New Books in Military History

The First World War was not limited the trenches on the Western Front. Nor was the system of internment camps it spawned. In his new book, Colonial Captivity during the First World War: Internment and the Fall of the German Empire, 1914-1919 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Mahon Murphy looks at the experiences of German colonial settlers interned by the Entente Powers, particularly the British, during World War I. Challenging Europe-centric interpretations of the conflict and internment, Murphy uses a wide range of sources, illustrating both the global integrated camp network, and how experiences of internment varied according to social class, gender and race. He also explores the effects of internment on Germans’ national identity, and how their experiences of post-colonial, Weimar Germany led many to believe that true Germanness was only to be found in the colonies. A must read for anyone interested in the global dimensions of internment and First World War. Anyone in London on 19 March is cordially invited to attend the launch of the book at the London School of Economics. Speakers include William Mulligan and David Stevenson. Information available here. Darren O’Byrne is a PhD student in History at Cambridge University, where he is researching the Ministerial Bureaucracy’s role under National Socialism. He can be contacted at obyrne.darren@gmail.com or on twitter at @darrenobyrne1.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Paraguay’s intervention in a crisis between Uruguay and Brazil in November 1864 began the bloodiest and most destructive conflict in South American history. Thomas Whigham begins his book The Road to Armageddon: Paraguay versus the Triple Alliance, 1866-1870 (University of Calgary Press, 2017), the second volume of his epic two-volume history of the war, with the allied powers of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay having driven Paraguayan forces out of Argentina and preparing their invasion of Paraguay. While heavily outnumbered by their enemies, Whigham credits the Paraguayan population with a cohesion and endurance that defied Brazilian, Argentinian, and Uruguayan expectations of a swift victory. Despite the formidable defenses constructed by his men, however, the Paraguayan leader, Francisco Solano Lopez, repeatedly ordered attacks in the Alliance forces that debilitated the Paraguayan ranks. By 1868 the Alliance captured the Paraguayan capital Asuncion, yet the conflict dragged on for another year and a half as Lopez fought on in the countryside. It was not until Lopez was killed by Brazilian soldiers in March 1870 that the war ended, leaving as its legacy a continent transformed in ways still being felt today, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

In I Remain Yours: Common Lives in Civil War Letters (Harvard University Press, 2018), Christopher Hager trains our attention to “the cell-level transfers that created the meaning of the Civl War.” He follows the correspondence of a group of soldiers, and their family members, many of whom had never written letters before in their life. These people were largely illiterate. They had to learn how to spell as they were trying to compose their thoughts on paper. Yet Hager leaves their letters ‘uncorrected.’ In their struggle to put their feelings and thoughts into words—a struggle we also feel in reading those words—the words themselves gain an immediacy and directness. They grow in importance for being chosen. The repetition of phrases throbs with feeling. The emotional dynamics of union and disunion—the fear of being forgotten, the assurance of love, no matter the soldier’s side in the war—congeal around individual words, phrases, even marks on the page. As they write, both soldiers and their family members realize that they’re at war together, tending to the relationships that comprise their everyday lives, and warding off the threats to them. Christopher Hager has previously explored the lives of ordinary Americans through their writing, including diaries kept by slaves. His first book, Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing, won the 2014 Frederick Douglass Prize for the best book of the year on the subject of slavery. Hager is Charles A. Dana Research Associate Professor of English at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut where he teaches courses in American literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the present. Michael Amico holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. His dissertation, The Forgotten Union of the Two Henrys: The True Story of the Peculiar and Rarest Intimacy of the American Civil War, is about the romance between Henry Clay Trumbull and Henry Ward Camp of the Tenth Connecticut Regiment. He is the author, with Michael Bronski and Ann Pellegrini, of “You Can Tell Just by Looking”: And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People (Beacon, 2013), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Nonfiction. He can be reached at mjamico@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

In the wake of Ken Burns’ most recent series, The Vietnam War, America’s fascination with the conflict shows no sign of abating. Fortunately the flood of popular retellings of old narratives is supplemented by a number of well-researched and reasoned efforts aimed at garnering a better sense of how our presumptions about the Vietnam War are in need of reinterpretation and revision. Returning to New Books in Military History is historian Gregory A. Daddis, author of two recent accounts of the war that together offer a sharp reassessment of the American effort. In Westmoreland’s War: Reassessing America’s Strategy in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Withdrawal: Reassessing America’s Final Years in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2017) Daddis challenges many existing perceptions of the readiness and roles of MACV’s two most prominent commanders, Generals William Westmoreland and Creighton Abrams, as well as their struggles with the Washington defense establishment during the war. By centering his study on the strategic planning and its execution, Daddis not only acknowledges the centrality of Vietnamese agency in the outcome of the war, he also reveals how some historians have misjudged the war’s outcome to present flawed visions of possible victory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

On a cold, rainy dawn in late November 1872, Lieutenant Frazier Boutelle and a Modoc Indian nicknamed Scarface Charley leveled firearms at each other. Their duel triggered a war that capped a decades-long genocidal attack that was emblematic of the United States’ conquest of Native Americas peoples and lands. California author and editor Robert Aquinas McNally tells the wrenching story of this conflict in The Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America’s Gilded Age (Bison Books, 2017). The 1872-73 Modoc War was one of the nation’s costliest campaigns against North American Indigenous peoples, in which the army placed nearly one thousand soldiers in the field against some fifty-five Modoc fighters. Although little known today, the Modoc War dominated national headlines for an entire year. Fought in south-central Oregon and northeastern California, the war settled into a siege in the desolate Lava Beds and climaxed the decades-long effort to dispossess and destroy the Modocs. The war did not end with the last shot fired, however. For the first and only time in U.S. history, Native fighters were tried and hanged for war crimes. The surviving Modocs were packed into cattle cars and shipped from Fort Klamath to the corrupt, disease-ridden Quapaw reservation in Oklahoma, where they found peace even more lethal than war. The Modoc War tells the forgotten story of a violent and bloody Gilded Age campaign at a time when the federal government boasted officially of a “peace policy” toward Indigenous nations. This compelling history illuminates a dark corner in our country’s past. Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges, universities, and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology.       Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

It’s a sad story known well. In dead of winter at Wounded Knee Creek in 1890, U.S. soldiers with the Seventh Cavalry Regiment gunned down over two hundred Lakota men, women, and children. Their crime? Taking part in the Ghost Dance ritual. What happened afterwards is a story told less often. David W. Grua, historian and editor with the Joseph Smith Papers project, tells about the competing memory and counter-memory of Wounded Knee as the U.S. Army first shaped the narrative, and later, Lakotas attempted to have their side of the story heard. In his Robert M. Utley Prize winning book, Surviving Wounded Knee: The Lakotas and the Politics of Memory (Oxford University Press, 2016), Grua argues that race, official memory, and public memorialization served the purposes of white supremacy on the northern Great Plains throughout much of the early twentieth century. Official army reports as well as physical memorialization at the massacre site spun a narrative of Indian savagery and white innocence that helped make the case for the twenty Medals of Honor awarded to soldiers who took part in the bloodshed. The truth was, of course, far more complicated, as Lakota activists like Joseph Horn Cloud would prove in an effort to gain restitution and justice from the American government. Surviving Wounded Knee is an important story about what happens to a massacre site once the smoke clears, and is a testament to the power of public history. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914-1921 (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a masterful account of the Russian revolutionary era by Laura Engelstein, Professor Emerita at Yale University. Spanning the pre-revolutionary period immediately prior the First World War to the end of the Russian Civil War, Russia in Flames provides a rich and comprehensive view of the whys and the wherefores of Revolutionary Russia. Russia in Flames provides both the academic and the general reader with a rich and flowing account of the seminal event of the twentieth century. All from the historian who is in the words of the periodical Kritika: “one of the most important figures in the field of Russian history” today. Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law and History at Vanderbilt University, narrates a postbellum struggle that raged in the Northern Rockies in Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War (W.W. Norton and Company, 2017). In the summer of 1877, General Oliver Otis Howard, a champion of African American civil rights during Reconstruction, ruthlessly pursued hundreds of Nez Perce families who resisted moving onto a reservation. Standing in his way was Chief Joseph, a young leader who never stopped advocating for Native American sovereignty and equal rights. Thunder in the Mountains is the spellbinding story of two legendary figures and their epic clash of ideas about the meaning of freedom and the role of government in American life. Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges, universities, and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

In the fifth podcast of Arguing History, Lynn Dumenil and Christopher Capozzola consider the relationship between America’s involvement in World War I and the granting of women the right to vote. As they note, when the war broke out women were enjoying considerable momentum at the state level, having won the right in several states. Together they discuss the impact of the war upon their efforts, looking at how the war fractured some organizations, led to the creation of new ones, and introduced new concepts of citizenship and participating into the public discourse that challenged both the suffrage movement and its opponents. Lynn Dumenil is Robert Glass Cleland Professor of American History, Emerita at Occidental College and the author of The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I; The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s; and Through Women’s Eyes, which she coauthored with Ellen Carol DuBois. Christopher Capozzola is associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen and co-curator of The Volunteers: Americans join World War I, a multi-platform public history initiative commemorating the centennial of America’s First World War. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

In 1917: War, Peace, and Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2018), David Stevenson examines a pivotal chapter of the First World War. Two and a half years of death and destruction had brought the belligerents to new nadirs of attrition and zeniths of strategic calculation. Deeply invested in the war, with unprecedented losses of blood and treasure, and no longer optimistic about their chances of victory, all sides were looking for a quick exit but had few prospects of finding one. In 1917, the Germans gambled in escalating their submarine warfare, which drew the hesitant Americans into the conflict, the French faced mutinies, and the Russians plunged the throes of Revolution. The war thus raged, spreading across two oceans to four continents, finally turning toward its conclusion. In this episode of the podcast, David Stevenson discusses the causes, course, and effects of these events with us, and shares his insights about judging historical forces and human agency, evaluating counterfactuals, and drawing comparisons between 1917 and subsequent events of the last 100 years, including the Second World War, the Vietnam War, and conflicts of the twenty-first century. Professor Stevenson is Stevenson Chair of International History at the London School of Economics, and has published several important works on the World War I including With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918, and 1914-1918: The History of the First World War. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing on culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar; he also teaches at Los Medanos College and Berkeley City College.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history