New Books in Military History

Hell on Earth: The 30 Years War and the Violent Birth of Capitalism is a new 10-part series from the creators of Hell of Presidents — one of Entertainment Weekly’s best podcasts of 2021 — and Chapo Trap House, the political podcast that they claim has made more people angrier than any other podcast. Hell on Earth tells the story of the Thirty Years War, 1618–1648. Including the long crisis of the 17th century, the birth of Protestantism and the collapse of Catholic Christendom, and ultimately, “the gleaming T-800 Terminator skeleton of capitalism emerging from the rotting corpse of feudalism”. In addition to tales of lurid violence from a bygone age, of hot death on the battlefield, and cool palace intrigue, Christman and Wade explore climate change, financial collapse, moral panics, speculative bubbles, pandemic, crisis in institutional legitimacy, of conspiracy theories driving policy, and an information revolution that changes the way everyday people relate to their political leaders. Sound familiar? This is the birth of modernity.Chris Wade is a podcast producer who produces Chapo Trap House, Hell of Presidents, And Introducing, and Infinite Cast. He's also produced and directed short films, music festivals, and many years ago written for Slate.com.Matt Christman is the co-author of The Chapo Guide to Revolution and co-hosts the podcast series Hingepoints, about crucial turning points in history, and Hell of Presidents, about American presidents. He’s most well-known for his work with the Chapo Trap House podcast, but he’s also done a number of these history series as well as his almost daily Grillstream in which he muses about history, Marxist theory, and all sorts of fun stuff.Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

The US military didn't just conquer its way across the US West and the Pacific - it also collected and categorized across these spaces too. In Taking the Field: Soldiers, Nature, and Empire on American Frontiers (U Nebraska Press, 2023), Colorado College's Amy Kohout examines the role of soldiers in the construction of imperial knowledge. By examining how soldiers interpreted the people and places they encountered in the West and in the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth century, Kohout explains how science and the military worked hand in hand to define ideas like wilderness and nature in places newly acquired and explored by the growing American empire. The book addresses a range of topics, from birds to the Black Hills to World's Fairs, and shows how following one's sources can lead a historian to some very interesting, as well as messy, places and conclusions. Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Fort Breendonk was built in the early 1900s to protect Antwerp, Belgium, from possible German invasion. Damaged at the start of World War I, it fell into disrepair . . . until the Nazis took it over after their invasion of Belgium in 1940. Never designated an official concentration camp by the SS and instead labeled a "reception" camp where prisoners were held until they were either released or transported, Breendonk was no less brutal. About 3,600 prisoners were held there--just over half of them survived. As one prisoner put it, "I would prefer to spend nineteen months at Buchenwald than nineteen days at Breendonk."In The Prisoners of Breendonk: Personal Histories from a World War II Concentration Camp (Mariner Books, 2020), , James M. Deem pieces together the story of the camp by telling the stories of its victims--Jews, communists, resistance fighters, and common criminals--for the first time in an English-language publication. Leon Nolis's haunting photography of the camp today accompanies the wide range of archival images.The story of Breendonk is one you will never forget. 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 middle of the twentieth century, in South Africa, Nelson Mandela organized a group of revolutionary freedom fighters to openly denounce the racist apartheid regime. Mandela and MK (Umkhonto we Sizwe) embarked on a dangerous, but revolutionary campaign of sabotage that fueled the burgeoning global anti-apartheid struggle. In Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries (Ohio University Press, 2022) Paul Landau explores the pivotal years that led up to the Rivonia trial in which Mandela was given a life sentence in prison while many of his comrades were either killed, imprisoned or exiled. Landau does this by exploring Mandela’s leadership role in MK as well as by highlighting the motives and actions of the people around him. Landau complicates the whitewashed “grandpa” figure so many of us have come to know Mandela to be. He gives us a detailed glimpse into the mind of the revolutionary and oftentimes violent Nelson Mandela that we so anxiously want to know.Robrecus Toles is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at The University of Mississippi. His research focuses on The Council of Federated Organizations and the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi between the years 1961-1965. He lives in Mississippi with his wife and three kids. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

In 1974, India surprised the world with “Smiling Buddha”: a secret underground nuclear test at Pokhran, Rajasthan. India called it a “peaceful nuclear explosion”—but few outside of India saw it that way.The 1974 nuclear tests became a symbol of India’s ability to help itself, especially given how the country was left out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, an agreement the country argued was colonial. But, as Jayita Sarkar’s Ploughshares and Swords: India’s Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022) points out, India’s nuclear program was in fact the product of Cold War tensions and international networks–including some foreign sources of nuclear knowledge and material. (An open-access version of Jay’s book can be found here)Jayita Sarkar is Senior Lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow and the Founding Director of the Global Decolonization Initiative. She can be followed on Twitter at @DrJSarkar, and her Linktree can be found here.In this interview, Jay and I talk about India’s nuclear program, from its very beginnings through to when India was brought back into the world’s—or, at least, the U.S.’s–nuclear good graces in 2008.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Ploughshares and Swords. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Many African Americans of the Civil War era felt a personal connection to Abraham Lincoln. For the first time in their lives, an occupant of the White House seemed concerned about the welfare of their race. Indeed, despite the tremendous injustice and discrimination that they faced, African Americans now had confidence to write to the president and to seek redress of their grievances. Their letters express the dilemmas, doubts, and dreams of both recently enslaved and free people in the throes of dramatic change. For many, writing Lincoln was a last resort. Yet their letters were often full of determination, making explicit claims to the rights of U.S. citizenship in a wide range of circumstances.Jonathan W. White's To Address You as My Friend: African Americans' Letters to Abraham Lincoln (UNC Press, 2021) presents more than 120 letters from African Americans to Lincoln, most of which have never before been published. They offer unflinching, intimate, and often heart-wrenching portraits of Black soldiers' and civilians' experiences in wartime. As readers continue to think critically about Lincoln's image as the "Great Emancipator," this book centers African Americans' own voices to explore how they felt about the president and how they understood the possibilities and limits of the power vested in the federal government.​​Omari Averette-Phillips is a graduate student in the department of history at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@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

How do states and societies confront the legacies of war and occupation, and what do truth, guilt, and justice mean in that process? In Ghosts of War: Nazi Occupation and Its Aftermath in Soviet Belarus (Cornell UP, 2022), Franziska Exeler examines people's wartime choices and their aftermath in Belarus, a war-ravaged Soviet republic that was under Nazi occupation during the Second World War.After the Red Army reestablished control over Belarus, one question shaped encounters between the returning Soviet authorities and those who had lived under Nazi rule, between soldiers and family members, reevacuees and colleagues, Holocaust survivors and their neighbors: What did you do during the war?Ghosts of War analyzes the prosecution and punishment of Soviet citizens accused of wartime collaboration with the Nazis and shows how individuals sought justice, revenge, or assistance from neighbors and courts. The book uncovers the many absences, silences, and conflicts that were never resolved, as well as the truths that could only be spoken in private, yet it also investigates the extent to which individuals accommodated, contested, and reshaped official Soviet war memory. The result is a gripping examination of how efforts at coming to terms with the past played out within, and at times through, a dictatorship.Jill Massino is a scholar of modern Eastern Europe with a focus on Romania, gender, and everyday life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

On September 2, 1945, Japan surrendered to the United States, ending the Second World War. Yet the Japanese invasion had upended the old geopolitical structures of European empires, leaving old imperial powers on the decline and new groups calling for independence on the rise.That unsteady situation sparked a decade of conflict: in Indonesia, in Vietnam, in China and in Korea, as esteemed military historian Professor Ronald Spector writes about in his latest book, A Continent Erupts: Decolonization, Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, 1945–1955, published by W. W. Norton in 2023.In this interview, Ronald and I talk about the decade of conflict following the Second World War–and whether these conflicts were inevitable in the postcolonial, Cold War world.Ronald H. Spector, professor emeritus of history and international relations at George Washington University, is the author of seven books, including Eagle Against the Sun: The American War With Japan (Free Press: 1984) and In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the Battle for Postwar Asia (Random House: 2008).You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of A Continent Erupts. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Violent Islamic extremism is affecting a growing number of countries in sub-Saharan Africa. In some, jihadi Salafi organizations have established home bases and turned into permanent security challengers. However, other countries have managed to prevent the formation or curb the spread of homegrown jihadi Salafi organizations. In Salafism and Political Order in Africa (Cambridge UP, 2021), Sebastian Elischer provides a comparative analysis of how different West and East African states have engaged with fundamentalist Muslim groups between the 1950s and today. In doing so, he establishes a causal link between state-imposed organizational gatekeepers in the Islamic sphere and the absence of homegrown jihadi Salafism.Sebastian Elischer is an associate professor of political science at the University of Florida. His research is focused on political Islam, violent extremism, and ethnicity, and democratization in sub-Saharan Africa. He is the author of Political Parties in Africa: Ethnicity and Party Formation (Cambridge University Press, 2013)Sally Sharif is Simons Foundation Canada Post-Doctoral Fellow at the School for International Studies at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of “Predicting the End of the Syrian Conflict: From Theory to the Reality of a Civil War” (2021). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

On February 24 2022, Vladimir Putin shocked the world by invading Ukraine. In this short interview, veteran military historian Jeremy Black looks at the conflict from a military point of view. Why have the Russians done so badly? Why have the Ukrainians done so well? And what are the prospects for victory by either side?Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History and the University of Rouen's online periodical Cercles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history