New Books in Diplomatic History

There are three Americans in the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame. One is Horace Wilson, the professor of English who brought his students outside for a game in 1872, thus introducing baseball to Japan. Another is Wally Yonamine, the Hawaii-born Nisei who played professional baseball in Japan in the 1950s... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a young, patriotic American, I was torn by the boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. On the one hand, I knew already as an eleven-year-old, long before Ronald Reagan had uttered the phrase, that the Soviet Union was the Evil Empire. Their invasion of Afghanistan in December... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, I spoke with Jeffrey Mankoff, an adjunct fellow with the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, and a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York. Mankoff recently released a second edition of his book Russian Foreign Policy:... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

People who care about other places (and that’s not everyone) have always thought of Russia as a strange place. It doesn’t seem to “fit.” A good part of Russia is in Europe, but it’s not exactly “European.” Russia has natural resources galore, but it’s surprisingly poor. Russians have written a lot of great literature, but for most of Russian history most Russians have been illiterate. Russia has p...

It’s been twenty years since the Soviet Union collapsed, and scholars still joust over its long- and short-term causes. Amid the myriad factors–stagnating economy, reform spun out of control, globalization, nationalism–the Soviet war in Afghanistan figures in many narratives. Indeed, the ten-year intervention was the one of hottest and bloodiest... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone...

It's safe to say that nobody but genocidaires likes genocide. It's also safe to say that everyone but genocidaires wants to halt on-going campaigns of mass murder and prevent future ones. The question, of course, is how to do this in practice. Keith Pomakoy's significant new book Helping Humanity: American Policy and Genocide Rescue (Lexington Books, 2011) explores exactly this question by analyzi...

In his new book, A Vulcan's Tale: How the Bush Administration Mismanaged the Reconstruction of Afghanistan (Brookings Institution Press, 2011) Dov Zakheim, former chief financial officer for the U.S. Department of Defense, describes his time as a Vulcan, one of the elite group of eight foreign policy experts who advised President Bush's presidential campaign, most of whom later served in the Bush...

How have the United States and Japan managed to remain such strong allies, despite having fought one another in a savage war less than 70 years ago? In Michael Auslin's Pacific Cosmopolitans: A Cultural History of U.S.-Japan Relations (Harvard University Press, 2011), the author, an Asia expert at the American Enterprise Institute, explores the history of cultural exchange between the United State...

The Spanish-American War was not only the beginning of a new imperial period for the United States, David Silbey observes in his book A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902 (Hill and Wang, 2008), it was also the point at which the Filipino people first began to conceive of themselves as a nation. Where Americans sought to conquer, control, and pacify their newly-purch...

What to think about the Vietnam War? A righteous struggle against global Communist tyranny? An episode in American imperialism? A civil war into which the United States blindly stumbled? And what of the Vietnamese perspective? How did they–both North and South–understand the war? Mark Bradley and Marilyn Young have assembled a crack team of historians to consider (or rather reconsider) these quest...

I have a (much beloved) colleague who calls all history about things before AD 1900 “that old stuff.” Of course she means it as a gentle jab at those of us who study said “old stuff.” Gentle, but in some ways telling. Many historians and history readers genuinely have a bias against the older periods, and particularly against the history of the pre-Hellenic Ancient World (roughly 10,000 BCE to 500...

Historians are by their nature public intellectuals because they are intellectuals who write about, well, the public. Alas, many historians seem to forget the “public” part and concentrate on the “intellectual” part. Our guest today–sponsored by the National History Center–is not among them. Julian Zelizer has used his historical research and writing to inform the public and public debate in a gre...

To Americans, Hitler et al. were a confusing bunch. The National Socialists were Germans, and Germans had a reputation for refinement, industry, and order. After all, many Americans were of German descent, and they surely thought of themselves as refined, industrious, and orderly. The Nazis, however, seemed un-German in important ways: they were, apparently, racist thugs bent on destroying democra...

Ronald Reagan was a odd fellow. Nobody seems to know what to make of him. He started as a Democrat and then became a Republican. Then he broke ranks with his party by running for president against a sitting Republican. As a leader, he appeared to be affably naive; yet he also seemed to be capable of formulating “three-steps-ahead” strategies. Once in office, he came to be known as the “great commu...

Gordon Brown, the British PM, came calling to Washington recently. He jumped the pond, of course, to have a chat with his new counterpart, President Barack Obama. They had a lot to talk about, what with the world economy melting down, the Afghan War heating up, and Iraq coming apart. But he had another purpose as well. In his speech before Congress Mr. Brown intoned: “Madam Speaker, Mr Vice-Presid...

There is just something about Fidel Castro that American presidents don’t like very much. Maybe it’s the long-winded anti-American diatribes. Maybe it’s the strident communism (to which he came rather late, truth be told ). Maybe it’s the beard. In any event, it’s clear that Eisenhower, JFK, and Johnson held personal grudges against the Cuban generalissimo. In fact, they all tried to kill him, as...