New Books in Military History

Tim Brady’s book His Father’s Son: The Life of General Ted Roosevelt, Jr. (NAL, 2017) is not just the biography of the eldest son and namesake of America’s 26th president, but an account of a life that was adventurous and consequential in its own right. Coming of age in the years in which his Theodore Roosevelt served as president, Ted at times struggled to measure up to the daunting example set b...

Timothy S. Huebner, the Irma O. Sternberg Professor of History at Rhodes College in Memphis, has written Liberty & Union: The Civil War Era and American Constitutionalism (University Press of Kansas, 2016), a one-volume history of the constitutional debates regarding slavery and sovereignty from the Declaration of Independence through the end of Reconstruction. Huebner brings together three strand...

The remarkable story of Henry Ossian Flipper, a young man born into slavery on the eve of the Civil War, and his struggle for recognition left its mark on our nations history. Through extensive research of military documents, court records, appeals, and from Flippers personal journals and published papers, Henry Ossian Flipper: West Point’s First Black Graduate (Wild Horse Press, 2015) captures th...

Was the War for American Independence really about American independence? It depends on who you ask. In his new book, Brothers at Arms: American Independence and the Men of France and Spain Who Saved It (Knopf, 2016), Larrie Ferreiro draws on decades of new research in archives and on battlefields across the US and Europe to detail the smuggling, espionage, gun running, and politicking that wreste...

Our guest for this interview combines his academic expertise in American military history with his professional experience as an employee of the National Park Service. Marc Blackburn is the author of Interpreting American Military History at Museums and Historical Sites (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). An expert in the interpretation and presentation of historical narratives and themes through mate...

Jelena Batinic’s Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance (Cambridge University Press, 2015) examines the role women played in the Communist-led Yugoslav Partisan resistance. By placing gender and gender relations at the forefront of her analysis, Batinic provides insightful history of a unique phenomenon—guerrilla warfare in which tens of thousands of women took direct m...

Jimmy Stewart has a well-deserved reputation as one of the major stars of the classic film era. Yet his life was greatly affected by his experiences as a bomber pilot in World War II. Robert Matzen, author of the book, Mission: Jimmy Stewart and the Fight for Europe (GoodKnight Books, 2016), reviews Stewart’s life in a military family and his role in the allied victory in Europe. He also discusses...

Narratives of the Pacific War frequently examine the 1944 Battle of Leyte Gulf from the operational perspective, focusing on the desperate actions of the US Seventh Fleets escort carriers, Task Unit 77.4.3 (“Taffy 3”) against the much larger Japanese Center Force, commanded by Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita. The ensuing drama, including the famous call for help and rebuke of US Third Fleet commander, A...

Elizabeth Reich is an assistant professor of film studies at Connecticut College in New London. Militant Visions: Black Soldiers, Internationalism, and the Transformation of American Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2016) examines how, from the 1940s to the 1970s, the cinematic figure of the black soldier helped change the ways American moviegoers saw black men, for the first time presenting Afri...

Best remembered as the nineteenth commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, Clifton B. Cates began his long and distinguished military career as a second lieutenant in World War I. In I Will Hold: The Story of USMC Legend Clifton B. Cates, From Belleau Wood to Victory in the Great War (NAL, 2016), journalist and author James Carl Nelson recounts Cates’ early life and service in the war. Cates was study...

Akiko Takenaka’s new book looks carefully at Yasukuni Shrine as a war memorial, examining its role in waging war, honoring the dead, promoting peace, and building a modern national identity. Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar (University of Hawaii Press, 2015) pays special attention to the significance of memory and spatial practice in shaping Yasukuni as belief, site,...

Ruling as he did during the Five Dynasties period of Chinese history, the emperor Mingzong (r. 926-933) has not received the same degree attention from historians as have many of his counterparts. In From Warhorses to Ploughshares: The Later Tang Reign of Emperor Mingzong (Hong Kong University Press, 2015), Richard L. Davis provides readers with the first modern biography of Mingzong. Born Miaojil...

I teach at a Catholic university and last semester co-taught (with a theologian) a class titled The Holocaust and its Legacies. Once my students became comfortable with me, they began to pepper me with questions about the role of the Catholic church during the Holocaust. Some of these questions–about the church and antisemitism, about the role of the Pope–I was able to answer effectively. But when...

The Crusades loom large in contemporary popular consciousness. However, our public understanding has largely been informed from a western perspective, despite the fact that there is a rich textual tradition recording its history in Muslim sources. Paul M. Cobb, Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, remedies this problem in The Race for Paradise: A...

In Forty-Seven Days: How Pershing’s Warriors Came of Age to Defeat the German Army in World War I (NAL Caliber, 2016), National Archives historian and forensic archivist Mitchell Yockelson reappraises the American Expeditionary Force’s performance under the command of General John J. Pershing. Accordingly, the American forces’ combat experience in the September to November 1918 Meuse-Argonne Campa...

Marc Lynch is the author of The New Arab Wars: Uprisings and Anarchy in the Middle East (Public Affairs, 2016). Lynch is a professor of political science at George Washington University and blogs at the Monkey Cage. From Tunisia to Egypt to Syria, the Arab Spring saw protesters storm to the street demanding reform and revolution. Five years later, most of these countries remain forever changed yet...

Most biographers writing about the life and achievements of Napoleon Bonaparte have focused on his dramatic personality or his military campaigns. In Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny (Pegasus, 2015) the inaugural volume of a projected three-volume biography of the French ruler Michael Broers’ takes a different approach. Drawing upon a new and vastly expanded collection of Napoleons letters to chronicl...

From the “Ballad of the Green Berets” to “Bad Moon Rising,” the music of the Vietnam War is woven through every vets memories. Vietnam vet Doug Bradley and his fellow University of Wisconsin professor Craig Werner first intended to whittle down a list of the top 20 songs of the war, and soon realized that was an impossible errand. No Vietnam veteran is alike, and hundreds of songs held meaning for...

Some books fly high above the field, making sweeping generalizations about big questions. Other books circle over a specific problem, analyzing it in great detail to say something important about a single subject. Joshua Zimmerman‘s The Polish Underground and the Jews, 1939-1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2015) shows how important and valuable books that adopt the latter approach can be. The boo...

John Kinder brings to life the challenges and problems faced by the disabled veteran in American history from the Civil War to the current day in his evocative book, Paying with Their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Considered by many... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a pr...

Long viewed conventionally through the lens of inter-European/colonist conflict, warfare in colonial era North America is currently experiencing a resurgence as a new generation of military historians employ a variety of tools and methods borrowed from other fields and disciplines. Our latest guest, Daniel Tortora, does so in his book Carolina in Crisis: Cherokees, Colonists, and Slaves in the Ame...

In Waste into Weapons: Recycling in Britain during the Second World War (Cambridge University Press 2015), Peter Thorsheim explores the role of waste and recycling in Britain under conditions of total war. Thorsheim argues wartime salvage efforts linked civilians socially as well as materially to the war. Salvage drives served to focus people’s efforts and helped them make sense of the events arou...

Have you seen those Facebook memes floating around, arguing that we shouldn’t support a 15-dollar -per-hour minimum wage for service sector workers because the military doesn’t earn a living wage? Jennifer Mittelstadt tells us how these stark lines were drawn between the military and the civilian economy – and on how military welfare affects us all. Jennifer Mittelstadt is Associate Professor of H...

In all of the thousands upon thousands of books written about Nazi Germany, it’s easy to lose track of some basic questions. What did Germans think they were fighting for? Why did they support the war? How did they (whether the they were soldiers fighting in France or Russia, women working to support the war effort, or mothers or fathers worrying about their children) experience the war? Nicholas...

John Kinder brings to life the challenges and problems faced by the disabled veteran in American history from the Civil War to the current day in his evocative book, Paying with Their Bodies: American War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Considered by many reviewers to be one of the most important books in recent years on the human cost of war, Paying wi...