New Books in Military History

Chimps, our closest relatives, kill each other. But chimps do not engage in anything close to mass slaughter of their own kind. Why is this? There are two possible explanations for the difference. The first is this: chimps are not programmed, so to say, to commit mass slaughter, while humans are so programmed. The second is this: chimps do not make their own history and therefore cannot make the c...

Historians are by their nature public intellectuals because they are intellectuals who write about, well, the public. Alas, many historians seem to forget the “public” part and concentrate on the “intellectual” part. Our guest today–sponsored by the National History Center–is not among them. Julian Zelizer has used his historical research and writing to inform the public and public debate in a gre...

By the time the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the Bolshevik Party had already amassed a considerable amount of expertise in moving masses of people around. Large population transfers (to put it mildly) were part and parcel of building socialism. Certain “elements” needed to be sent for re-education (the Kulaks), others to build new socialist cities (Magnitogorsk), and still othe...

It’s a question I’ve long asked myself: Why and how did common soldiers fight for so long in the First World War? The conditions were awful, death was all around, and there was no real hope of a “breakthrough” that might bring victory. It was simply one long hard slog to nowhere. Why not just give up? Thanks to Alexander Watson’s insightful Enduring the Great War. Combat, Morale and Collapse in th...

Like it or not, governments need to mobilize their populations in times of crisis and one of the ways they do it is to disseminate propaganda. Now this is uncomplicated if you are, say, Stalin and claim to know what’s best for everyone and control the media (and most everything else) completely. But what if you are, say, McKinley, Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, or Bush (II) and you d...

Many years ago I had the opportunity to spend a summer in Germany, more specifically in a tiny town on the Rhine near Koblenz. The family I stayed with looked for all the world like typical Rhinelanders. They even had their own small Weingut where they made a nice Riesling. But they were not originally from the Rhinegau at all. They were from East Prussia, a place where there are no longer any Ger...

When I was in college about a million years ago, we used to sit in bars and talk about the Revolution. Actually, it was this bar and something like this “Revolution.” Clearly nothing ever came of our planning (or drinking). But it wasn’t always so, as you can learn in Benjamin Carp’s remarkable Rebels Rising: Cities in the American Revolution (Oxford UP, 2007; 2009 pbk). When the American colonist...

When I was in high school, I really didn’t go in for reading. Until, that is, I somehow encountered Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. I remember hiding in the back of all my classes reading it while my teachers talked about something I know not what. I was hooked on World War I, and I’m sure I’m not alone. The Great War was such a strange and tragic thing. It seems to have bee...

Most everyone has heard of the Nuremberg Trials. Popular books have been written about them. Hollywood made movies about them. Some of us can even name a few of the convicted (Hermann Goering, Albert Speer, etc.). But fewer of us know about what might be called “Nuremberg East,” that is, the Toyko trials held after the defeat of the Japanese in World War Two. These proceedings generated few books,...

Every Jew knows the story. The evil tsarist authorities ride into the Shtetl. They demand a levy of young men for the army. Mothers’ weep. Fathers’ sigh. The community mourns the loss of its young. It’s a good story, and some of it’s even true. The reality, of course, was much more complex as we learn in Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern‘s excellent Jews in the Russian Army, 1827-1917 (Cambridge UP, 2008)....

While researching his Pulitzer-Prize-winning Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (with Mike Wallace; Oxford UP 1999), Edwin Burrows uncovered the story of thousands of American soldiers who had been held prisoner by the British during the Revolutionary War in and around New York. Now he’s back to tell the tale in a full-length book: Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners...

The thing about empire building is that when you’re done building one, you’ve got to figure out what to do with it. This generally involves the “extraction of resources.” We tend to think of this in terms of things like gold, oil, or rubber. But people can be “extracted” as well. The French empire of the later nineteenth century offers a case in point. Havingfound themselves in a very nasty war wi...

It’s curious how historical images become stereotyped over time. One hears the word “Nazi,” and immediately the Holocaust springs to mind. This reflexive association is probably a good thing, as it reminds us of the dangers of ethnic hatred in an era that knows it too well.  But in another way the Nazi = Holocaust equation obscures part of the story of Hitler’s insanity and that of all genocidal m...

U.S. forces invade a distant country in order to disarm an international threat to American security. They fight well, and win every major battle decisively. They become occupiers, and find themselves engaged in a low-level guerrilla war against a determined though shadowy enemy. The American-backed government has a tenuous hold on power, and it is unclear whether it can survive without significan...

There is just something about Fidel Castro that American presidents don’t like very much. Maybe it’s the long-winded anti-American diatribes. Maybe it’s the strident communism (to which he came rather late, truth be told ). Maybe it’s the beard. In any event, it’s clear that Eisenhower, JFK, and Johnson held personal grudges against the Cuban generalissimo. In fact, they all tried to kill him, as...

I confess I sometimes wonder where we got in the habit of proclaiming, usually with some sort of righteous indignation, that we have the “right” to this or that as citizens. I know that the political theorists of the eighteenth century wrote a lot about “rights,” and that “rights” made their way into the the U.S. and French constitutions. But when did they begin to dominate political discourse in...

Much has been written about Winston Churchill recently. Some love him, some hate him. But few understand him, at least as well as John Lukacs. That’s hardly a surprise as Lukacs has been thinking and writing about Churchill for over fifty years. He’s written a wonderful book focusing on one of Churchill’s best known speeches, namely the one he gave upon becoming Prime Minister on May 13, 1940. In...

Today we have Professor Kimberly Jensen on the show. She teaches in the Department of History and in the Gender Studies Program at Western Oregon University. We’ll be talking with Kim today about her new book Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War (University of Illinois Press, 2008). I’m a bit of a war buff, so I was very eager to read the book. It certainly didn’t disappoint....