New Books in Military History

“Irrationality rules” in war, Michael Mann writes in his magisterial 2023 book, On Wars (Yale UP, 2023), a history that begins with the Roman Republic and ancient China and works its way through the world wars of the 20th century and up to present times. Mann is a Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. His irrationality thesis, which posits that many wars are...

The inside story of the most expensive and controversial military program in history, as told by those who lived it.  The F-35 has changed allied combat warfare. But by the time it’s completed, it will cost more than the Manhattan Project and the B-2 Stealth Bomber. It has been subject to the most aggressive cyberattacks in history from China, Russia, North Korea, and others. Its stealth technolog...

More than twenty years ago, 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan set into motion a hugely consequential shift in America’s foreign policy: a perpetual state of war that is almost entirely invisible to the American public. War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine (New Press, 2023), by the journalist and political analyst Norman Solomon, exposes how this happened, and...

For thousands of years, reparations have been used to secure the end of war and to alleviate its deleterious consequences. While human rights law establishes that victims have a right to reparations, reparations are not always feasible and are often difficult to deliver.  In Reparations and War: Finding Balance in Repairing the Past (Oxford UP, 2023), Professor Luke Moffett used interviews with hu...

In 1965, five years after the capture of Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires, one of his Mossad abductors was sent back to South America to kill another fugitive Nazi, the so-called “butcher of Riga,” Latvian Herberts Cukurs. Cukurs was shot. On his corpse, the assassins left pages from the closing speech of the chief British prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg: “After this o...

An astonishing deep dive into the war in Ukraine - from the corridors of the Kremlin to the trenches of Mariupol. The Russo-Ukrainian War is the most serious geopolitical crisis since the Second World War - and yet at the heart of the conflict is a mystery. Vladimir Putin lurched from a calculating, subtle master of opportunity to a reckless gambler, putting his regime - and Russia itself - at ris...

In the past week, the entire world has been focusing on the murderous attack by the Hamas organization against the State of Israel and Israel's response to these actions. Hamas has killed 1,300 civilians and soldiers, including children, the elderly, and women. Furthermore, the methods used by Hamas in their killings have displayed an unprecedented level of cruelty, including acts of desecration o...

When the Nazis came to power, they used various strategies to expel German Jews from social, cultural, and economic life. Fighter, Worker, and Family Man: German-Jewish Men and Their Gendered Experiences in Nazi Germany, 1933–1941 (U Toronto Press, 2022) focuses on the gendered experiences and discrimination that German-Jewish men faced between 1933 and 1941. Sebastian Huebel argues that Jewish me...

Proxy wars like those in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and now Ukraine have played major roles in military history. Historian Paul Rahe takes us back to one of the earliest yet most influential proxy wars in the West: Athens' invasions of Spartan-backed Sicily. Here, he discusses his most recent book, Sparta's Sicilian Proxy War (Encounter Books, 2023), the fifth in his series "The Grand Strategy of Class...

The inspiration for Christopher Nolan’s major motion picture, Oppenheimer, this Pulitzer Prize-winning biography explores the life and times of J. Robert Oppenheimer – the “Father of the Atomic Bomb” – who, like the mythological Prometheus, brought atomic fire to mankind. In deep detail, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Vintage...

As increasingly contentious politics in the United States raise concerns over the "politicization" of traditionally non-partisan institutions, many have turned their attention to how the American military has been--and will be--affected by this trend. Since a low point following the end of the Vietnam War, the U.S. military has experienced a dramatic reversal of public opinion, becoming one of the...

World War I was the first great general conflict to be fought between highly industrial societies able to manufacture and transport immense quantities of goods over land and sea. Yet the armies of the war were too vast in scale, their movements too complex, and the infrastructure upon which they depended too specialized to be operated by professional soldiers alone. In Civilian Specialists at War:...

In this interview military historian Jeremy Black examines ongoing Israeli-Hamas conflict in Israel and the Gaza Strip in historical perspective. Black is the author of Insurgency Warfare: A Global History to the Present (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023).  Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of speciali...

The conquest of Indigenous land in the eastern United States through corrupt treaties and genocidal violence laid the groundwork for the conquest of the American West. In Gallop Toward the Sun: Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison's Struggle for the Destiny of a Nation (Random House, 2023), acclaimed author Peter Stark exposes the fundamental conflicts at play through the little-known but consequen...

Parks M. Coble's book The Collapse of Nationalist China: How Chiang Kai-shek Lost China's Civil War (Cambridge UP, 2023) revisits one of the most stunning political collapses of the twentieth century. When Japan surrendered in September 1945, Chiang Kai-shek seemed triumphant—one of the Big Four Allied leaders of the war and head of a government firmly allied with the United States. Yet less than...

In 1812 the French emperor Napoleon decided to invade Russia. For this purpose, he gathered an army of half a million men and women, consisting of soldiers from all nationalities, including French, German and Italian. Serving in this army was Carel Johannes Wagevier, an officer in the 125th Regiment of the Line, which was staffed by mostly Dutch soldiers. Full of confidence, they went to war and b...

Blood of Others: Stalin's Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity (U Toronto Press, 2022) offers a cultural history of Crimea and the Black Sea region, one of Europe’s most volatile flashpoints, by chronicling the aftermath of Stalin’s 1944 deportation of the Crimean Tatars in four different literary traditions. In the spring of 1944, Stalin deported the Crimean Tatars, a small Sunni Muslim...

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, three violent national conflicts rocked the Americas: the Wars of Unification in Argentina, the War of the Reform and French Intervention in Mexico, and the Civil War in the United States. The recovery efforts that followed reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In Civil Wars and Reconstructions in the Americas, Evan C. Rothera uses both transnational and co...

The Republic Will Be Kept Clean: How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Antileft Repression (University of Illinois Press, 2023) by Dr. Tariq D. Khan examines the long relationship between America’s colonising wars and virulent anticommunism. The colonising wars against Native Americans created the template for anticommunist repression in the United States. Dr. Khan’s analysis reveals bloodshed and...

Conflict and trauma remain among the most prevalent themes in film and literature. Comics has never avoided such narratives, and comics artists are writing them in ways that are both different from and complementary to literature and film. Harriet E. H. Earle brings together two distinct areas of research—trauma studies and comics studies—to provide a new interpretation of a long-standing theme. F...

Harriet Murav and Gennady Estraikh's book Soviet Jews in World War II: Fighting, Witnessing, Remembering (Academic Studies Press, 2018) discusses the participation of Jews as soldiers, journalists, and propagandists in combating the Nazis during the Great Patriotic War, as the period between June 22, 1941, and May 9, 1945 was known in the Soviet Union. The essays included here examine both newly-d...

Clothing Goes to War: Creativity Inspired by Scarcity in World War II (Intellect, 2022) by Nan Turner is the story of clothing use when manufacturing for civilians nearly stopped and raw materials and workers across the globe were shifted to war work. Governments mandated rationing programmes in many countries to regulate the limited supply, in hopes that the burden of austerity would be equally s...

Perhaps no other single day in US history was as threatening to the survival of the nation as August 24, 1814, when British forces captured Washington, DC. This unique moment might have significantly altered the nation’s path forward, but the event and the reasons why it happened are little remembered by most Americans.  Robert P. Watson's book When Washington Burned: The British Invasion of the C...

Covering political, military, economic and social history, Norway in the Second World War: Politics, Society and Conflict (Bloombury, 2020) is the most authoritative book on the subject in the English language. This innovative study describes how the Germans conquered Norway in 1940 and the type of government that was then imposed. German organisations such as the Wehrmacht, the SS and the civilia...

Under the Swastika in Nazi Germany (Bloomsbury, 2023) begins in flames in 1933 with Adolf Hitler taking power and ends in the ashes of total defeat in 1945. Kristin Semmens tells that story from five different perspectives over five chronologically distinct phases in the Third Reich's lifespan. The book offers a much-needed integrated history of insiders and outsiders - Nazis, accomplices, support...