New Books in Military History

Russell Shorto‘s Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom (Norton, 2017) is a history of many revolutions, kaleidoscopic turns through six individual lives. There is Cornplanter, a leader of the Seneca Indians; George Germain, who led the British war strategy during the Revolution; Margaret Moncrieffe Coghlan, the daughter of a British major; the always worried and wearied George Washington; Venture Smith, an African slave who eventually purchased his freedom in Connecticut; and Abraham Yates, the self-taught rabble rouser from Albany who helped shape the politics of New York, and the country. With each turn in their stories, these six lives continuously remerge and recolor the text, and together make one Revolution. Shorto keeps the reader on the ground, so that we can see how the term “freedom,” among other concepts of the time, gained its meaning and importance. We feel each individual’s fight for self-determinacy, including its ugly and oppressive aspects, across their life spans. In our conversation, Shorto and I talk about the insecurities and failures, the feelings of incompleteness, and the attempts at asserting or gussying up one’s self that drive the stories of all these historical subjects. The book slips and slides into ‘great’ events through wonderfully stark portraits of contingency, circumstance, and personality. What Shorto’s approach makes viscerally clear, and what we return to as we talk, is that no one person determined the Revolution more than any other, and no individual view contains all. This matters for the very reason that this Revolution song is no fiction. It is a history with many parts in contrapuntal relation that resolve only to hear a new dissonance and seek another resolution. It is a song we continue to sing. 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

Marie von Clausewitz: The Woman Behind the Making of On War (Oxford University Press, 2016) is an important and fascinating book that not only tells the story of a remarkable woman’s life during the tumultuous years of the French Revolution and Restoration. Based on a recently discovered cache of letters between Marie von Clausewitz and her renowned husband, Carl, it also dramatically expands our understanding of the process by which Carl’s famous treatise, On War, came to be. Vanya E. Bellinger, currently a visiting professor at the United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, argues that Marie was a crucial foil for the development of Carl’s ideas over many years. Marie’s connections to the Prussian court (she was born into the prominent von Bruhl family) also helped to secure her husband’s often precarious position. Bellinger freely acknowledges Carl’s military genius but places Marie alongside her husband as an intellectual partner and political confidante, who played an important role in bringing one of the most famous works of military theory to the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

What were the dreams of the Civil War? Find out by listening to my conversation with Jonathan White about his new book Midnight in America: Darkness, Sleep, and Dreams during the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Jonathan W. White is associate professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University. He is the author of several books and almost one hundred articles, essays, and reviews about the Civil War. His earlier book, Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln, was the winner and finalist for a number of book prizes. Now he has written a book about a subject few, if anyone, has known much about—and that in itself is a feat for Civil War history. Midnight in America surveys the dreams of soldiers, civilians, African Americans, the dying, and Abraham Lincoln, including how those dreams were represented in popular culture. The dreams he includes are truly strange, with all the wacky juxtapositions we expect in our own dreaming. Indeed, what White’s book shows overall is that it is the dreams during the Civil War, and not any more the wakeful, sober analyses of official accounts, that most clearly reveal the life of the country, with all its fears, desires, and struggles. Soldiers’ dreams of home (the most prominent ‘theme’ of their dreams) pivoted around feelings of vulnerability and mortality, and, consequently, the need for care and affection. We talk about how their dreams harbored fears of being cheated upon, forgotten, no longer important, and even replaced—fears many times instigated by not having received a letter from home recently. Dreaming is how we get through the day, even as, in their most free-ranging forms, dreams can reveal that which we are trying to escape. As we discuss in our conversation, surveying the content of these dreams offers a view of the emotional dynamics that underwrote ‘the war,’ as well as the dreamer’s drive to fight. We also discuss the differences between white and black cultures of dreaming. The stark divides of the relationships that appeared in the dreams of soldiers and their families back home were on full display in the daily lives of slaves. In contrast to white people, African-Americans gave dreaming a more central, ritualistic place in their cultural practices. And while in public slaveowners presented a ‘rational’ defense of slavery, their dreams evinced a complex recognition of the humanity of black people. The very “dream” of a perfect union, with clear differences between good and evil, especially as sentimentalized in popular culture, was premised on the fear of disunion, disconnection, and incompleteness in ones own life. For better and worse, the war was a dream. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

In his new book, The Malmedy Massacre: The War Crimes Trial Controversy (Harvard University Press, 2017), Steven Remy, professor of history at City University of New York, examines the Malmedy massacre which took place on December 17, 1944 and the trial that followed after the conclusion of World War II. Remy effectively demonstrates how in the decade following the trial how a network of German and American sympathizers succeeded in discrediting the trial. Remy directly looks at the accusations of torture, which the defendants and their allies alleged led to false confessions. Although these allegations were false, Remy demonstrates how amnesty advocates used them successfully to not only discredit the trial, but distorted our understanding of one of the most brutal massacres in American military history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

When the nations of Latin America fought for their independence in the early 19th century, they commissioned privateers stationed in the United States to attack Spanish skipping. In Privateers of the Americas: Spanish American Privateering from the United States in the Early Republic (University of Georgia Press, 2015), David Head examines the activities of these privateers within the context of the contemporary Atlantic world. As Head explains, these privateers, most of whom were American citizens, existed in a complex environment of international politics, diplomacy, and economic activity. Operating in violation of U.S. law, they evaded the authorities in a variety of ways, from clandestine operations in the Louisiana bayous to deceptive claims to port authorities in Baltimore. While U.S. officials were often frustrated in their efforts to enforce the law, Head finds that civil claims were often pursued by the attacked merchants with greater success. It was only with the end of the wars, though, that the activities of these privateers came to an end, leaving them to embark upon lives often changed by their dramatic experiences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Monica Ricketts’ new book Who Should Rule? Men of Arms, the Republic of Letters, and the Fall of the Spanish Empire (Oxford University Press, 2017) presents readers with the connected histories of military cadres and intellectuals in Peru and Spain c. 1770-1830. The book advances the argument that a Crown-sponsored change in the idea of “merit” in the Spanish Empire made possible the rise to power of new military cadres and the renewal of the Hispanic republic of letters. Ricketts argues that these changes had important consequences as these two cohorts of individuals battled over who had the merits to rule the Empire during the captivity of Spanish king Ferdinand VII under Napoleon, and after independence in Peru. Such shift in the conception of merit accounted for the rise of men like Agustin Gamarra and Andres de Santa Cruz, two of the most prominent leaders of independent Peru, to high military rank in the Spanish imperial armies first, and in the revolutionary ones later. The quest for an intellectual renewal in Spain and Spanish America also led to a reinvigoration of a Spanish Atlantic republic of letters. There too new men rose to prominence based on their literary and intellectual achievements. Part of these Spanish Atlantic intellectuals would battle with the men of the military concerning whom had the most “merits” to govern in Spain and Spanish America. Ricketts’ book stimulates the reader to ask questions regarding the origins of “meritocratic” thinking in Spain and Latin America, as well as how coherent military bodies came into public life. Alvaro Caso Bello is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Johns Hopkins University. He can be reached at acasobe1@jhu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

With the end of the Civil War, George Crook’s decision to continue serving in the United States Army meant reverting to a lower rank and assuming a command in the Pacific Northwest. Yet, as Paul Magid details in the second volume of his biography of Crook, The Gray Fox: George Crook and the Indian Wars (University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), he would soon emerge as one of the most prominent figures in the army’s ongoing operations against Native Americans in the territories. In describing Crook’s campaign against the Paiutes in the Great Basin, Magid details the relentless attritional warfare that was a hallmark of his strategy against the tribes he fought. Results in the Northwest led to his transfer to Arizona, where his success against the Apache and Yavapai earned him a promotion to the rank of brigadier general. With his selection as the head of the Department of the Platte in 1875, Crook found himself coping with the deteriorating situation in the Dakota Territory created by the surge of prospectors and settlers, and with the outbreak of the war against the Sioux, the general took to the field in a series of grueling campaigns. Though suffering a setback at the battle of Rosebud, Crook’s subsequent victory at Slim Buttes led to the subjugation of the Sioux and the surrender of Crazy Horse, which cemented Crook’s reputation as the army’s leading expert in Indian warfare. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

David Morgan-Owen‘s The Fear of Invasion: Strategy, Politics, and British War Planning, 1880-1914 (Oxford University Press, 2017) tells a complex story clearly and concisely. In the decades prior to the Great War, British preparations for defense of its commercial and imperial interests were warped by fears of an invasion of the home islands. The specter of a French, or after 1905, a German invasion prevented British officials in the Cabinet, the War Office, and the Admiralty from thinking clearly about how to prosecute a European war. Planning to prevent or defeat an enemy landing kept the Royal Navy in a defensive mindset and kept the British Army from thinking clearly about sending an expedition to the continent. Ironically, whether or not the French or Germans themselves had any clear plans to invade Britain went largely undiscussed. As Morgan-Owen makes clear in the interview, even those who consider themselves well-read on the subject of British grand strategy will learn much. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous.” Thus begins Guenter Lewy’s latest book, Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers (Oxford University Press, 2017), a welcome attempt to challenge the idea that all Nazi perpetrators were the same, and that they were all driven by the same bass motivations. Largely a synthesis of material previously only available in German, Lewy presents a typology of perpetrator types and dispels the idea that it was impossible for killers to walk away. He also presents arguably the most accessible analysis of the post-war justice available in English. Undoubtedly a must-read for anyone wishing to understand how and why people participate in acts of mass violence. Darren O’Byrne is a PhD student in History at Cambridge University. His dissertation, Political Civil Servants and the German Administration under Nazism, explores the dynamics of Civil Service behaviour under National Socialism, asking why senior administrators assisted the regime in pursuit of its ideological goals. He has forthcoming publications with the Journal of Contemporary History and the Routledge Studies in Genocide and Crimes against Humanity. 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

Judith Giesberg, an expert on the history of women and gender during the Civil War, is professor and director of graduate studies in the history department at Villanova University and Editor of The Journal of the Civil War Era. Two of her previous books include Civil War Sisterhood: The United States Sanitary Commission and Women’s Politics in Transition (2000), which is about the understudied roles of women in relief efforts during the war, and “Army at Home”: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front (2009), which concerns the experiences of working class women in the north. She is also the principal editor of Emilie Davis’s Civil War: The Diaries of a Free Black Woman in Philadelphia (2014). Her latest book, and the subject of our discussion, is Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of an American Morality (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Giesberg argues that the Civil War is the turning point for the influential rise of postwar anti-pornography laws and a genesis for the related network of anti-vice campaigns, which included laws against contraceptives and abortion, newly entrenched legal regulations of marriage, and ever broader social purity initiatives around sexuality. We discuss how crucial, and yet understudied, questions of sex and desire are to the Civil War era and how silence around them has affected the ways we talk about and regulate social relations today. Much of our conversation focuses on how a small group of men created new regulations around pornography, the constitution of which was always up for debate, to hold onto the political and social power that they felt to be threatened by men of a lower class or of a different race. Prominent among this group of regulators, and a leading face of the postwar anti-vice campaigns, was Anthony Comstock. After serving in a largely inactive regiment during the war, and feeling left out of the camaraderie generated by the sharing of pornography among his fellow soldiers, Comstock fashioned for himself a largely illusory legal fraternity of moral crusaders. For pornography was hardly the main issue for those who associated themselves with his cause. Geisberg writes and talks about how other men in power negotiated the place of newly freed slaves by tightening the regulatory role that marriage played in their “free” lives. Doctors jumped at the opportunity to regulate abortion and contraception as a way to further professionalize themselves after postwar advances in medicine. Both of these groups became part of an omnibus of social reform that affects the country to this day. As you will hear over the course of our conversation, the importance of Giesberg’s account is in showing the connections between these issues and how they come together in the Civil War. Sexual abuse was at the center of social systems, including slavery. But the legal articulations of sexual crimes after the war created more easily regulated vices that distracted attention aw... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history