New Books in Military History

In How ISIS Fights: Military Tactics in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Egypt (Edinburgh UP, 2021), Omar Ashour has written a detailed and data-rich analysis of ISIS's way of war. He analyzes the tactical and operational levels of war to depict what makes ISIS successful and unique. He reveals that ISIS was tactically and organizationally innovative, redefining not just what a terrorist organization is, bu...

When the Choctaw Nation was forcibly resettled in Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma in the 1830s, it was joined by enslaved Black people—the tribe had owned enslaved Blacks since the 1720s. By the eve of the Civil War, 14 percent of the Choctaw Nation consisted of enslaved Blacks. Avid supporters of the Confederate States of America, the Nation passed a measure requiring all whites living i...

Before 1871, Germany was not yet nation but simply an idea. Its founder, Otto von Bismarck, had a formidable task at hand. How would he bring thirty-nine individual states under the yoke of a single Kaiser? How would he convince proud Prussians, Bavarians, and Rhinelanders to become Germans? Once united, could the young European nation wield enough power to rival the empires of Britain and France-...

Throughout history, warfare has transformed social, political, cultural, and religious aspects of our lives. We tell tales of wars--past, present, and future--to create and reinforce a common purpose. In A Short History of War (Yale UP, 2021), Jeremy Black examines war as a global phenomenon, looking at the First and Second World Wars as well as those ranging from Han China and Assyria, Imperial R...

In Quagmire in Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2020) Dr. Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl provides the first treatment of quagmire in civil war, moving beyond the notion that quagmire is intrinsic to certain countries or wars. In a rigorous but accessible analysis, he explains how quagmire can emerge from domestic-international interactions and strategic choices. To support the argument, Dr. Schulhofe...

“Kashmir” carries the burden of being known as one of the world’s biggest flashpoints. If a novel, TV show, or video game wants an easy international crisis, there’s a good chance Kashmir will be the crisis of choice. But while Kashmir is globally known, few understand the roots of the conflict—or what the people that live in Kashmir actually think. For those that do, Professor Sumantra Bose’s Kas...

During World War I, the British Empire enlisted half a million young men, predominantly from the countryside of Egypt, in the Egyptian Labor Corps (ELC) and put them to work handling military logistics in Europe and the Middle East. British authorities reneged on their promise not to draw Egyptians into the war, and, as Kyle Anderson shows, the ELC was seen by many in Egypt as a form of slavery. T...

From the 1960s through 1970s there were a series of conflicts in Africa involving Rhodesia, South Africa, and Portugal in conflict with the so-called Frontline States. There was an international element with the Cold War and saw American interest at the diplomatic, economic, and social level. In the post-Vietnam period there was participation by individual American soldiers and politicians. Most o...

Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era (UNC Press, 2022) examines how the public funerals of major figures from the Civil War era shaped public memories of the war and allowed a diverse set of people to contribute to changing American national identities. These funerals featured lengthy processions that sometimes crossed multiple state lines, burial ceremonies open to...

Holocaust movies have become an important segment of world cinema and the de-facto Holocaust education for many. One quarter of all American-produced Holocaust-related feature films have won or been nominated for at least one Oscar. Yet most Holocaust movies have fallen through the cracks and few have been commercially successful. In Holocaust Cinema Complete: A History and Analysis of 400 Films,...

In one of the most “exciting and engaging” (Gordon S. Wood) histories of the American founding in decades, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Joseph J. Ellis offers an epic account of the origins and clashing ideologies of America’s revolutionary era, recovering a war more brutal, and more disorienting, than any in our history, save perhaps the Civil War. For more than two centuries, historians have...

On July 17, 2018, starting an unjust war became a prosecutable international crime alongside genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Instead of collective state responsibility, our leaders are now personally subject to indictment for crimes of aggression, from invasions and preemptions to drone strikes and cyberattacks. Noah Weisbord, The Crime of Aggression: The Quest for Justice in an...

In Governing for Revolution: Social Transformation in Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2021) Dr. Megan Stewart argues that despite significant risks, some rebels undertake costly governance projects during wartime, to achieve transformational goals. Dr. Stewart explores the development of this model by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and how its become a prototype ever since. Dr. Stewart u...

Here is the many-faceted, world-historically significant story of Britain at war. In looking closely at the military and political dimensions of the conflict's first crucial years, Alan Allport tackles questions such as: Could the war have been avoided? Could it have been lost? Were the strategic decisions the rights ones? How well did the British organize and fight? How well did the British live...

New oral histories from Black Namibian and Angolan troops who fought in apartheid South Africa’s security forces reveal their involvement, and its impact on their lives, to be far more complicated than most historical scholarship has acknowledged. In anticolonial struggles across the African continent, tens of thousands of African soldiers served in the militaries of colonial and settler states. I...

Instruments of Empire: Filipino Musicians, Black Soldiers, and Military Band Music during US Colonization of the Philippines published in 2021 by the University Press of Mississippi by Mary Talusan focuses on the Philippine Constabulary band, a military band organized in 1902 that served the colonial government in the Philippines until World War II. Founded and led for most of its history by Walte...

Eighteen months after Iran’s Revolution in 1979, hundreds of thousands of the country’s women participated in the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) in a variety of capacities. Iran was divided into women of conservative religious backgrounds who supported the revolution and accepted some of the theocratic regime’s depictions of gender roles, and liberal women more active in civil society before the revoluti...

NB: This interview contains material about wartime experiences that may be upsetting to some listeners.  When Alex Panasenko was born in 1933, his native Ukraine was devastated by Stalin’s program of mass starvation; millions were murdered and, soon after, millions more removed in Stalin’s Great Purge. In 1941, when Panasenko was eight years old, Hitler’s Wehrmacht invaded and he was deported with...

December 2021 marks the 80th anniversary of Pearl Harbor and the American entry into the Second World War. In fact, this interview was recorded on December 12th: the 80th anniversary of Japanese troops landing on the Philippine island of Luzon. That invasion marked the four-year war over the Philippines: the surrender of American forces on May 8th, 1942; the invasion of Leyte by MacArthur on Octob...

Why do some armies fare better than others on the battlefield? In Divided Armies: Inequality and Battlefield Performance in Modern War (Princeton UP, 2020), Jason Lyall argues that a state's prewar treatment of ethnic groups within its population determine subsequent battlefield performance. Treating certain ethnic groups as second-class citizens, either by subjecting them to state-sanctioned disc...

Over the last 20 years the world's most advanced militaries have invited a small number of military legal professionals into the heart of their targeting operations, spaces which had previously been exclusively for generals and commanders. These professionals, trained and hired to give legal advice on an array of military operations, have become known as war lawyers. In The War Lawyers: The United...

Three Cities After Hitler: Redemptive Reconstruction Across Cold War Borders (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021) compares how three prewar German cities shared decades of postwar development under three competing post-Nazi regimes: Frankfurt in capitalist West Germany, Leipzig in communist East Germany, and Wrocław (formerly Breslau) in communist Poland. Each city was rebuilt according to two intertwined m...

Today's guest is former US Army general, Stanley McChrystal. A retired four-star general with 34 years of service, Stanley was the commander of all US and coalition forces in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010. Previously, he served as commander of JSOC or the Joint Special Operations Command, overseeing the US military’s most elite units including Delta Force and SEAL Team 6. According to journalist S...

Is it possible that efforts to make war more humane can actually make it more common and thus more destructive?   This tension at the heart of this query lies at the heart of Samuel Moyn's new book Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2021). He draws fascinating connections between literary figures such as Tolstoy and Bertha von Suttner, civ...

According to US Secretary of War Henry Stimson, the "most shocking single event" of World War II was not the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but rather the fall of France in spring 1940. Michael Neiberg offers a dramatic history of the American response--a policy marked by panic and moral ineptitude, which placed the United States in league with fascism and nearly ruined the alliance with Britain...