New Books in Military History

In the wake of the Arab Spring and the ensuing Syrian Civil War, the stories of the millions displaced by the conflict as well as the millions Syria has lost since 2011 remain largely untold. Wendy Pearlman‘s We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled (Custom House, 2017) attempts to fill that void. Almost entirely comprised of interviews with Syrian refugees, conducted in Arabic then painstakingly translated and organized to tell the story of the Syrian Civil War. Pearlman covers the period before the Civil War, the revolution itself and the tragic aftermath. Heartbreaking, inspiring, and informative all at once, We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled is hopefully the first of many such compilations to tell the multifaceted Syrian story. NA Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing. 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 10th century, a succession of Byzantine rulers reversed centuries of strategic policy by embarking on a series of campaigns that dramatically reshaped their empire. This effort and its consequences for the history of the region is the focus of Anthony Kaldellis‘s Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood: The Rise and Fall of Byzantium, 955 A.D. to the First Crusade (Oxford University Press, 2017), which provides the first survey of this important era of Byzantine history written in over a century. Kaldellis sees the campaigns that began in the 950s as a consequence of the collapse of the Carolingian empire and the decline of the Abbasid caliphate, which provided the Byzantines with an opportunity to stabilize their southeastern frontiers and to extend and consolidate their holdings in the Balkans and in Italy. Effected through a combination of military conquest and traditional Byzantine “soft power,” the result was a greatly expanded domain, one centered now in Europe rather than in Asia. As Kaldellis explains, what brought this period to an end was not any factor internal to the empire but the simultaneous threats posed in the late 11th century by the Normans, the Pechenegs, and the Seljuk Turks, which in the end proved too much for the Byzantine state to manage successfully even with the help of the warriors of the First Crusade. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Hussein Fancy’s book The Mercenary Mediterranean: Sovereignty, Religion, and Violence in the Medieval Crown of Aragon (University of Chicago Press, 2016) begins with the description of five Muslim jenets, or cavalrymen, journeying through Spain in 1285 to serve as soldiers for the crown of Aragon. As Fancy explains, these men were not outliers, but just a few of the many thousands who were employed by successive Aragonese kings over the course of the 13th and 14th centuries, and their service challenges many of our long-held assumptions of the divide between the Christian and Islamic worlds during the Middle Ages. For the kings of Aragon, hiring jenets gave them a powerful force of light cavalry that could be used to foster their imperial ambitions, while the jenets themselves saw their service for Christian kings as fully compatible with their tradition of jihad. By describing their relationship, Fancy’s work highlights one of the many ties that linked Christian Aragon to Muslim North Africa, two regions that are usually treated separately rather than part of the interconnected Mediterranean world that emerges from his pages. 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 majority of the books we profile on New Books in Military History are traditional research narratives, monographs written by historians and authors seeking to present a particular campaign, organization, battle, or individual in detail. Once in a while, though, we take pride in introducing our listeners to projects that are more focused on how memory and history are intertwined, bringing the past to the present. In this episode, we speak with New York Times travel writer and amateur historian Richard Rubin about his own thoughts on the First World War and how it shaped a special relationship between many Frenchmen and the ideal of America that survives to this day. His most recent book, Back Over There: One American Time-Traveler, 100 Years Since the Great War, 500 Miles of Battle-Scarred French Countryside, and Too Many Trenches, Shells, Legends, and Ghosts to Count (St. Martins Press, 2017), is a deeply personal account of Rubin’s many walks across the Western Front and his encounters with local caretakers, fellow tourists and pilgrims, and everyday people in Belgium and France. Our discussion is more of a conversation about the state of memory and the daily encounters with history that, prior to this point, remained largely unknown to so many people. The interview, and Rubin’s book, are tactile reminders of the history that lies, quite literally, just beneath our feet . . . if we know how and where to look for it. 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 Jewish Volunteers, the International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), Gerben Zaagsma, Senior researcher at the centre for contemporary and digital history at the University of Luxembourg, discusses the participation of volunteers of Jewish descent in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, focusing particularly on the establishment of the Naftali Botwin Company, a Jewish military unit that was created in the Polish Dombrowski Brigade. Zaagsma analyses the symbolic meaning of the participation of Jewish volunteers and the Botwin Company both during and after the civil war. He puts this participation in the broader context of Jewish involvement and Jewish/non-Jewish relations in the Left, and asks to what extent Jewishness and Jewish concerns mattered in the International Brigades and why the Botwin Company was actually created. To this end, the book examines representations of Jewish volunteers in the Parisian Yiddish press (both communist and non-communist). In addition, he analyses the various ways in which the memory of the experiences of Jewish volunteers and the Botwin Company came to be constituted and constructed after the Second World War and the Holocaust. To that end the book traces how discourses about Jewish volunteers became decisively shaped by post-Holocaust debates on Jewish responses to fascism and Nazism, analyses how, and why, volunteers of Jewish descent eventually became Jewish volunteers after the war, and discusses claims that Jewish volunteers can be seen as ‘the first Jews to resist Hitler with arms’. Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at [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 conquest of the Philippines in 1942 brought thousands of Americans under the control of the empire of Japan. While most of them were interned or imprisoned for the duration of the war, a remarkable few evaded capture and fought on against the Japanese. In MacArthur’s Spies: The Soldier, the Singer, and the Spymaster Who Defied the Japanese in World War II (Viking, 2017), Peter Eisner describes the efforts of three of them John Boone, Claire Phillips, and Chick Parsons to incite an insurgency against the Japanese occupation. Facing long odds, they risked their lives to undermine Japan’s control, with Claire’s Manila nightclub supplying resources and information to Boone in the nearby countryside and the intelligence passed on to Chick and other officers working towards America’s return to the Philippines. Their efforts in association with that of others provided American and Filipino guerrillas with much-needed material, and smuggled in food and supplies to thousands of prisoners of war the Japanese held on Luzon. As Eisner reveals, while their efforts aided America’s eventual reconquest of the islands, it came at personal cost to them as it did for so many others, who faced detention, torture, and even death for their actions. 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 Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez‘s The Soviet-Israeli War, 1967-1973: The USSR’s Intervention in the Egyptian-Israeli Conflict (Oxford University Press/Hurst, 2017), tells you that this is a revisionist history, which argues that the Six Day War (1967) and the Yom Kippur War (1973) were not merely brief explosions of Arab-Israeli violence but part of longer sustained conflict between Israel and the Soviet Union. The role of Soviet “advisors” in Egypt in the period is well known. Using memoirs and testimony of Soviet veterans, Ginor and Remez show that the Soviet involvement was much more direct and provocative than previously understood. In addition, the authors significantly change our understanding of the eventual rapprochement between Egypt and the United States. The usual story relies heavily on the memoirs of Henry Kissinger, who naturally takes much of the credit for the supposed “expulsion” of Soviet advisors and the decision by Sadat after the war to move closer to the American camp. The problem is, as Ginor and Remez show, the advisors (and other military personnel) never left. Rather, they were shuffled around for the benefit of news people and foreign agents, then returned to their units. Crucially, these Soviet units advanced the air defense network to cover the Suez Canal– itself the prerequisite for any Egyptian attack. For these reasons and more, this book is well worth your attention. Enjoy the interview. Because this is an ongoing project, the authors are eager to collect more information. If there are veterans, diplomats, or others with some involvement in these conflicts who would be willing to share their stories, please contact Ginor and Remez at the Truman Institute: [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 Peloponnesian War was one of the first subjects of historical inquiry, and one that has been the subject of many works ever since Thucydides wrote his famous account of the conflict. Yet these works typically focus just on the decades when Sparta’s Peloponnesian League fought against the Athenian empire. In The Plague of War: Athens, Sparta, and the Struggle for Ancient Greece (Oxford University Press, 2017), Jennifer T. Roberts sets the war within the broader context of inter-state hostilities in 5th and 4th century Greece. As she explains, fighting between the two sides did not begin in 431, nor did it really end in 404. Instead the Peloponnesian War was just one of a series of conflicts that stretched throughout the Hellenic era, in which victories often simply set the stage for the next round of battles. Though Sparta may have defeated Athens in 404, by continuing the story beyond then Roberts shows how the new alignments that resulted transformed the city states in ways that led to Sparta’s own defeat in 371, making her triumph in the war only a fleeting one. 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 218 BCE, the Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca launched an invasion of Italy designed to bring the Roman Republic to its knees. Yet for all of his success in defeating Rome’s legions on the battlefield, Hannibal ultimately failed in his lifelong goal. In Hannibal (Simon and Schuster, 2017), Patrick N. Hunt recounts the triumphs and frustrations of the legendary commanders dramatic military career. The son of a Carthaginian leader who fought Rome in the First Punic War, Hannibal was raised to reverse Carthage’s loss in that initial conflict. This he did by taking the fight to Rome, where his outnumbered armies triumphed over the Romans in three successive battles. Yet, as Hunt explains, Rome soon learned from Hannibal’s example, and the Carthaginians’ inability to translate battlefield victories into a Roman surrender left him mired in a war of attrition he could not win. By the time he faced a Roman army at Zama in 202 BCE, the situation was now reversed, as Scipio Africanus used many of Hannibal’s own tactics against him. In this Hunt exposes the irony of Hannibal’s life, as his effort to destroy Rome’s nascent empire only made it stronger, setting the stage for the next seven centuries of its domination of the Mediterranean. 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 the U.S. Navy’s blockade of the Confederacy has not received the attention devoted to the bloody campaigns on land, it was an important contributor to the Union’s victory in the Civil War. In Lincoln’s Trident: The West Gulf Blockading Squadron during the Civil War (University of Alabama Press, 2015), Robert M. Browning Jr. describes the operations of the blockade in the Gulf Coast region. At the start of the war the newly-formed West Gulf squadron was faced with the task of patrolling hundreds of miles of coastline, from the Florida port of Pensacola to the Rio Grande River. Initially composed of just a handful of ships, the squadron would often spend months stationed off the coast, attempting to interdict the blockade runners that aided the Confederate war effort by bringing in the supplies the Confederates could not produce themselves. As the war went on the squadron took on the formidable task of capturing the major Confederate ports, and under the command of David Farragut it was instrumental to the capture of New Orleans and Mobile, as well as the occupation of the lower Mississippi River. It was through such efforts that the navy helped the Union win the war, and sooner than might otherwise have been 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 inaugural podcast of Arguing History, historians Michael S. Neiberg and Brian Neumann address the question of Americas decision in 1917 to declare war against Germany. Together they discuss the factors involved in it, such as Germanys wartime provocations and the economic impact the war was having upon the nation. Yet it was more than just a product of the events of the conflict, as it came at a time when the role of the United States in the world was being redefined by its emergence as a major economic and financial power on the international scene. How Americans perceived this also played a role both in the decision to go to war, even though there was no consensus as to how the nation should respond to the consequences of their choice once they made it. Michael S. Neiberg is the Stimson Chair of the Department of National Security and Strategy at the U.S. Army War College and the author of Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I (Harvard University Press, 2014). Brian Neumann is an historian with the U.S. Army Center for Military History and the lead editor of the centers series of pamphlets on 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

One often hears stories of World War II and Korean War veterans who came back from the war and refused to talk about what they had experienced in combat. They neither wanted folks at home to know what had happened nor did they want to relive it themselves. It was just too horrible to relate. The truth about combat in those conflicts, so we are told, was therefore suppressed. In Vietnam, the truth was also suppressed, but in a different way and for altogether different reasons. As Gary Kulik demonstrates in his remarkable book ‘War Stories’: False Atrocity Tales, Swift Boaters, and Winter Soldiers–What Really Happened in Vietnam (Potomac Books, 2009), some Vietnam veterans came back from the war and, far from hesitating to tell their “war stories,” exaggerated and even invented them. This was particularly true of atrocity tales, which were both numerous and well broadcast. As Kulik explains, the point of these false atrocity stories was not to portray the “grunts” in a bad light. On the contrary, the tellers of the tales portrayed themselves–with the aid of the anti-war media and what might be called the anti-war psychological establishment–as victims. Victims of what? The ‘American War Machine’ (my phrase, not Kulik’s)– a monstrous, immoral creation that ground vast quantities of men and material–American and Vietnamese–into dust for no good purpose. The ‘American War Machine,’ so Americans were told in the Winter Soldiers’ testimony, in a huge memoir literature, and in blockbuster films, produced atrocities that then in turn produced the broken, lost, and possibly insane Vietnam vet of popular folk memory. Think John Rambo or Travis Bickle. Kulik’s point is not that American soldiers committed no atrocities in Vietnam. They did, and they were too many of them. Nor is it to claim that American soldiers were not, in some cases, badly traumatized by their Vietnam experience. Some were, and too many of them. His argument is that the truth about Vietnam–that it was basically a war like others Americans have fought in the twentieth century, not one that produced a flood of atrocities and psychologically wounded soldiers–has been suppressed by those who wanted to tell politically-charged “war 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

In the 1930s the Royal Navy faced the problem of defending its empire in eastern Asia and Australia against the formidable naval power of Japan. How they responded to this threat in the final years of peace and the first years of the Second World War, is the subject of Andrew Boyd‘s book The Royal Navy in Eastern Waters: The Linchpin of Victory, 1935-1942 (Seaforth Publishing, 2017; distributed in the US by Naval Institute Press). As Boyd explains, the challenge was one of defending British interests against a modern fleet that was qualitatively the equal of theirs. Efforts to implement a strategy, though, were disrupted by the growing threat of war in Europe, and the fall of France in the summer of 1940 forced the British to reassess their strategic assumptions. The growing priority the British gave to their interests in the Mediterranean and the Middle East during this time came at the expense of their preparations against Japan, leading the British to seek greater cooperation with the United States and others to protect their possessions in the region. Though these attempts to establish an effective defense were incomplete when the Japanese onslaught came at the end of 1941, Boyd shows how the planning and preparation for it laid the groundwork for the successful defense of the Indian Ocean region, which ultimately proved strategically vital to Allied efforts to defeat the Axis powers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

From the American Revolution to the present day, African Americans have stepped forward in their nation’s defense. Fighting for Uncle Sam: Buffalo Solders in the Frontier Army (Schiffer, 2016) breathes new vitality into a stirring subject, emphasizing the role men who have come to be known as “buffalo soldiers” played in opening the Trans-Mississippi West. This concise overview reveals a cast of characters as big as the land they served. Over 150 images painstakingly gathered nearly a half century from public and private collections enhance the written word as windows to the past. Now 150 years after Congress authorized blacks to serve in the Regular Army, the reader literally can peer into the eyes of formerly enslaved men who bravely bought their freedom on the bloody battlefields of the Civil War, then trekked westward, carried the “Stars and Stripes” to the Caribbean, and pursued Pancho Villa into Mexico with John “Black Jack” Pershing. Growing up in Tucson, Arizona, historian and author John P. Langellier spent four decades working in public history after earning a B.A. and M.A. in history from the University of San Diego and his Ph.D. in military history from Kansas State University. He spent a dozen years with the U.S. Army, helped found California’s Autry Museum of the American West, and served as director for Wyoming State Museum, deputy director of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, executive director of Arizona’s Sharlot Hall Museum, and director of Arizona Historical Society’s Central Division. He was also awarded an honorary membership into the 9th and 10th U.S. Horse Calvary Association. He has written dozens of published books, served as a Hollywood film consultant, a Smithsonian Institution fellow, and produced history documentaries for television networks A&E, History, and PBS. Langellier officially “retired” to Tucson in 2015, but still continues his work as one of the preeminent military historians in the United States. After Fighting for Uncle Sam: Blacks in the Frontier Army, one of his current research projects is a book-length work on the connections between the Western art of Frederic Remington and the U.S. Army 10th Calvary (Buffalo Soldiers) in Arizona. James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. 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 Civil War Father James Sheeran served as a Catholic chaplain for the 14th Louisiana Infantry. Between his various responsibilities Sheeran kept a journal in which he recounted his experiences with, and observations of, life in the Army of Northern Virginia. As editor of The Civil War Diary of Rev. James Sheeran, Chaplain, Confederate, Redemptorist (Catholic University of America Press, 2016), Patrick J. Hayes has provided readers with the most complete edition yet of Sheeran’s manuscript, one that details the activities of a man of faith in a time of war. An immigrant from Ireland, Sheeran joined the Redemptorist congregation in the 1850s and was serving as a parish priest in New Orleans when the war began in 1861. As a military chaplain, Sheeran witnessed firsthand many of the key battles of the Civil War, from Second Manassas in 1862 to Cedar Creek in 1864, and his recorded observations provide a valuable record of those clashes. Yet Sheeran’s diaries also serve as a window into what life was like for soldiers and civilians during the conflict, as observed by a man whose commitment to the Confederate cause was matched only by his piety. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Michael Bryant’s book is both less and more ambitious than its title. He’s writing less of a history of war crimes than he is a history of the idea and concept of war crimes. He’s most interested in what people have considered a breach of the norms of warfare and how this concept has changed over time. The triumph of A World History of War Crimes: From Antiquity to the Present (Bloomsbury, 2016) is it’s reminder that, while expectations about how soldiers (and others) would act during warfare are not new at all, the notion of war crimes is actually quite recent. Bryant argues that ideas about the proper conduct of war go back to the ancient Near East. But these ideas were rarely based on the dignity of human person. Instead they derived from religion or from the shape of the political institutions in society. It was only in the 18th and 19th century, in the aftermath of the Enlightenment, that norms about conduct during warfare began to be based on the idea that mistreating civilians or wounded soldiers was a crime. And even then, these notions were activated through bilateral or multilateral treaties–implying that the recognition of human dignity had very real limits. It’s an audacious task to attempt to survey the history of war crimes, especially a global history. Meant as a textbook, Bryant inevitably privileges European history. But it’s a thoughtful, well-written, provocative survey, exactly what we hope for in a textbook. Kelly McFall is Associate Professor of History at Newman University in Wichita, Kansas, where he directs the Honors Program. He is particularly interested in the question of how to teach about the history of genocides and mass atrocities and has written a module in the Reacting to the Past series about the UN debate over whether to intervene in Rwanda in 1994. 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 accounts about the naval battles of the First World War focus upon the stalemate between the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet, or the German raiders who attempted to disrupt Allied commerce. In Securing the Narrow Sea: The Dover Patrol 1914-1918 (Seaforth Publishing, 2017; distributed in the US by Naval Institute Press), Steve Dunn focuses on the often overlooked service of the British naval forces stationed in the English Channel during the conflict. The eclectic collection of destroyers, converted yachts, and requisitioned trawlers that comprised the patrol made for a considerable contrast with the dreadnoughts at Scapa Flow, yet, as Dunn demonstrates, they played a vital role in securing the Channel for the safe transport of British troops to France and in opposing the transit of German U-boats to their stations. In describing the admirals who commanded the station over the course of the war, the lives of the men who served aboard the ships, and the various engagements which they fought against their German opponents, he explains the unglamorous yet frequently dangerous contribution the patrol made to Britain’s victory over Germany in 1918, one that was subsequently glossed over in the postwar era. 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 America went to war against Germany in 1917, the scale of the conflict required the mobilization of women as well as men in order to achieve victory. In The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Lynn Dumenil describes the many ways in which women participated in the war effort and the ways in which it transformed their lives. As she notes, in the years leading up to the war increasing numbers of American women were employed outside the home and involved in the public sphere. For many the politically-engaged among their number, the decision to go to war presented an opportunity to demonstrate their gender’s patriotism and worthiness for the vote. Thousands showed their support for the soldiers by participating in a variety of volunteer activities, with some even traveling to Europe to work in canteens or as nurses. Many more took up the jobs that the men left behind, filling the void created by their enlistment. These efforts were celebrated in the popular media of the time, though often with the message that these new roles were only temporary. Yet as Dumenil demonstrates, while postwar gains were indeed limited, the involvement of women in the war accelerated many of the changes taking place in politics and society, changes which were reflected in new attitudes and expectations held by these women in the 1920s and beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Phil Gurski‘s Western Foreign Fighters: The Threat to Homeland and International Security (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) is his second recent monograph on terrorism, and another useful resource for practitioners and non-specialists alike. Written in an approachable, grounded style, Western Foreign Fighters is both topical and novel; its comparative analysis of volunteers’ participation in non-sanctioned conflicts both jihadist and secular is especially notable. Gurski’s measured, thoughtful analysis is a credit to the Canadian intelligence community (wherein he spent his entire career) and I look forward to his further publications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Seth Barrett Tillman has written “Ex Parte Merryman: Myth, History and Scholarship,” an article about the famous case that is popularly thought to demonstrate a conflict between the President and the federal courts during the American Civil War. Tillman’s article is an effort to revise the standard historical understanding of the case called Ex Parte Merryman. In the spring of 1861, just as the hostilities had begun in the Civil War, famously issued an order to the U.S. Army granting army officials discretion to suspend the writ of habeas corpus if resistance or treasonous activity were encountered in Union territory. That spring, as soldiers poured into the Washington, D.C. area through Maryland, the Army was confronted with popular protests and violence by civilians. One suspect was John Merryman, a young man from a prominent Maryland family. Merryman hired lawyers to seek his release via the traditional method of asking the federal courts for an order to release Merryman pending his trial. However, Merryman was not initially released and was confined in Ft. McHenry, a military base near the port of Baltimore. The traditional account of the case portrays Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney as heroically seeking to vindicate the rights of a civilian prisoner wrongly held by the military and Lincoln as defying an order to comply with the Constitution. In this podcast Professor Tillman, a lecturer in the Department of Law at Maynooth University in County Kildare, Ireland, discusses his arguments that the traditional account of the Merryman case is built upon multiple myths. If Tillman’s view of the case is correct, it holds the potential for overturning our understanding of this important period in constitutional history and civil-military relations. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Norman Ohler’s Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) explores the drug culture of Nazi Germany. Far from being a nation of physical and mental purity portrayed by Goebbels’s propaganda machine, Ohler shows Germany was a hub of drug production and abuse during the 1920s. Manufacturers like Merck and Bayer openly marketed their wares to the public, building the basis of so-called big pharma on intoxicants. Produced by Temmler, the Nazi elite embraced methamphetamine as a wonder drug, free of the connotations of disease and degeneracy associated with the drug culture of the Weimar years. Stimulants became a valuable tool in Germany’s wartime arsenal. The German military acknowledged the value of amphetamines and distributed Pervitin en masse. Ohler argues amphetamines powered the Wehrmacht’s armored Blitzkrieg of 1939-1941, defeating the Allies in France and elsewhere. These gains were short-lived, however. Nazi Germany’s Faustian bargain with drugs evaporated during the Battle of Stalingrad and in the distant steppes of the Soviet Union. Ever more powerful drug combinations were desperately sought by the Nazi state to save the Reich from annihilation, exposing horrors of the regime from experiments on concentration camp prisoners and drugged child soldiers. Blitzed details how Hitler’s personal physician, Dr. Theo Morell, administered vitamin concoctions and hormone injections common to athletic doping to pump up Hitler’s ailing body during the war years. Though Hitler had promised to cleanse the nation of drug abuse, he himself became utterly dependent on drugs to survive. Military defeat and destruction took their toll on Nazism embodied, Morell increasingly looked towards methamphetamine and oxycodone (Eukodal) to keep Hitler wake and alert during the last apocalyptic years of the Reich. In so doing, Morell himself built an impressive medical empire based on quack medicines and bought political access. Ohler shows how in the final months of the conflict, Morell’s supplies of drugs ran out, exposing Hitler’s frail body to his inner circle with health crises, symptoms of chemical withdraw, and fits of madness. James Esposito is a historian and researcher interested in digital history, empire, and the history of technology. James can be reached via email at [email protected] and on Twitter @james_esposito_ 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 intersection of colonialism and mass atrocities is one of the most exciting insights of the past years of genocide studies. But most people don’t really think of the Soviet Union and the American west as colonial spaces. But while there are limitations to this, both fit well into a kind of geography of colonialism. This is why Edward Westermann‘s new book Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars: Comparing Genocide and Conquest (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016)is so interesting. Westermann teaches at Texas A & M University at San Antonio. Prior to this work, he wrote a well-regarded volume on the German police battalions on the Eastern Front in the Second World War. Before joining the university world, he was an officer in the US military, and he brings his training and experience to a study of the strategy and tactics of the armies which fought in each space. In doing so, he sheds new light on how each army behaved. He’s particularly good at understanding how tactics and military culture drove the American army to act in ways that killed women and children without that being their goal. But he’s also good at analyzing the broader cultural climate that informed policy makers in each society. His discussion of the regional splits in policy toward American Indians was noteworthy. It’s a book that made me think about the American west in a new light. Kelly McFall is Associate Professor of History at Newman University in Wichita Kansas, where he directs the Honors Program. He is particularly interested in the question of how to teach about the history of genocides and mass atrocities and has written a module in the Reacting to the Past series about the UN debate over whether to intervene in Rwanda in 1994. 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 Path to War: How the First World War Created Modern America (Oxford University Press, 2016), acclaimed historian Michael Neiberg examines the background of war fever in the United States between 1914 to 1917 to present a new interpretation on the nation’s slide to entering the First World War in April 1917. In a departure from the general outlook on the war, he presents a case where the American public was more engaged in the process than has been allowed by historians who have traditionally focused on the Wilson administration’s leadership in the varying crises in German-American relations following the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare in the winter of 1917. Rather than being passive observers who had to be convinced to join the war, Neiberg argues that many citizens, including ethnic German and Irish-Americans, were convinced by the course of actions over the three year period of neutrality that war was inevitable and the sooner the United States joined, the more quickly it could be resolved. Michael Neiberg is the inaugural Chair of War Studies at the United States Army War College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The views he expresses, both in The Path to War and in our interview, are his own, and in no way reflect the opinion of the United States Army War College or the Department of Defense. 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 best remembered today for his brief tenure as the ninth president of the United States, William Henry Harrison’s most significant contribution to American history was his service as a general in the War of 1812. In William Henry Harrison and the Conquest of the Ohio Country: Frontier Fighting in the War of 1812 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), David Curtis Skaggs recounts Harrison’s military career and the lessons he learned that brought him national acclaim. The son of a Virginia aristocrat, Harrison rejected a medical career in favor of service in the United States Army. While serving as an aide to General Anthony Wayne in the 1790s, he learned the challenges of campaigning in what was then the northwestern frontier of the United States. These lessons stood him in good stead later when, as governor of Indiana Territory, he faced the growing challenge of Tecumseh’s confederacy, the defeat of which became his claim to fame. Yet as Skaggs demonstrates it was his subsequent victory over British forces at the Battle of the Thames which was his greatest achievement, as it ensured that the territories that became Wisconsin and the upper peninsula of Michigan would return to American control at the end of the War of 1812. 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 forty years between 1881 and 1921, the United States Navy went from a small force focused on coastal defense to one of the world’s largest fleets. In Congress Buys a Navy: Politics, Economics, and the Rise of American Naval Power, 1881-1921 (Naval Institute Press, 2016), Paul Pedisich describes the role that the legislative branch played in making this happen. At the start of the period, the Navy possessed a more decentralized organization than today, with the bureau chiefs who ran it more responsive to Congress than the executive branch. The legislators who played critical roles in shaping policy during this period were often driven more by local concerns than any overarching vision of what the Navy should become. Starting in the 1880s, however, successive presidential administrations gradually persuaded Congress to provide more funding to build modern ships. Over time, America’s growing engagement in global affairs led to the expansion of the navy, as the acquisition of an overseas empire brought the United States into competition with European powers, which required a naval force that could defend the increasing number of American interests abroad. 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 mass incarceration of Japanese Americans in the Pacific West is one of the most shameful episodes in our nation’s history. As the United States waged war against fascism, it removed tens of thousands of American citizens and their families from their homes. The First to Cry Down Injustice?: Western Jews and Japanese Removal during WWII (Lexington Books, 2008) invites us into a community in the middle of that contradiction. American Jews knew too well the dangers of prejudice but remained firmly committed to the fight against Nazism, at any cost. Professor Ellen Eisenberg invites us into the complexity of Jewish response to Japanese incarceration. In doing so, she parses the tense and near universal silence that Jewish institutions kept as their Japanese neighbor disappeared. This silence, she proposes, reflected not indifference but a struggle to reconcile opposition to bigotry with an unwillingness to risk speaking out. But she also tells other stories at the margins of that silence. Jewish civic leaders, academics, and Rabbis who raised their voices in resistance. And one Jewish institution that chose a different path, and in doing so providing the federal administration propaganda to support the incarceration policy. Professor Eisenberg paints in great detail the larger context of the Western ethnic landscape and argues that Jewish responses to Japanese incarceration were linked to, and help to illuminate the identity of western Jews both as Westerners and as Jews. Jeremy Wood is a Seattle attorney. Much of his legal and scholarly work has concerned Native American interests. He also serves as Co-Chair for the Seattle City Human Rights Commission and teaches Jewish literature to high school students after school. You can learn more about his work by visiting https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyfwood. He can be reach at [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

Tim Brady’s book His Father’s Son: The Life of General Ted Roosevelt, Jr. (NAL, 2017) is not just the biography of the eldest son and namesake of America’s 26th president, but an account of a life that was adventurous and consequential in its own right. Coming of age in the years in which his Theodore Roosevelt served as president, Ted at times struggled to measure up to the daunting example set by his dynamic father. While often emulating his father’s path, Ted nonetheless sought to be judged on his own achievements, and distinguished himself in both business and in command during the First World War. To many Ted was on his way to becoming the second Roosevelt to occupy the White House, yet his electoral career came to a premature end in 1924 with his loss to Al Smith in the race for the governorship of New York a loss which paved the way for his subsequent political eclipse by his distant cousin, Franklin. Yet as Brady demonstrates, the growing animosity between the two branches of the family did nothing to dim Ted’s commitment to serve his country in its hour of greatest need, and it was while in uniform as a United States Army general in France that his life came to its tragically early end. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Timothy S. Huebner, the Irma O. Sternberg Professor of History at Rhodes College in Memphis, has written Liberty & Union: The Civil War Era and American Constitutionalism (University Press of Kansas, 2016), a one-volume history of the constitutional debates regarding slavery and sovereignty from the Declaration of Independence through the end of Reconstruction. Huebner brings together three strands of history: African American history, military history, and constitutional/political history. In doing so, he joins often disparate areas of inquiry in an account of the unresolved questions from the Founding Era: 1) what would become of slavery? and 2) what was the nature of the Union and how was sovereignty divided between the states and federal government? Huebner reviews the competing theories and political events that repeatedly stoked debate and conflict over how slavery would be handled in a federated constitutional republic. Huebner makes original contributions to the debates about the Civil Wars origins and outcomes by integrating the political and military contributions of African Americans, especially norther free blacks of the antebellum period and blacks from North and South who sought freedom and fought in the war. Additionally, Huebner denotes how the conduct of the war revealed the political and constitutional views of military and civilian commanders on both sides. Huebner concludes that the Civil War and Reconstruction provided definitive answers to the questions of slavery and sovereignty: slavery was extinguished and the sovereignty of the people (rather than the states) had been vindicated. This is a work intended for general readers and professional historians. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. 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 remarkable story of Henry Ossian Flipper, a young man born into slavery on the eve of the Civil War, and his struggle for recognition left its mark on our nations history. Through extensive research of military documents, court records, appeals, and from Flippers personal journals and published papers, Henry Ossian Flipper: West Point’s First Black Graduate (Wild Horse Press, 2015) captures the sum and substance of a nation torn apart by political ambitions and extreme prejudices and reveals the uncertainty of acceptance and intolerance of blacks in America following Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. In 1878, Flipper seemed destined for a long military career. Four years later, he was on trial at Fort Davis, Texas, for embezzlement of government funds and conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman. But his journey through the West did not end in West Texas, it was only the beginning. Before Flipper’s life was over his adventures would take him through Mexico, South America, and Arizona. It was on that journey that he found fame and redemption. Historian and author Jane Eppinga is a legendary Arizona writer. Her writing credentials include more than 300 articles for both popular and professional publications covering a broad spectrum of subjects including children’s fiction, travel, personal profiles, biology, construction, food, and public relation pieces. A long-time resident of Arizona and a graduate of the University of Arizona, Eppinga is a member of Western Writers of America, Southern Arizona Authors, the National Federation of Press Women, and serves on the board of directors of Arizona Press Women. In addition to Henry Ossian Flipper: West Points’ First Black Graduate, Jane Eppinga has written on many diverse topics concerning the American West. Unsolved Arizona, La Malinche, Black Heroes: America’s Buffalo Soldiers, and They Made Their Mark: an Illustrated History of the Society of Woman Geographers are some of her more recent works. Her articles have also often appeared in Wild West Magazine and Persimmon Hill, the official publication of the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. 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 the War for American Independence really about American independence? It depends on who you ask. In his new book, Brothers at Arms: American Independence and the Men of France and Spain Who Saved It (Knopf, 2016), Larrie Ferreiro draws on decades of new research in archives and on battlefields across the US and Europe to detail the smuggling, espionage, gun running, and politicking that wrested the United States from British control. A revision of the national myth that the American colonies rose up and threw off imperial oversight solely by the unity found in the strength of their convictions, this globalist return to the 1760s and 70s weaves together military, economic, diplomatic, and social history with fascinating stories of the European soldiers, sailors, merchants, and ministers who conspired and collaborated to give the north American colonies a fighting chance. In Brothers at Arms, and in this interview, Dr. Ferreiro advances the argument that for the governments of France and Spain, defeating the British in the American colonies was as much about achieving their own interests in the sphere of European power as it was about heeding the call to advance the ideals of liberty and justice across the Atlantic, and that the relationships that developed between France, Spain, and the new United States did more to shape American institutions and ways of life that we often acknowledge. Carl Nellis is an academic editor and writing instructor working north of Boston, where he researches contemporary American community formation around appropriations of medieval European culture. You can learn more about Carls work at carlnellis.wordpress.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Our guest for this interview combines his academic expertise in American military history with his professional experience as an employee of the National Park Service. Marc Blackburn is the author of Interpreting American Military History at Museums and Historical Sites (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). An expert in the interpretation and presentation of historical narratives and themes through material artifacts, archives, and exhibit space, Marc offers both a fresh perspective blending public and academic history in his book. Offering a series of observations on the state of public history in the United States, he also provides a short yet comprehensive chronological narrative of the nation’s military past. Like myself, a former student of Russell F. Weigley, Marc provides a refreshing conversation about the current and future states of the craft. One disclaimer: the thoughts that Marc Blackburn expresses in this interview and in his book are his own, and in no way reflect the policies or opinions of the National Park Service. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Jelena Batinic’s Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance (Cambridge University Press, 2015) examines the role women played in the Communist-led Yugoslav Partisan resistance. By placing gender and gender relations at the forefront of her analysis, Batinic provides insightful history of a unique phenomenon—guerrilla warfare in which tens of thousands of women took direct military roles. Based on vast amount of archival sources, Batinic demonstrated how gender was the main organising force of the Partisan movement. In this interview, we have talked about the main arguments of the book, particularly focusing on gender relations within the movement. Additionally, the interview will also introduce our listeners to the Balkan conflict during the Second World War and explore how and why the remarkable story of the Partisan women fell into oblivion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Jimmy Stewart has a well-deserved reputation as one of the major stars of the classic film era. Yet his life was greatly affected by his experiences as a bomber pilot in World War II. Robert Matzen, author of the book, Mission: Jimmy Stewart and the Fight for Europe (GoodKnight Books, 2016), reviews Stewart’s life in a military family and his role in the allied victory in Europe. He also discusses how the war affected Stewarts immediate post-war film career. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Narratives of the Pacific War frequently examine the 1944 Battle of Leyte Gulf from the operational perspective, focusing on the desperate actions of the US Seventh Fleets escort carriers, Task Unit 77.4.3 (“Taffy 3”) against the much larger Japanese Center Force, commanded by Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita. The ensuing drama, including the famous call for help and rebuke of US Third Fleet commander, Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr., has become legend. In his latest book, Storm Over Leyte: The Philippine Invasion and the Destruction of the Japanese Navy (NAL, 2016), seasoned historian John Prados places Leyte Gulf as the denouement of a larger campaign for control of the Central Pacific Ocean, one which was the swan song of Japanese naval power. Incorporating the naval intelligence of both sides, he restores agency to the Imperial Japanese Navy as the unwitting architect of its own destruction. Drawing upon a wide range of sources, including many hitherto unseen Japanese primary documents, memoirs, and interviews, Prados unveils one of the most comprehensive comparative treatments of this controversial campaign. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Elizabeth Reich is an assistant professor of film studies at Connecticut College in New London. Militant Visions: Black Soldiers, Internationalism, and the Transformation of American Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2016) examines how, from the 1940s to the 1970s, the cinematic figure of the black soldier helped change the ways American moviegoers saw black men, for the first time presenting African Americans as vital and integrated members of the nation. In the process, Elizabeth Reich reveals how the image of the proud and powerful African American serviceman was crafted by an unexpected alliance of government propagandists, civil rights activists, and black filmmakers. Contextualizing the figure in a genealogy of black radicalism and internationalism, Reich shows the evolving images of black soldiers to be inherently transnational ones, shaped by the displacements of Diaspora, Third World revolutionary philosophy, and a legacy of black artistry and performance. Offering a nuanced reading of a figure that was simultaneously conservative and radical, Reich considers how the cinematic black soldier lent a human face to ongoing debates about racial integration, black internationalism, and American militarism. Militant Visions thus not only presents a new history of how American cinema represented race, but also demonstrates how film images helped to make history, shaping the progress of the civil rights movement itself. In addition to this work, previously in 2015 Reich co-edited a special issue of Film Criticism, titled “New Approaches to Cinematic Identification,” which brings together works on one of Reich’s other primary interests: identification and film spectatorship. Reich’s own articles appear in Screen, African American Review, Film Criticism and Women and Performance, and she has a chapter forthcoming in Black Cinema Aesthetics, edited by Michael Gillespi and Akil Huston. She also serves on the editorial boards of Criticism and Film Criticism. Reich is also currently at work on two new projects: co-editing a book collection on Afrofuturism, Justice In Time: Critical Afrofuturism and Black Freedom Struggles, and writing another monograph on global cinema, temporality and reparations, tentatively titled Reparative Time. In addition to her film studies scholarship, Reich is also a noted documentary director. Her feature-length documentaries include “Milton and Charlotte: A Baliwood Love Story” and “very Queer kids.” James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Best remembered as the nineteenth commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, Clifton B. Cates began his long and distinguished military career as a second lieutenant in World War I. In I Will Hold: The Story of USMC Legend Clifton B. Cates, From Belleau Wood to Victory in the Great War (NAL, 2016), journalist and author James Carl Nelson recounts Cates’ early life and service in the war. Cates was studying to take the Tennessee bar when the United States joined the war in April 1917, an event which led Cates to set aside his studies and answer the call to service. After training in the rapidly-expanding Marine Corps, Cates was sent to France in January 1918, and within a few short months he found himself at the heart of combat at the battle of Belleau Wood. Despite being in the thick fighting, Clifton escaped serious injury, and with his unit he participated in the Soissons offensive later that summer. Nelson’s book offers a look at the war Cates fought against the Germans, one in which he demonstrated his natural leadership skills and won some of the highest honors our nation could bestow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Akiko Takenaka’s new book looks carefully at Yasukuni Shrine as a war memorial, examining its role in waging war, honoring the dead, promoting peace, and building a modern national identity. Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar (University of Hawaii Press, 2015) pays special attention to the significance of memory and spatial practice in shaping Yasukuni as belief, site, and issue. The chapters guide readers from the pre-history of Yasukuni tracing the origin of an important myth that developed around Yasukuni Shrine during the Asia-Pacific War: the idea that dying for the emperor would result in enshrinement at Yasukuni as a god through the very different uses of the space as a venue for popular entertainments and celebrations, the popularization of beliefs associated with the shrine outside of Tokyo and the nationalization of the Yasukuni myth, the practices associated with Yasukuni during total war mobilization during the Asia-Pacific War, the politics and legalities of enshrinement at Yasukuni, and postmemory at Yasukuni today. Its a clear and compelling study of an important issue that will be of interest to many readers. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Ruling as he did during the Five Dynasties period of Chinese history, the emperor Mingzong (r. 926-933) has not received the same degree attention from historians as have many of his counterparts. In From Warhorses to Ploughshares: The Later Tang Reign of Emperor Mingzong (Hong Kong University Press, 2015), Richard L. Davis provides readers with the first modern biography of Mingzong. Born Miaojilie, Mingzong grew up among his fellow Shatuo Turks and rose to become a leading commander of the forces of the Tang dynasty. After taking the throne in the aftermath of a military rebellion, he managed relations with other states with success and instituted a series of economic reforms designed to encourage trade. Though the territories of the Tang prospered during this period, peace was cut short by Mingzong’s death, with his dynastic line coming to a violent end less than a decade later. Davis’ book offers a window into a dramatic era in China’s past, one in which Mingzong’s reign stood out for its stability amidst the tumult. 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 teach at a Catholic university and last semester co-taught (with a theologian) a class titled The Holocaust and its Legacies. Once my students became comfortable with me, they began to pepper me with questions about the role of the Catholic church during the Holocaust. Some of these questions–about the church and antisemitism, about the role of the Pope–I was able to answer effectively. But when they started asking me about the behaviors and beliefs of the bishops and priests-the people in the church who interacted with ordinary people on an everyday basis–I was at a loss. Thanks to Lauren Faulkner Rossi’s new book Wehrmacht Priests: Catholicism and the Nazi War of Annihilation (Harvard University Press, 2015), I can now give a much more informed and thoughtful answer to these questions. While Rossi spends some time looking at the macro level, she devotes most of her book to ‘ordinary’ priests who served in the German army. Some of these men were chaplains specifically entrusted with the pastoral care of the men in their units. Many others were priests who served in the army in other roles, who were specifically prohibited from offering such care to their fellow soldiers. Her book offers a nuanced, well-researched and convincing portrait of ordinary people trying to integrate their religious faith and their positions in the church with their service in a nazified army. It’s a compelling story, one that Rossi tells well. I will be recommending it to my students for a long time to come. 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 Crusades loom large in contemporary popular consciousness. However, our public understanding has largely been informed from a western perspective, despite the fact that there is a rich textual tradition recording its history in Muslim sources. Paul M. Cobb, Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, remedies this problem in The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades (Oxford University Press, 2014) by presenting the fullest and most readable account of the Crusades relying on Islamic sources. Cobb expands the geographical and chronological boundaries of the Crusades by placing traditional conflicts within Muslim accounts of Frankish aggression. In general, medieval Muslims were not overly concerned with Europe and ongoing relationships between Christians and Muslims only really existed in the Mediterranean context. European expansion into Muslim lands throughout the Middle Ages marked a different phase of encounter,but these incursions were not always clearly demarcated by religious boundaries. Cobb illustrates the often competing logic behind political alliances, military aggression and intervention, or discursive justification. The Race for Paradise does a wonderful job of presenting the narrative in a new light and dissolving many of the assumptions about pre-modern conflicts that have been produced by one-sided accounts of the Crusades. In our conversation we discussed the Frankish conquests, the significance of Jerusalem, Mediterranean Muslims communities, Arabic sources, notions of jihad, Frankish rule in the Levant, Saladin and his political heirs, thinking about the Crusades today, and making an audio book. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research and teaching interests include Theory and Methodology in the Study of Religion, Islamic Studies, Chinese Religions, Human Rights, and Media Studies. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at [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

In Forty-Seven Days: How Pershing’s Warriors Came of Age to Defeat the German Army in World War I (NAL Caliber, 2016), National Archives historian and forensic archivist Mitchell Yockelson reappraises the American Expeditionary Force’s performance under the command of General John J. Pershing. Accordingly, the American forces’ combat experience in the September to November 1918 Meuse-Argonne Campaign is shown to be far more pivotal to Allied victory than allowed for in the standard Anglo-centric literature of the conflict. Even as Pershing’s army acquired its craft in hard fighting against an increasingly implacable and desperate German opponent, the men of the A.E.F. proved to be relentless in their efforts to clear the densely wooded and fortified forest that had resisted French efforts for the previous four years. Yockelson’s account of the campaign is even-handed and well-written, providing the foundation for an interesting conversation about the book and his own approach to writing and interpreting history from a wide range of primary and secondary sources. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Marc Lynch is the author of The New Arab Wars: Uprisings and Anarchy in the Middle East (Public Affairs, 2016). Lynch is a professor of political science at George Washington University and blogs at the Monkey Cage. From Tunisia to Egypt to Syria, the Arab Spring saw protesters storm to the street demanding reform and revolution. Five years later, most of these countries remain forever changed yet far from reformed. Peace has not been lasting across the region, and Lynch’s book attempts to reconcile what explains the ongoing warfare. He argues that this upheaval may be at its start, rather than at its completion. Authoritarian regimes remain in place in many countries and the U.S. continues to struggle to find a sustainable role. 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 biographers writing about the life and achievements of Napoleon Bonaparte have focused on his dramatic personality or his military campaigns. In Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny (Pegasus, 2015) the inaugural volume of a projected three-volume biography of the French ruler Michael Broers’ takes a different approach. Drawing upon a new and vastly expanded collection of Napoleons letters to chronicle his subjects life from his early years in Corsica to the eve of his 1805 campaign, Broers focuses on his achievements in politics and state-building. He sees Napoleon’s time as conqueror and ruler of Italy as key both to his emergence as a prospective leader and to the development of his ideas of governance. Though applied bluntly in Egypt, their legacy in Napoleons development of the French state during his subsequent years as First Consul and as emperor are made clear by the author, who details how they created not just the structure of administration France uses to this day but more modern and uniform states throughout much of Europe as well. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

From the “Ballad of the Green Berets” to “Bad Moon Rising,” the music of the Vietnam War is woven through every vets memories. Vietnam vet Doug Bradley and his fellow University of Wisconsin professor Craig Werner first intended to whittle down a list of the top 20 songs of the war, and soon realized that was an impossible errand. No Vietnam veteran is alike, and hundreds of songs held meaning for those who fought there. It was a varied soundtrack of patriotism and protests, hard rock and soul music, love songs, Dear John songs and more. Bradley and Werner’s book We Gotta Get Out Of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War (University of Massachusetts Press, 2015) blends musical and personal histories, explaining the backgrounds of specific songs and artists as well as what they meant to the Vietnam soldiers. In a conversation with Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, they discuss everything from the generational differences between Vietnam soldiers and their World War II-veteran fathers to the importance of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,” written a full decade after the war ended. Hanoi Hannah, Good Morning Vietnam DJ Adrian Cronauer, Jimi Hendrix, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Nancy Sinatra, Country Joe McDonald and his famous F cheer all played a role in the wars musical history. Take a musical trip through this sometimes personal and often poetic book. Country Joe himself said of it, We all love popular music and we all love soldiers. All we have left is memories. Maybe there is something to learn from this book, from their experiences, from the music. God, I hope so. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Some books fly high above the field, making sweeping generalizations about big questions. Other books circle over a specific problem, analyzing it in great detail to say something important about a single subject. Joshua Zimmerman‘s The Polish Underground and the Jews, 1939-1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2015) shows how important and valuable books that adopt the latter approach can be. The book is an exceptionally rich account of the attitudes, politics, policies and actions of the Polish Underground regarding Polish Jews during the Second World War. Zimmerman, Associate Professor of History at Yeshiva University in New York, spent years exploring archives, memoirs and secondary sources in preparing the book. Nearly every page of the book displays this research, with extensive quotes from newspapers, internal communications and leaders within the army. Zimmerman is well-aware of the historical and political stakes involved in his question. His answers are careful, nuanced and balanced. I can imagine people disagreeing with his conclusions (although I personally am convinced), but it’s hard to imagine a more thorough attempt to approach the question. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in the interaction of Polish Jews and Polish institutions and individuals during the war. Kelly McFall is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University in Wichita, Kansas. His research and teaching concentrates on the history of violence and human rights, focusing especially on the history of genocide. His writing centers around a pedagogy titled Reacting to the Past. Here he has written, among others, The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994. He can be reached at [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

John Kinder brings to life the challenges and problems faced by the disabled veteran in American history from the Civil War to the current day in his evocative book, Paying with Their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Considered by many... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Long viewed conventionally through the lens of inter-European/colonist conflict, warfare in colonial era North America is currently experiencing a resurgence as a new generation of military historians employ a variety of tools and methods borrowed from other fields and disciplines. Our latest guest, Daniel Tortora, does so in his book Carolina in Crisis: Cherokees, Colonists, and Slaves in the American Southwest, 1756-1763. By focusing on the French and Indian War's Southern theater, particularly in the two Carolinas and Virginia, Tortora crafts a unique account of an area generally overlooked in the face of the larger body of scholarship focused on events in the Northern Colonies and Canada. Carolina in Crisis employs a conceptual narrative and analytical framework often associated with Borderlands theory to craft an intricate account of conflict and how it was viewed across three different cultural boundaries: white European, native American, and enslaved Africans. The end product is a rich and rewarding addition to the historiography of early American warfare. 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 Waste into Weapons: Recycling in Britain during the Second World War (Cambridge University Press 2015), Peter Thorsheim explores the role of waste and recycling in Britain under conditions of total war. Thorsheim argues wartime salvage efforts linked civilians socially as well as materially to the war. Salvage drives served to focus people’s efforts and helped them make sense of the events around them and their role in the conflict. The ebb and flow of resource scarcity served as a metric in which to measure changing military and strategic concerns against the Axis, but also complicated the wartime alliance between the British Empire and the United States. Although essential for national survival, Thorsheim shows how wartime salvage tended to alienate as much as unite the British public. Vigorous, but often ill-conceived, salvage efforts led to infringements of civil liberties, destroyed historical artifacts, and damaged private property. Some materials were never recycled and left to languish in enormous dumps long after the end of the war. The national salvage effort angered thousands and left many without compensation for their losses, souring a generation on recycling. Unlike the environmental movement of the 1970s, Waste into Weapons shows recycling was a means to further destruction rather than conservation. Thorsheim’s book sheds light on a little known episode in environmental history and provides alternative genealogy of recycling in the twentieth 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

Have you seen those Facebook memes floating around, arguing that we shouldn’t support a 15-dollar -per-hour minimum wage for service sector workers because the military doesn’t earn a living wage? Jennifer Mittelstadt tells us how these stark lines were drawn between the military and the civilian economy – and on how military welfare affects us all. Jennifer Mittelstadt is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. She is the author of The Rise of the Military Welfare State (Harvard University Press, 2015). You can read more about her research 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 all of the thousands upon thousands of books written about Nazi Germany, it’s easy to lose track of some basic questions. What did Germans think they were fighting for? Why did they support the war? How did they (whether the they were soldiers fighting in France or Russia, women working to support the war effort, or mothers or fathers worrying about their children) experience the war? Nicholas Stargardt‘s new book The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945 (Basic Books, 2015) sets out to answer these questions. The book is a delight. Stargardt approaches his subject with a depth of feeling and of insight that all historians aspire to. His analysis is careful, measured and nuanced, shedding new light on a variety of important questions. But the book’s strength lies in the way it immerses itself into the lives of ordinary Germans. Stargardt’s retelling of their stories is compassionate and empathetic. It is the nature of the lives of his subjects that many of his stories end suddenly rather than happily. Wisely, he allows us to mourn with his subjects, yet reminds us to remember the crimes many committed. It’s a terribly difficult balance to strike, and it’s to his credit that he does so consistently. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history