New Books in Military History

German Ambassador Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau believed that Germany and the Soviet Union were locked together in a Schicksalgemienshaft, or “community of fate.” The interaction of these two nations, Brockdorff-Rantzau thought, would decide the course of history, in Europe and beyond. Anyone familiar with the history of German-Soviet relations in the twentieth century might be inclined to agree w...

In the West, the study of the phenomenon known as the Crusades has long been dominated by European concerns: European periodization, European selection of important moments and personages, and, most of all, European sources. In recent years, scholars such as Carole Hillenbrand, Paul Cobb, and Michael Lower have mined Arabic-language material with the purpose of creating a more balanced view of the...

Since 2004 the Malay-Muslim majority provinces in the border region of southern Thailand have been wracked by a violent insurgency. Over 7000 people have been killed and many thousands more injured. Currently 60,000 Thai security personnel are stationed in the region to conduct counter-insurgency operations. Another 80,000 people have been organized into a “volunteer defense force”. Ruth Streicher...

The story of how the American military—and more particularly the regular army—has played a vital role in the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States that extended beyond the battlefield is the focus of Robert Wooster’s The United States Army and the Making of America: From Confederation to Empire, 1775–1903 (University Press of Kansas, 2021). As Wooster shows, Americans repeatedly us...

Photography emerged in the 1840s in the United States, and it became a visual medium that documents the harsh realities of enslavement. Similarly, the photography culture grew during the Civil War, and it became an important material that archived this unprecedented war. Deborah Willis's The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship (New York University Press, 2021) con...

Marching across occupied France in 1944, American GI Leroy Stewart had neither death nor glory on his mind: he was worried about his underwear. "I ran into a new problem when we walked," Stewart wrote, "the shorts and I didn't get along. They would crawl up on me all the time." Crawling underwear may have been a small price to pay for the liberation of millions of people, but in the utter wretched...

The digital age has touched and changed pretty much everything, even altering how historical research is practiced. In his new book Technology and the Historian: Transformations in the Digital Age (University of Illinois Press, 2021), Adam Crymble makes a meta-historical account of how digital and technological advances have impacted historical research, collection management, education, and commu...

Political Scientist Nathan Kalmoe has written a fascinating historical and political exploration of the connections between violence and partisanship before, during, and after the American Civil War. This book brings together work by historians and political scientists and straddles both disciplines in the examination of the way that partisan politics at the time of the Civil War also contributed...

The Western Front evokes images of mud-spattered men in waterlogged trenches, shielded from artillery blasts and machine-gun fire by a few feet of dirt. This iconic setting was the most critical arena of the Great War, a 400-mile combat zone stretching from Belgium to Switzerland where more than three million Allied and German soldiers struggled during four years of almost continuous combat. It ha...

In 1902, the British government concluded a defensive alliance with Japan, a state that had surprised much of the world with its sudden rise to prominence. For the next two decades, the Anglo-Japanese alliance would hold the balance of power in East Asia, shielding Japan as it cemented its regional position, and allowing Britain to concentrate on meeting the German challenge in Europe. Yet it was...

Few people have made decisions as momentous as Eisenhower, nor has one person had to make such a varied range of them. From D-Day to Little Rock, from the Korean War to Cold War crises, from the Red Scare to the Missile Gap controversies, Ike was able to give our country eight years of peace and prosperity by relying on a core set of principles. These were informed by his heritage and upbringing,...

“…and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” -Isaiah 2:4 The instinct to fight may be innate in human nature, but war—organized violence—comes with organized society. War has shaped humanity’s history, its social and political institutions, its values and ideas. Our ve...

During a pivotal few months in the middle of the First World War all sides-Germany, Britain, and America-believed the war could be concluded. Peace at the end of 1916 would have saved millions of lives and changed the course of history utterly. Two years into the most terrible conflict the world had ever known, the warring powers faced a crisis. There were no good military options. Money, men, and...

Today I talked to Edward G. Longacre about his new book Unsung Hero of Gettysburg: The Story of Union General David McMurtrie Gregg (University of Nebraska Press, 2021). On the 3rd day of the Battle of Gettysburg, Union cavalry officer David Gregg ensured that Jeb Stuart’s Confederate cavalry troops didn’t succeed. Stuart’s orders were to attack the right flank of the Army of the Potomac and creat...

World War II endures in the popular imagination as a heroic struggle between good and evil, with villainous Hitler driving its events. But Hitler was not in power when the conflict erupted in Asia—and he was certainly dead before it ended. His armies did not fight in multiple theaters, his empire did not span the Eurasian continent, and he did not inherit any of the spoils of war. That central rol...

In the years leading up to the First World War, a loose combination of serving naval officers, journalists, and politicians in Great Britain orchestrated a wave of support for the Royal Navy and an expanded, modernized fleet. In New Crusade: The Royal Navy and British Navalism, 1884-1914 (De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2021), Bradley Cesario charts the emergence of this group, one whose efforts in many wa...

Exploring the concepts of collaboration, resistance, and postwar retribution and focusing on the Chetnik movement, Jelena Đureinović's book The Politics of Memory of the Second World War in Contemporary Serbia (Routledge, 2019) analyses the politics of memory. Since the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, memory politics in Serbia has undergone drastic changes in the way in which the Second W...

Edward M. Almond belonged to the generation of US Army officers who came of age during World War I and then ascended to senior command positions during World War II. During WWII, Almond led the 92nd Infantry Division, one of only two African American divisions to see combat in the war. Yet, alongside his achievements, including a command during the Korean War, Almond was a fervent racist and a rig...

Bringing strategy, foreign policy, domestic and imperial politics together, this book challenges the conventional understanding as to why the British Empire, at perhaps the height of its power, lost control of its American colonies. Critiquing the traditional emphasis on the value of alliance during the Seven Years' War, and the consequences of British isolation during the War of American Independ...

Military Medicine and the Making of Race: Life and Death in the West India Regiments (Cambridge University Press, 2020) by Tim Lockley demonstrates how Britain's black soldiers helped shape attitudes towards race throughout the nineteenth century. The West India Regiments were part of the British military establishment for 132 years, generating vast records with details about every one of their 10...

Linda Colley is a luminary in the fields of British and imperial history, and the Shelby M. C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University. Her captivating new book The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World (Liveright, 2021) narrates a sweeping global history of written constitutions from the 18th to the 21st century. Bold, imaginative,...

Boston, Philadelphia, London...Fort Loudon, PA. One of these places is not usually included when imagining the crucial scenes of the American Revolution. In Frontier Rebels: The Fight for Independence in the American West, 1765-1776 (W. W. Norton, 2018), Dr. Patrick Spero argues that the early West was just as important to the unfolding American Revolution as events in imperial centers and colonia...

After twenty-six years of unprecedented revolutionary upheavals and endless fighting, the victorious powers craved stability after Napoleon's defeat in 1815. With the threat of war and revolutionary terror still looming large, the coalition launched an unprecedented experiment to re-establish European security. With over one million troops remaining in France, they established the Allied Council t...

Erich Ludendorff is a contentious figure in military history. Focused, energetic, and hailing from humble origins, Ludendorff rose through the ranks of the largely aristocratic late-nineteenth century German officer corps to play a leading role in the First World War. As a field officer at Liège and Tannenberg, as a driving force behind the development of the Siegfried Line, and as the architect o...

The "decline of the West" is once again a frequent topic of speculation. Often cited as one element of the alleged decline is the succession of prolonged and unsuccessful wars--most notably those waged in recent decades by the United States. This book by three Danish military experts examines not only the validity of the speculation but also asks why the West, particularly its military effectivene...