New Books in Military History

Niall Whelehan is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Strathclyde, where he focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and themes of migration, political violence, nationalism and radicalism, mainly relating to Ireland and the Irish diapsora. In this interview he discusses his new book Changing Land: Diaspora Activism and the Irish Land War (NYU Press, 2021), which examines ra...

The year is 1680, in the heart of the Golden Age of Piracy, and more than three hundred daring, hardened pirates—a potent mix of low-life scallywags and a rare breed of gentlemen buccaneers—gather on a remote Caribbean island. The plan: to wreak havoc on the Pacific coastline, raiding cities, mines, and merchant ships. The booty: the bright gleam of Spanish gold and the chance to become legends. S...

The United States is now nearly 250 years old. It arose from humble beginnings, as a strip of mostly agrarian and sparsely populated English colonies on the northeastern edge of the New World, far removed from the centers of power in Europe. Today, it is the world's most powerful country, with its largest economy and most powerful military. How did America achieve this status? In The Four Ages of...

In the spring of 1954, after eight years of bitter fighting, the war in Vietnam between the French and the communist-led Vietminh came to a head. With French forces reeling, the United States planned to intervene militarily to shore-up the anti-communist position. Turning to its allies for support, first and foremost Great Britain, the US administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower sought to create wha...

Ploughshares and Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022) by Jayita Sarkar challenges this received wisdom by narrating a global story of India's nuclear program during its first forty years. The book foregrounds the program's civilian and military features by probing its close relationship with the space program. Through nuclear and space technologie...

Released in 1946, The Best Years of Our Lives became an immediate success. Life magazine called it “the first big, good movie of the post-war era” to tackle the “veterans problem.” Today we call that problem PTSD, but in the initial aftermath of World War II, the modern language of war trauma did not exist. The film earned the producer Samuel Goldwyn his only Best Picture Academy Award. It offered...

Today I talked to Sheila A. Smith about her book Japan Rearmed: The Politics of Military Power (Harvard UP, 2019). Modern Japan is not only responding to threats from North Korea and China but is also reevaluating its dependence on the United States, Sheila Smith shows. No longer convinced they can rely on Americans to defend their country, Tokyo's political leaders are now confronting the possibi...

In Feeding Washington's Army: Surviving the Valley Forge Winter of 1778 (University of North Carolina Press, 2022), Dr. Ricardo Herrera presents a major new history of the Continental Army’s Grand Forage of 1778. Dr. Herrera uncovers what daily life was like for soldiers during the darkest and coldest days of the American Revolution: the Valley Forge winter. Here, the army launched its largest and...

Based on five years of archival research, Britain's Informal Empire in Spain, 1830-1950: Free Trade, Protectionism and Military Power offers a radical reinterpretation of Britain and Spain’s relationship during the growth, apogee and decline of the British Empire. It shows that from the early nineteenth century Britain turned Spain into an ‘informal’ colony, using its economic and military dominan...

What is the relationship between the military and the monarchy in Thailand? How has that relationship changed since King Vajiralongkorn (Rama X) assumed the throne in 2016? Why have recent military coups in Thailand been staged partly in order to defend the throne? And how far can earlier interpretations of Thai politics be adapted to explain the growing influence of the monarchy in recent years?...

A critical look at how the US military is weaponizing technology and data for new kinds of warfare—and why we must resist. War Virtually: The Quest to Automate Conflict, Militarize Data, and Predict the Future (University of California Press, 2022) is the story of how scientists, programmers, and engineers are racing to develop data-driven technologies for fighting virtual wars, both at home and a...

The Unfinished History of the Iran-Iraq War: Faith, Firepower, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (Cambridge UP, 2021) represents a fascinating and carefully documented intellectual history of how Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps document, remember, and contest the Iran-Iraq War and of its ramifications for the religious, cultural, and political history of the country. Utilizing a large corp...

The civil war in Yemen has going on since 2014. Noria al-Hossini, Communications Director of Mwatana for Human Rights, discusses the war and the numerous human right violations that have occurred and are occurring in 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

Half a century after the Holocaust, on European soil, Bosnian Serbs orchestrated a system of concentration camps where they subjected their Bosniak Muslim and Bosnian Croat neighbors to torture, abuse, and killing. Foreign journalists exposed the horrors of the camps in the summer of 1992, sparking worldwide outrage. This exposure, however, did not stop the mass atrocities. Hikmet Karčić shows tha...

The Families' Civil War: Black Soldiers and the Fight for Racial Justice (U Georgia Press, 2022) tells the stories of freeborn northern African Americans in Philadelphia struggling to maintain families while fighting against racial discrimination. Taking a long view, from 1850 to the 1920s, Holly A. Pinheiro Jr. shows how Civil War military service worsened already difficult circumstances due to i...

Today I talked to Claire Bellerjeau about her book (co-authored with Tiffany Yecke Brooks) Espionage and Enslavement in the Revolution: The True Story of Robert Townsend and Elizabeth (Lyons Press, 2021). In January 1785, a young African American woman named Elizabeth was put on board the Lucretia in New York Harbor, bound for Charleston, where she would be sold to her fifth master in just twenty-...

In Proscribing Peace: How Listing Armed Groups as Terrorists Hurts Negotiations (Manchester UP, 2021), Dr. Sophie Haspeslagh offers a systematic examination of the impact of proscription on peace negotiations. With rare access to actors during the Colombian negotiations with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia People's Army (FARC), Dr. Haspeslagh shows how proscription makes negotiations ha...

Cannae and Agincourt, Waterloo and Gettysburg, Stalingrad and Midway, this compact volume, edited by master historian, Professor Jeremy Black, collects the most influential battles and conflicts in history. Covering the past twenty-five centuries, editor Jeremy Black analyzes the effects these events have had on the development of states and civilizations. Organized chronologically in seven parts,...

In the midst of the ongoing war between the Russian Federation and Ukraine, it is vital that the lay-educated public understand the historical origins of the conflict. It is with this in mind, that this episode of ‘Arguing History’, takes a look at the subject of ‘Ukrainian Nationalism and the Russian / Soviet state’. To guide us in this intricate and not well know matter, are three superb histori...

During the Second World War, locals in Australia and Britain described American GIs as “overpaid, oversexed, and over here.” But this conflict between civilians and the military didn’t only take place abroad. Civil-military tensions could be seen at ‘home’ too. Nearly three-quarters of servicemen in the months leading up to D-Day were stationed domestically, while one in four never went abroad at...

The story of India and Indians in World War II has been overshadowed by other historical events of the 1940s, a busy decade that included such historical watersheds as Indian independence (and the anti-colonial nationalist movement that led to it), as well as the partition of the Indian subcontinent. Indeed, many in Europe and North America, and even many in India, probably know very little about...

On October 27, 1930, members of six Taiwanese indigenous groups ambushed the Japanese attendees of an athletic competition at the Musha Elementary School, killing 134. The uprising came as a shock to Japanese colonial authorities, whose response was swift and brutal. Heavy artillery and battalions of troops assaulted the region, spraying a wide area with banned poison gas. The Seediq from Mhebu, w...

In Claiming Union Widowhood: Race, Respectability, and Poverty in the Post-Emancipation South (Duke UP, 2020), Brandi Clay Brimmer analyzes the US pension system from the perspective of poor black women during and after the Civil War. Reconstructing the grassroots pension network in New Bern, North Carolina, through a broad range of historical sources, she outlines how the mothers, wives, and wido...

In the late eighties and early nineties, driven by the post–Cold War environment and lessons learned during military operations, United States policy makers made intelligence support to the military the Intelligence Community's top priority. In response to this demand, the CIA and DoD instituted policy and organizational changes that altered their relationship with one another. While debates over...

The history of India and Pakistan since Partition has been marked by countless skirmishes–and four major wars. The second conflict–the 1965 war between India and Pakistan along the long land border–featured some of the largest tank battles since the Second World War and some of the first skirmishes between the Indian and Pakistani air forces. It reshaped regional and global geopolitics, pushing In...