Nazi occupation. Usually proud and aloof, but almost always confident in his own leadership, he quarreled violently with Churchill, Roosevelt and many of his own countrymen. Yet they knew they would need his help to rebuild a shattered France. Thanks to de Gaulle, France was recognized as one of the victorious Allies when Germany was finally defeated. Then, as President of the Fifth Republic, he brought France back from the brink of a civil war over the war in Algeria. And, made the difficult decision to end the self-same war. Thereafter he challenged American hegemony, took France out of NATO, and twice vetoed British entry into the European Community in his pursuit of what he called “a certain idea of France.” Julian Jackson, Professor of History at Queen Mary College, University of London, past winner of the Wolfson History Prize and the winner in 2018 of the Paris Book Award for his book on De Gaulle--De Gaulle (Harvard University Press, 2018)--has written a magnificent biography, the first major reconsideration in over twenty years. Drawing on the extensive resources of the recently opened de Gaulle archives, Jackson reveals the conservative roots of de Gaulle’s intellectual formation and upbringing, sheds new light on his relationship with Churchill, and shows how de Gaulle confronted riots at home and violent independence movements abroad from the Middle East to Vietnam. No previous biography has so vividly depicted this towering figure whose legacy remains evident in present-day France. In short Professor Jackson has written a superb book, which in every way possible is a glittering ornament in the biographical art. 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 European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

By the third century BC, the once-modest settlement of Rome had conquered most of Italy and was poised to build an empire throughout the Mediterranean basin. What transformed a humble city into the preeminent power of the region? In The Rise of Rome: From the Iron Age to the Punic Wars(Harvard University Press, 2018), the Durham University historian and archaeologist Kathryn Lomas reconstructs diplomatic ploys, political stratagems, and cultural exchanges whereby Rome established itself as a dominant player in a region already brimming with competitors. The Latin world, she argues, was not so much subjugated by Rome as unified by it. This new type of society that emerged from Rome’s conquest and unification of Italy would serve as a political model for centuries to come. Archaic Italy was home to a vast range of ethnic communities, each with its own language and customs. Some such as the Etruscans, and later the Samnites, were major rivals of Rome. From the late Iron Age onward, these groups interacted in increasingly dynamic ways within Italy and beyond, expanding trade and influencing religion, dress, architecture, weaponry, and government throughout the region. Rome manipulated preexisting social and political structures in the conquered territories with great care, extending strategic invitations to citizenship and thereby allowing a degree of local independence while also fostering a sense of imperial belonging. In the story of Rome’s rise, Lomas identifies nascent political structures that unified the empire’s diverse populations, and finds the beginnings of Italian peoplehood. Ryan Tripp (Ph.D., History) is currently an adjunct in History at Los Medanos Community College and Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

In November 2013, two mass burials were discovered unexpectedly on a construction site in the city of Durham in northeast England. Over the next two years, a complex jigsaw of evidence was pieced together by Christopher Gerrard, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Durham, and a team of archaeologists to establish the identity of the human remains. Today we know them to be some of the Scottish prisoners who died in the autumn of 1650 in Durham cathedral and castle following the battle of Dunbar on the south-east coast of Scotland. Fought between the English and the Scots, this was one of the key engagements of the War of the Three Kingdoms. Using the latest techniques of skeleton science, this book gives back to the men a voice through an understanding of their childhood and later lives. Archaeological and historical evidence also allows us to reconstruct with vivid accuracy how and why these men vanished off the historical radar. Of the prisoners who survived their ordeal after Dunbar, new evidence has emerged about their involvement in local industries and in one of the great infrastructural projects of the day, the draining of the Fens. Others were sent far away, transported to the colonies as indentured servants to begin a new life at the edge of the known world. Following the trail of their biographies takes us across the Atlantic where the Dunbar men supported each other throughout their lives on the frontiers of New England. Here they worked in ironworks and sawmills, farmed and fished and adapted to the vast forested landscapes which they named ‘Scotland’ and ‘Unity’, after the vessel they had sailed in. None returned to the country of their birth. Winner of the Best Archaeological Book at the 2018 British Archaeology Awards, Lost Lives, New Voices: Unlocking the Stories of the Scottish Soldiers from the Battle of Dunbar, 1650 (Oxbow Books, 2018) is a collaboration between academic researchers and professional archaeologists working on the Scottish Soldiers Research Project. Ryan Tripp (Ph.D., History) is currently an adjunct in History at Los Medanos Community College and Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

As the island of Puerto Rico transitioned from Spanish to U.S. imperial rule, the military and political mobilization of popular sectors of its society played important roles in the evolution of its national identities and subsequent political choices. While scholars of American imperialism have examined the political, economic, and cultural aspects of U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico, few have considered the integral role of Puerto Rican men in colonial military service and in helping to consolidate the empire. In Soldiers of the Nation: Military Service and Modern Puerto Rico, 1868-1952 (University of Nebraska Press, 2018),Harry Franqui-Rivera argues that the emergence of strong and complicated Puerto Rican national identities is deeply rooted in the long history of colonial military organizations on the island. Franqui-Rivera examines the patterns of inclusion-exclusion within the military and the various forms of citizenship that are subsequently transformed into socioeconomic and political enfranchisement. Analyzing the armed forces as an agent of cultural homogenization, Franqui-Rivera further explains the formation and evolution of Puerto Rican national identities that eventually led to the creation of the Estado Libre Asociado (the commonwealth) in 1952. Franqui-Rivera concludes that Puerto Rican soldiers were neither cannon fodder for the metropolis nor the pawns of the criollo political elites. Rather, they were men with complex identities who demonstrated a liberal, popular, and broad definition of Puertorriqueñidad. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Films that feature war as a theme have been made almost since the beginning of the industry. In The Philosophy of War Films (University Press of Kentucky, 2018), part of the "Philosophy of Popular Culture Series," David LaRocca brings together a number of prominent authors to discuss the genre as a way to consider how war films have impacted us. The contributors explore a variety of topics, including the aesthetics of war as portrayed on-screen, the effect war has on personal identity, and the ethical problems presented by war. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

How did the search for Nazi fugitives become a vehicle to oppose South American dictatorships? Daniel Stahl’s award-winning new book traces the story of three continents over the course of half a century in Hunt for Nazis: South America's Dictatorships and the Prosecution of Nazi Crimes (Amsterdam University Press, 2018). Through a rich transnational history, Daniel traces the ebb and flow of political will alongside the cooperation between far flung governments and civil society groups. The result is unique insight into how post-war justice became a battleground for the legitimacy of authoritarian regimes. Daniel Stahl is a research associate at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. Hunt for Nazis was distinguished with the Opus Primum award from the Volkswagen Foundation. Stahl has also worked on the Independent Historian’s Commission on the History of the German Foreign Office and is currently researching a history of arms trade regulation in the 20th century. Ryan Stackhouse is a historian of Europe specializing in modern Germany and political policing under dictatorship. His research exploring Gestapo enforcement practices toward different social groups is nearing completion under the working title A Discriminating Terror. He also cohosts the Third Reich History Podcast and can be reached at [email protected] or @Staxomatix. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

When World War II ended, Americans celebrated a military victory abroad, but the meaning of peace at home was yet to be defined. From roughly 1943 onward, building a postwar society became the new national project, and every interest group involved in the war effort—from business leaders to working-class renters—held different visions for the war's aftermath. In Postwar: Waging Peace in Chicago (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), Laura McEnaney plumbs the depths of this period to explore exactly what peace meant to a broad swath of civilians, including apartment dwellers, single women and housewives, newly freed Japanese American internees, African American migrants, and returning veterans. In her fine-grained social history of postwar Chicago, McEnaney puts ordinary working-class people at the center of her investigation. What she finds is a working-class war liberalism—a conviction that the wartime state had taken things from people, and that the postwar era was about reclaiming those things with the state's help. McEnaney examines vernacular understandings of the state, exploring how people perceived and experienced government in their lives. For Chicago's working-class residents, the state was not clearly delineated. The local offices of federal agencies, along with organizations such as the Travelers Aid Society and other neighborhood welfare groups, all became what she calls the state in the neighborhood, an extension of government to serve an urban working class recovering from war. Just as they had made war, the urban working class had to make peace, and their requests for help, large and small, constituted early dialogues about the role of the state during peacetime. Postwar examines peace as its own complex historical process, a passage from conflict to post-conflict that contained human struggles and policy dilemmas that would shape later decades as fatefully as had the war. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

In his new book, Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), Brian Crim, Associate Professor of History at the University of Lynchburg, looks at the controversial program to bring German scientist to the United States after World War II. The book draws on recently declassified documents from the Department of Defense, State Department, the FBI and other intelligence agencies to show how these German scientists were incorporated into military and civilian agencies to work on various projects, most importantly rocket technology. Ultimately the book engages with the legacy of Project Paperclip and its place in national memory and how this Cold War program reflects the ambivalence of the American people about the national security state and the military industrial complex. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Jonathan W. White, an associate professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University, is the co-author of “Our Little Monitor”: The Greatest Invention of the Civil War (Kent State University Press, 2018). Ever since their famous naval encounter in 1862, the Monitor and Merrimack (a.k.a., C.S.S. Virginia) have been part of American Civil War lore. In this work White and his co-author, Anna Gibson Holloway, investigate the history of one of the most popular elements of the American Civil War: the Monitor ironclad ship. The ironclads were innovative combat ships, which sat at the waterline and could prove effective against the then-dominant wooden-hulled ships of the world’s navies. Although other nations had designed ironclads, the U.S.S. Monitor’s encounter with the C.S.S. Virginia on March 9, 1862 was the first test of ironclads in combat. In this interview Professor White discusses the design and development of the Monitor, the famous Battle of Hampton Roads, the conditions under which crews served, and the popular memory of the Monitor from the Civil War through today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

One of the most recent additions to the well-known and highly regarded Eerdmans series, the Library of Religious Biography, is The Religious Life of Robert E. Lee (Eerdmans, 2017), by R. David Cox, a professor of history at Southern Virginia University. Professor Cox’s book presents his perennially controversial subject was a consistently religious thinker, working from the deist and evangelical influences of Lee’s parents towards the religious convictions and commitments of his maturity. But what does Christian faith look like in times of civil war? Did Lee think about slavery within any kind of religious frame? And how could a man of sincere, if evolving, Episcopal faith come to terms with the fact that hundreds of thousands of men had died under his leadership? In today’s podcast, Professor Cox steers us through these troubled times. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

In her new book, Filming the Colonial Past: The New Zealand Wars on Screen (Otago University Press, 2018), Annabel Cooper, an Associate Professor in the Gender Studies Programme at the University of Otago, explores how filmmakers have portrayed the New Zealand wars of the 19th century and how those productions serve as a snapshot of the complex cultural moment of their creation. Exploring today's new forms of media and innovative platforms, Cooper charts the growth of Maori creative control in telling these important national stories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

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 victorious nations, especially the United Kingdom. In his newest book, The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion (I.B. Tauris, 2018), writer and journalist, Peter Hitchens, past winner of the Orwell Prize and regular columnist for the Mail on Sunday, takes on the myth of World War II as the 'good war', and in the process he deconstructs the many fables which have become associated with this highly popular historical narrative. Whilst not per se arguing against the idea that at some point in time Hitler's Germany had to be defeated, Hitchens queries the need to have commenced that war in September 1939. Along the way, Hitchens queries and or attacks various other myths such as Anglo-American solidarity and the so-called 'Special Relationship'; that the Battle of Britain was an important turning point in the war, or that British and American involvement were the key aspect to the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany. By turns, erudite, unorthodox and even funny, Hitchens book is a must read for anyone who is interested in the run-up to World War II and the way in which that conflict was fought. 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 European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki both play a central role in any narrative of the end of the East Asia-Pacific War in 1945, yet Hiroshima has consistently drawn more attention in the ensuing decades. In Resurrecting Nagasaki: Reconstruction and the Formation of Atomic Narratives (Cornell University Press, 2018), Chad Diehl argues that the tendency to overlook the bomb’s impact on the citizens of Nagasaki and the city’s arduous, contested process of reconstruction is hardly a coincidence. As Diehl exhaustively demonstrates in this richly documented, multi-dimensional study, Nagasaki’s municipal officials and US Occupation authorities worked together—though not necessarily for the same reasons—to downplay the bomb’s horrific impact in order to promote the city’s identity as an “international cultural city.” At the same time, conflicting interpretations of Nagasaki’s atomic past, present, and future have always competed with the officially sanctioned narrative for national and international attention. Throughout the Occupation era and even into the present day, Nagai Takashi (the “Saint of Urakami”), the city’s Catholic community, and survivor-activists have all contributed to a multivocal discourse that, in Diehl’s analysis, provides new insights into the politics of collective memory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

In his new book, Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler’s Brownshirts (Yale University Press, 2017, Daniel Siemens, professor of European history at Newcastle University, writes a comprehensive history of the SA, from the early 1920s until Nazi Germany’s total defeat in 1945. Siemens demonstrates how the SA evolved from a small organization to a massive and potent force that directly impacted the Nazi rise to power, and how that organization shaped German society during the Nazi period. He tackles the long-held view that the SA had become largely irreverent after the 1934 purge known as the “Night of the Long Knives,” and shows how the SA had significant impact in the military, the management of conquered territories and the Holocaust. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

The prologue to The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War (University of Chicago Press, 2018) begins by provocatively invoking a question American physiologist Walter Cannon first asked in 1926: “Why don’t we die daily?” In the erudite chapters that follow, Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers explore how practitioners and theorists working during and after World War I tried to answer that very thorny problem in light of the challenges of wound shock. This functional disorder demanded that doctors, surgeons, and physiologists account for two medical realities: first, that wound shock was a whole-body, multi-systemic response to trauma; and second, that a fairly homogenous group—namely the young, male soldier-patient—responded to wound shock in highly variable and individuals ways. Whereas the historiography of World War I and trauma has largely focused on psychopathological models, Geroulanos and Meyers illuminate how the work of Henry Head, Réné Leriche, Kurt Goldstein and others enacted a wholesale transformation of the concept of the individual, one that would define medico-physiological individuality as an integrated and indivisible body, but one constantly on “the verge of collapse.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

The antebellum South was on the road to agricultural ruin, and the Civil War put a brick on the gas pedal. In Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South (Oxford University Press, 2018), a sweeping reassessment of some of the oldest questions in U.S. historiography, Erin Stewart Mauldin draws on ecology to help her offer a fresh, powerful explanation for why a region that produced so much wealth for centuries became characterized by widespread poverty in the late nineteenth century. She argues that cotton plantations were hardly ecologically sustainable enterprises, yet their habits of shifting cultivation of staple crops and free-range livestock husbandry were better suited to the region’s nutrient-poor soils and oppressive climate than the prevailing land-use practices of northern farmers. But when the war came, the crisis southern farmers had kept in the offing arrived quickly at their shores. Both armies sustained themselves by emptying the South’s granaries, devouring its animals, and razings its forests and fences. Cotton agriculture would never be the same. That is partly because the resources needed to restore it were gone, but also because freed people would not consent to returning to working in gangs on operations large enough to resume shifting cultivation and, when renting or sharecropping fragments of former plantations, refused landowner’s demands that they labor under contract after harvest to maintain the ecological integrity of someone else’s property. So the region turned to growing more cotton in more places and more intensively than before the war and depending on costly fertilizers to do so. Subsistence practices vanished, migrants fled to the cities, and debt ruled the land. Erin Stewart Mauldin is Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. She is book review editor of Agricultural History and the co-editor of A Companion to Global Environmental History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Redefining the Modern Military: The Intersection of Profession and Ethics (Naval Institute Press, 2018), edited by Nathan K. Finney and Tyrell O. Mayfield, is a collection of essays examining military professionalism and ethics in light of major changes to modern warfare. Contributors examine philosophical and legal questions about what constitutes a profession, the requirements of a military professional, and military education. Additionally, the authors tackle questions of ethics related to new technological advancements, such as unmanned aircraft. Finally, an interesting discussion of the military’s relationship with society, and vice versa, is discussed as an important component of oversight of the profession. Today I spoke with Finney and one of the contributors, Brian Laslie. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

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, Sputnik I, into orbit. This event prompted the United States to open up its own crash program to put first a satellite, then later, human beings, into space. The primary motivating factor for all this, was the fear of missiles being the primary delivery system for nuclear warheads at the height of the Cold War. Our guest in this episode –Nicholas Michael Sambaluk – makes the case for another perspective on the Eisenhower Administration’s decision to engage in space exploration. In his book The Other Space Race: Eisenhower and the Quest for Aerospace Security (Naval Institute Press, 2015), Sambaluk describes the checkered history of the Dynamic Soarer Space Glider Bomber – a.k.a. “Dyna-Soar,” a heat-resistant single seat-space shuttle that was intended to guarantee American aerospace superiority. Though ultimately canceled, the Dyna-Soar program’s legacy continues to this day in the form of the SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance Aircraft, the Space Shuttle, and future orbiting space vehicles. Sambaluk is an associate professor of strategy at the Air University, at Maxwell Air Force Base, in Montgomery, Alabama. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Teddy Roosevelt had one of the most colorful lives in the American history, but few have deeply explored his final years. Historian David Pietrusza does just that in TR’s Last War: Theodore Roosevelt, the Great War, and a Journey of Triumph and Tragedy (Lyons Press, 2018), taking us through a period in which Roosevelt exhorts an America prone to isolationism to join the war against Germany, only for the war to take the life of one of his sons. Pietrusza tracks how Roosevelt’s alters America’s political history, abandoning his “Bull Moose” party and re-uniting the Republicans in hopes of strengthening American foreign policy. And the author chronicles Roosevelt’s heartbreak, unable to die a glorious death on the battlefield himself, but bereaved to see his son die from a policy he advocated. Pietrusza also offers evidence of a controversial theory: that a depressed Roosevelt ultimately took his own life with an overdose of morphine. Bill Scher is a Contributing Editor for POLITICO Magazine. He has provided political commentary on CNN, NPR and MSNBC. He has been published in The New York Times, The New Republic, and The New York Daily News among other publications. He is author of Wait! Don’t Move to Canada, published by Rodale in 2006. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Most Americans do not appreciate the extent to which victory in the American Revolution was due to the leadership of a French aristocrat. As Nathaniel Philbrick demonstrates in his new book In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown (Viking, 2018), it was Admiral Comte de Grasse’s naval victories which made possible George Washington’s decisive victory at the battle of Yorktown. Such a victory did not seem possible at the start of 1781, as the British imperial forces seemed locked in an intractable stalemate with the rebelling colonists. In that year, however, the assistance of the French helped to tip the balance, not just on sea but in the land war as well. Once Admiral de Grasse’s ships drove off the British fleet in the battle of the Chesapeake, Washington was able to lay siege to General Charles Cornwallis’s forces at Yorktown with a combined Franco-American army, defeating the main British force in the Southern states and realizing America’s independence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

In her new book, The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace (Harvard University Press, 2016), Dr. Susan Carruthers, professor of American Studies at the University of Warwick, chronicles America’s transition from wartime combatant to post-war occupier in both Germany and Japan. This excellent book examines occupation by exploring the thoughts and feelings of ordinary servicemen and women who participated in the difficult task of rebuilding defeated nations. By examining occupation from the ground up, this book effectively tackles the mythology surrounding America’s occupation and demonstrates that the rebuilding of post-war Europe and Japan was a difficult and by no means straightforward. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Many books have been written on the tragic decisions regarding Vietnam made by the young stars of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Yet despite millions of words of analysis and reflection, no historian has been able to explain why such decent, brilliant, and previously successful men stumbled so badly. That changes with The Road to Disaster: A New History of America’s Descent Into Vietnam (Harper Collins, 2018). Historian Brian VanDeMark, a professor of history at the United States Naval Academy, draws upon decades of archival research, his own interviews with many of those involved, and a wealth of previously unheard recordings by Robert McNamara and Clark Clifford, who served as Defense Secretaries for Kennedy and Johnson. Yet beyond that, Road to Disaster is also the first history of the war to look at the cataclysmic decisions of those in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations through the prism of recent research in cognitive science, psychology, and organizational theory to explain why the “Best and the Brightest” became trapped in situations that suffocated creative thinking and willingness to dissent, why they found change so hard, and why they were so blind to their own errors. An epic history of America’s march to quagmire, Road to Disaster is a landmark in scholarship and a book of immense importance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

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 the lens of environmental history and material culture and finds only more terrors and even greater suffering. War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2018) draws from a dizzying cache of research from nearly four dozen archives to capture the brutality and desperation of the wars that raged beyond the battlefield—over food, timber, shelter, and the control of people themselves. Most of these struggles were not between the armies, but between soldiers and civilians. Despite Lost Cause slurs against Sherman and his ilk, Cashin finds both armies fully capable of emptying the stores, robbing the woodlots, and torching the homes of white noncombatants. To have two massive armies with nearly inexhaustible appetites for resources crisscrossing the South ensured widespread devastation. But the destruction was all the greater because soldiers on both sides paid little attention to military codes regulating pillage and plunder, and their commanders were usually unwilling or unable to reign them in. So, Cashin argues, the war caused starvation, deforestation, the razing of villages, and an underappreciated amount of hostage-taking and abuse of civilians. After the war, there was no reckoning, no recompense for the toll both armies took on white southerners, and the scars were bandaged with myths that deceive us still. Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is researching African American environmental history in the nineteenth-century Cotton South. He is also an editor of the digital environmental magazine and podcast Edge Effects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Dr. Giulio Ongaro, currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Economics Department at the University of Milan-Bicocca has just published Peasants and Soldiers: The Management of the Venetian Military Structure in the Mainland Dominion between the 16th and 17th Centuries (Routledge, 2017), a fascinating study of the early modern Venetian military. Rather than focus on the city itself or the republic’s higher-profile naval forces, Ongaro examines the workings of the Venetian land forces—its cavalry, militia, and fortress structures. Financing and supplying these forces required increasingly sophisticated administrative measures that, as in so many European states at the time, drove the expansion of state institutions. Most previous studies have assumed that such expansion came at the expense of local power structures and that state administrations existed in competition with local elites. By examining the records of municipal and rural archives in the Venetian hinterland, Ongaro instead shows that while the central state had the power to make demands, those demands were most often satisfied in cooperation with local forces, rather than in competition. Local elites benefitted from the contracts to provision fortresses or supply saltpeter, for example, and so did not resist state directives as a matter of course. This detailed economic history will expand your horizons and your understanding of early modern military history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

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” trade beyond the port of Canton (Guangzhou) and continue dealing in the lucrative commodity, opium. Historian Stephen R. Platt’s book, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age (Knopf, 2018) proves that the path to war was not so simple. Internal rebellions weakened the Qing military and stretched resources thin. British themselves debated the merits of the Canton system that restricted all Western foreigners and their trade in China to a single port. Some Qing officials considered opium a wholly domestic issue while others considered how best to resolve opium smuggling–by legalizing opium or ejecting foreigners from Canton. Platt traces the narratives of figures who played significant roles in the mounting conflict and identifies lynchpin moments when the history of China and the West could have turned out much differently. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

We have all seen pictures of the “Big Three” (Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin) at their historic meeting Yalta in February 1945. The three leaders command the viewer’s attention, naturally, but in the background of the various versions of that photo are other important figures. One can glimpse George Marshall in some. Foreign ministers Eden and Molotov appear in others. American Admirals King and Leahy are there. And so is a U.S. Army Air Force general named Larry Kuter. Not exactly a household name, Kuter was an enormously influential figure, who richly deserves this excellent biography written by airpower expert, Brian Laslie: Architect of Air Power: General Laurence S. Kuter and the Birth of the U.S. Air Force (University Press of Kentucky, 2017). Dr. Laslie is the Deputy Command Historian at NORAD and US Northern Command and the author of another noteworthy book on the U.S. Air Force: The Air Force Way of War: U.S. Tactics and Training after Vietnam (2015), which I can also recommend. Laslie kept encountering Kuter’s name or photo as his work took him to Air Force bases and installations around the world and began to ask questions. Kuter was the co-author of AWPD-1, the first American plan for air war and a strong proponent of daylight, precision strategic bombing. He commanded American forces all over the world, served immediately under Harold George in the postwar Air Transport Command, which gave him responsibility, among other things, for the Berlin Airlift in 1948. He set up the United States Air Force Academy; he commanded NORAD; in retirement, he worked with Pan Am on the 747 project. And there was much more to Kuter’s story, as you can read in Laslie’s book after you enjoy our conversation here. Listeners might also be interested in the author’s blog, Balloons to Drones. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

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 western Mediterranean. In his book Rome Resurgent: War and Empire in the Age of Justinian (Oxford University Press, 2018), Peter Heather recounts the campaigns of Justinian’s armies and the factors that made them possible. As Heather explains, the Roman imperial state in the 6th century was one focused mainly upon the waging of war, though for all of the revenue expended upon its armies the eastern Romans had experienced a series of defeats at the hands of their Sassanian Persian rivals to their east. Soon after Justinian took the throne, however, the eastern Roman armies enjoyed a series of successes thanks to the leadership of his most successful commander, Belisarius. While these victories helped define Justinian’s stature as emperor, maintaining them ultimately proved the greater challenge, one that Justinian’s successors were unable to accomplish. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

N.A.J. Taylor and Robert Jacobs,’s edited volume Reimagining Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Nuclear Humanities in the Post-Cold War (Routledge, 2017) developed out of a special journal issue of Critical Military Studies organized on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Taylor and Jacobs have gathered a subtly interwoven set of papers that together offer a distinctly post-Cold War perspective Hiroshima and Nagasaki—not just the bombings, but their long, continuing aftermaths. At various levels of granularity and expansiveness, the contributors present a diverse set of approaches and findings in what the editors describe as the “exciting new field of Nuclear Humanities.” The contributions to this volume are arrayed along five “pathways” laid out by the editors in their introduction: “testimony from lived experience;” “memorialization and commemoration;” “ordinary people’s resentment, suffering, and forgiveness;” the long-term and universal effects of nuclear weapons; and the transdisciplinary exchanges that characterize Nuclear Humanities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Today we are joined by Gerald Gems, Professor of Kinesiology at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, and the author of several books on sports history including Sport in American History: From Colonization to Globalization (2017), Sport and the American Occupation of the Philippines (2016), and Blood and Guts to Glory: A History of Sports (2014). Gems is also the former president of the North American Society for Sport History, the former vice-president of the International Society for the History of Physical Education and Sports, and a former Fulbright Scholar. In Sport and the American Occupation of the Philippines: Bats, Balls, and Bayonets (Lexington Books, 2016), Gems explores the history of sport during the US occupation of the Philippines. Based on extensive primary and secondary source research, Gems work uses hegemony theory to investigate how and why American colonizers imported ideas about sports to the Philippines, and in what circumstances Filipinos adopted, adapted, rejected these sporting practices. He shows that American politicians, military planners, missionaries, and businessmen saw sports like baseball and basketball as essential for keeping soldiers physically and morally fit, while teaching American values including capitalism, militarism, and work ethic. Filipino sportsmen and women played some American sports, first baseball and later basketball, but on their own terms. For many Filipino athletes, sports became a way to assert Filipino nationalism. When they played basketball against US soldiers, they overcame American height advantages by developing a fast paced style and they likened their victories to the rapid strikes of Filipino guerrillas against the occupying forces. Gem’s work has resonance beyond the Philippines and will be interesting reading for scholars studying the translation of American ideas in similar colonial contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

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 University has written a terrific novel, The Verdun Affair: A Novel (Scribner, 2018). It’s protagonist is Tom, an American living in France after World War I, having served as an ambulance driver for the American Field Service. He has the macabre task of gathering bones from the battlefield at Verdun, in preparation for the construction of ossuary there. Families come from all over France, looking for news, or perhaps the remains, of loved ones reported missing or dead during the war. One such pilgrim is Sarah, also American, looking for her husband, Lee, whom she is convinced still lives. You can learn more about the story in the interview (or go read the book!), which also details some of the remarkable historical research that Dybek conducted as he wrote. The sense of global catastrophe, the losses of grieving families, the search for meaning, the efforts to rebuild, all conjure the atmosphere of postwar Europe. Dybek’s descriptions of Verdun, of the battles on the Isonzo and in the Dolomites, the fascist violence in Italy reflect that careful research and teach the history of the period with greater impact than all but the best works of history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

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 it was prepared to use them if necessary against an increasingly hostile Soviet Union. This was not exactly the case, our guest John M. Curatola argues in his book, Bigger Bombs for a Brighter Tomorrow: The Strategic Air Command and American War Plans at the Dawn of the Atomic Age, 1945-1950 (McFarland & Company, 2016). Curatola is a professor of history at the United States Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He presents the story of an ad hoc, frequently chaotic, strategic defense posture at the opening of the Cold War. Inter-service rivalries, inter-agency bickering, and deficiencies in equipment, morale, and training all left the United States Air Force and the Atomic Energy Commission to pursue their own strategic plans, which Curatola notes were unrealistic, and in some cases, almost ludicrous. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

During the 17th and 18th centuries, Austria established itself as one of the dominant powers of Europe, despite possessing much more limited fiscal resources when compared to its counterparts. In The Sinews of Habsburg Power: Lower Austria in a Fiscal-Military State, 1650-1820 (Oxford University Press, 2018), William D. Godsey uses the financial support provided by one region of the Habsburg’s empire to understand how it maintained its status during a time of change in the nature of military power. As Godsey explains, the challenge was posed by the contrasting trends of a need for a larger standing army and the ability of the region’s economy to support it. In response to the demands placed on it, the Estates of the region – the assemblage of clerical, noble, and municipal leaders who implemented taxes for the monarchy – evolved to play a regular role in supplying the Habsburg armies with the resources it needed to operate. This evolution preserved the importance of the role the Estates played in the exercise of Habsburg power, one that was challenged occasionally by such events as the centralizing reforms of Emperor Joseph II but nonetheless persevered well into the 19th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

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 interview, the fact that the war led to ongoing conflicts in the Middle East is an accepted interpretation of the war’s meaning. However, through his research Laron has provided a new lens by which to understand the war. Using a holistic perspective that situates the war in the context of the Cold War and the economic development of the non-western world, Laron argues that several broader trends pushed the Israeli and Arab states into conflict in 1967. As developmental aid disappeared, Arab and Israeli governments alike were facing crises of confidence from their own populations. Reliance on the military became a way to earn legitimacy with a public that was becoming disenchanted, though it also fed into a number of increasingly belligerent moves that ultimately led to war on June 5, 1967. Laron’s research shows as well the role of the superpowers in this conflict. As development aid gave way to military aid, they fueled the rise of militarism in these countries, and their often-contradictory diplomacy only muddied an already difficult situation. The legacy of the war, in addition to the ongoing conflicts that Israel faces in Palestine and its issues with neighbors such as Syria, was an erosion of civil-military relations that gave outsized roles to generals in the region. To write this history, Laron drew on archival research in the archives of former Soviet states and the literature that already existed on the topic. In doing so, he moves the study of the war from being a strictly regional issue to a global one. Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Though Great Britain’s warships ruled the waves throughout the First World War, their greatest challenge came from just underneath them. Nowhere was this better demonstrated in the Western Approaches, where, as Steve R. Dunn details in his book Bayly’s War: The Battle for the Western Approaches in the First World War (Naval Institute Press, 2018), the Royal Navy found themselves hard pressed even to secure the trade routes just off their western shores from the threat posed by Germany U-boats. At the start of the war, the command covering the region, the Coast of Ireland station, was something of a backwater, one not anticipated to be a major area of the war. The U-boat campaign against British trade soon changed this, as sinkings such as those of the liner Lusitania demonstrated the vulnerability of shipping in the region. In response the Admiralty nominated the dynamic Lewis Bayly to take over as commander. Setting a focused, no-nonsense tone from the start, Bayly soon moved to protect merchant shipping and hunt down U-boats by every means possible. Bayly’s greatest success, though, came with the entry of the United States into the war in 1917, as he presided over the successful integration of American naval vessels into his command, where they provided the necessary protection for the ships transporting American soldiers to the battlefields of the Western Front. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

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 confines of a single volume. Craig Symonds undertakes this challenge in his book World War II at Sea: A Global History (Oxford University Press, 2018), which provides him with a perspective that produces a new understanding into how the conflict was waged. Symonds demonstrates that the naval campaigns were pivotal in determining the winners of the war, given the vast mobilization of resources undertaken by many of the combatants. For the Germans, disrupting this was key, and the fall of France dramatically changed the balance of the naval war in Europe. Yet the British and the Americans were hard pressed to focus on the German threat to British trade once Japan attacked their Asian colonies in an effort to expand their own empire. The result was a juggling act, as the western Allies were forced to constantly readjust finite naval resources to wage two maritime struggles on opposite ends of the Earth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

In Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research During the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2013), Joy Rohde discusses the relationship between the social sciences, academia, and national security institutions. Through an examination of the use of military research during the Cold War, Dr. Rohde raises questions about the ethics of scholarship, the military industrial complex, and the role of expertise in the national security arena. This book is a thought provoking read on the implications of military-funded social science. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Coincident with the hundredth anniversary of the first American engagements in the First World War, Andrew J. Huebner joins New Books in Military History to talk about his book, Love and Death in the Great War (Oxford University Press, 2018). Through a collection of vignettes – some quite personal to him – Huebner considers the First World War through the lens of the average American citizen soldier and his family. Accordingly he describes how Americans genuinely believed they were taking part in a war to keep their families and futures safe from German aggression. Following a course largely set by propaganda, Americans personalized and romanticized the war far more than historians have thought in the past. Rather than being an agent for change, Huebner also presents the war as a call to normalcy, one which would reassert white Anglo-Saxon masculine prerogatives in a society that, under the Progressives, had for many become unmoored from its past. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

The First World War is usually associated with Trench Warfare, industrial mobilization, and the Lost Generation. In her recent book, Sexual Treason in Germany during the First World War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), Lisa M. Todd reveals an obsession among elites, the state, and everyday people with sex in the midst of such disruptive warfare. She argues that the state, the churches, and even their neighbors viewed men and women who had sex outside of marriage as traitors to the nation. Critically exploring explosive debates among moral Christians, sex reformers, military figures, and politicians, this book demonstrates the profound ambiguities of the era. Balancing everyday stories with major legal changes and cultural discourse, Todd assesses sexual encounters on the western, eastern, and home fronts. She analyzes fraught issues such as sex work, POW labor, and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Combining dynamic individual stories from a rich archival base, this book is one that will appeal to many listeners. Michael E. O’Sullivan is Associate Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He will publish Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in the fall of 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history