New Books in Military History

We are surrounded by more readily available information than ever before. And a huge percentage of it is inaccurate. Some of the bad info is well-meaning but ignorant. Some of it is deliberately deceptive. All of it is pernicious. With the internet always at our fingertips, what’s a teacher of history to do? In Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone) (U Chicago Press, 2018), Sam Winebu...

Dr. Leonidas Mylonakis (PhD in History from the University of California, San Diego) is the author of Piracy in the Eastern Mediterranean: Maritime Marauders in the Greek and Ottoman Aegean (Bloomsbury, 2021). This captivating book is based on rich sets of Ottoman, Greek, and other archival sources. Dr. Mylonakis shows that far from ending with the introduction of European powers to the region aro...

Perhaps no prediction has been as consistently made—and as consistently wrong—as the imminent death of amphibious operations. Whatever the changes in warfare and technology, the necessity of amphibious force projection endures, long outliving those who claim its time has passed. Changes in how amphibious operations are conducted, however, are just as consistent. This essential contributed volume a...

Katherine Chandler's Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare (Rutgers UP, 2020) studies the conditions that create unmanned platforms in the United States through a genealogy of experimental, pilotless planes flown between 1936 and 1992. Characteristics often attributed to the drone--including machine-like control, enmity and remoteness--are achieved by displacements betwee...

For more than half of its existence, members of the Marine Corps largely self-identified as soldiers. It did not yet mean something distinct to be a Marine, either to themselves or to the public at large. As neither a land-based organization like the Army nor an entirely sea-based one like the Navy, the Corps' missions overlapped with both institutions. Heather P. Venable, How the Few Became the P...

In his new book International Courts and Mass atrocity: Narratives of War and Justice in Croatia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) Ivor Sokolić explores the effects of international and national transitional justice in Croatia, and in particular the consequences of the work of the United Nations’ International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the ICTY. Sokolić casts a critical analytical gaze...

The image of the Ottoman Turks and their interaction with the Christian West, has undergone many changes in the past: from William Gladstone's famous comment that: “[The Turks] one and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the province they have desolated and profaned.” To the more recent revisionist views of the 'cultural exchange' school, who de-emphasize the military conquest, end...

From Napoleon Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt in 1798 to the foreign interventions in the ongoing civil wars in Syria, Yemen, and Libya today, global empires or the so-called Great Powers have long assumed the responsibility to bring security in the Middle East.  The past two centuries have witnessed their numerous military occupations to 'liberate', 'secure' and 'educate' local populations. They st...

With an estimated 250,000 people killed in 15 years, the Mexican drug war is the most violent conflict in the Western world. It shows no sign of abating. In Mexican Drug Violence: Hybrid Warfare, Predatory Capitalism and the Logic of Cruelty (2020), Dr Teun A. Voeten analyzes the dynamics of the violence. He argues it is a new type of war called hybrid warfare: multidimensional, elusive and unpred...

Histories of the Vietnam War are not in short supply. In U.S. history, it ranks alongside the Civil War and World War Two in terms of author coverage. The aftermath of the war has received a similar amount of attention, with historians noting the effect that the end of the war had on domestic politics and U.S. foreign policy. But what about shifts during the war itself? While the war dominated thi...

This book is the story of one death among many in the war in eastern Ukraine. Its author is a historian of war whose brother was killed at the frontline in 2017 while serving in the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Olesya Khromeychuk takes the point of view of a civilian and a woman, perspectives that tend to be neglected in war narratives, and focuses on the stories that play out far away from the warzone...

How can we best understand ethnic armed organizations on the borderlands of Myanmar? Why did the Karen embrace the military-initiated peace process in 2012, shortly after the Kachin had rejected ceasefire proposals? How can ethnographic fieldwork inform studies of insurgent movements? And what does the February 2021 military coup mean for the future of ethnic conflicts in Myanmar In this wide-rang...

In Recharging China in War and Revolution, 1882–1955 (Cornell University Press, 2021), Ying Jia Tan explores the fascinating politics of Chinese power consumption as electrical industries developed during seven decades of revolution and warfare. Tan traces this history from the textile-factory power shortages of the late Qing, through the struggle over China's electrical industries during its civi...

With its ultimate debacle in August 2021, a discussion of the twenty-year military involvement of America and the West in Afghanistan is most timely. Accordingly, there is no one more pertinent to speak to about this history than premier British historian Jeremy Black. In a dialogue with Dr. Charles Coutinho of the Royal Historical Society, Professor Black expertly delineates why the once promisin...

With Britain by late 1916 facing the prospect of an economic crisis and increasingly dependent on the US, rival factions in Asquith's government battled over whether or not to seek a negotiated end to the First World War. In this riveting new account, Plotting for Peace: American Peacemakers, British Codebreakers, and Britain at War, 1914–1917 (Cambridge UP, 2021) by Daniel Larsen tells the full s...

In 1948, a war broke out that would result in Israeli independence and the erasure of Arab Palestine. Over twenty months, thousands of Jews and Arabs came from all over the world to join those already on the ground to fight in the ranks of the Israel Defense Forces and the Arab Liberation Army. With this book, the young men and women who made up these armies come to life through their letters home...

What claims could Jewish veterans make on the Nazi state by virtue of their having fought for Germany? How often did Germans treat Jewish veterans differently from Jewish men without military experience during the Weimar and Nazi periods? How did perceptions of masculinity and of Germanness intersect to shape attitudes and behaviors of Jewish veterans?   Michael Geheran's wonderful new book Comrad...

What is grand strategy? What does it aim to achieve? And what differentiates it from normal strategic thought--what, in other words, makes it "grand"? In answering these questions, most scholars have focused on diplomacy and warfare, so much so that "grand strategy" has become almost an equivalent of "military history." The traditional attention paid to military affairs is understandable, but in t...

When civil war broke out in Spain in 1936, tens of thousands of young men and women from across the world flocked there to fight against the Nationalist uprising. Though their history has been told before, Giles Tremlett’s The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War (Bloomsbury, 2021) draws upon previously unavailable materials to tell the stories of the war they fought....

Nicholas, today's guest, explains Australia has no war hero more impressive than Tongerlongeter. Leader of the Oyster Bay nation of south-east Tasmania in the 1820s and ’30s, he and his allies led the most effective frontier resistance ever mounted on Australian soil. They killed or wounded some 354 – or 4 per cent – of the invaders of their country. Tongerlongeter’s brilliant campaign inspired te...

In Trauma, Primitivism and the First World War: The Making of Frank Prewett (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), Joy Porter examines the extraordinary life of Frank “Toronto” Prewett and the history of trauma, literary expression, and the power of self-representation after WWI. She sheds new light on how the First World War affected the Canadian poet, and how war-induced trauma or “shell-shock” caused him...

Making the Forever War: Marilyn Young on the Culture and Politics of American Militarism (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021) is a timely collection of articles and essays by Marilyn B Young, edited by Mark P. Bradley and Mary L. Dudziak. In this interview, Mark Bradley joined me to discuss Marilyn Young's life and legacy, the impetus for assembling the book, and the relevance of her work in...

From the Taliban to Hezbollah, armed nonstate actors and civil warfare have dominated the US national security debate for much of the last 20 years. Yet, most analysis shares a critical underlying assumption: that non-state actors fight very differently than states do. In Nonstate Warfare: The Military Methods of Guerillas, Warlords and Militias (Princeton UP, 2021), Dr. Stephen Biddle argues that...

Remapping empire, nature, and scientific enquiry beyond the simple binary exchange between periphery and metropole, Dr. Kirsten Greer demonstrates how ornithology, the study of birds, became entwined with tours of duty for British military officers shaping military strategy and developing ecological understanding. A critical historical geography of empire, Red Coats and Wild Birds: How Military Or...

Following tirailleurs sénégalais’ deployments in West Africa, Congo, Madagascar, North Africa, Syria-Lebanon, Vietnam, and Algeria from the 1880s to 1962, Militarizing Marriage West African Soldiers’ Conjugal Traditions in Modern French Empire (Ohio UP, 2021) historicizes how African servicemen advanced conjugal strategies with women at home and abroad. Sarah J. Zimmerman examines the evolution of...