New Books in Military History

Richard Overy sets out in Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945 (Viking, 2022) to recast the way in which we view the Second World War and its origins and aftermath. As one of Britain's most decorated and respected World War II historians, he argues that this was the "last imperial war," with almost a century-long lead-up of global imperial expansion, which reached its peak in the territorial ambitions of Italy, Germany and Japan in the 1930s and early 1940s, before descending into the largest and costliest war in human history and the end, after 1945, of all territorial empires.Overy also argues for a more global perspective on the war, one that looks broader than the typical focus on military conflict between the Allied and Axis states. Above all, Overy explains the bitter cost for those involved in fighting, and the exceptional level of crime and atrocity that marked the war and its protracted aftermath--which extended far beyond 1945.Blood and Ruins is a masterpiece, a new and definitive look at the ultimate struggle over the future of the global order, which will compel us to view the war in novel and unfamiliar ways. Thought-provoking, original and challenging, Blood and Ruins sets out to understand the war anew.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

The late Russian Empire experienced rapid economic change, social dislocation, and multiple humanitarian crises, enduring two wars, two famines, and three revolutions. A "pastoral activism" took hold as parish clergymen led and organized the response of Russia's Orthodox Christians to these traumatic events. In Russia's Social Gospel: The Orthodox Pastoral Movement in Famine, War, and Revolution (U Wisconsin Press, 2022), Daniel Scarborough considers the roles played by pastors in the closing decades of the failing tsarist empire and the explosive 1917 revolutions.Roland Clark is a Reader in Modern European History at the University of Liverpool, a Senior Fellow with the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, and the Principal Investigator of an AHRC-funded project on European Fascist Movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

There are currently a record-setting number of forcibly displaced persons in the world. This number continues to rise as solutions to alleviate humanitarian catastrophes of large-scale violence and displacement continue to fail. The likelihood of the displaced returning to their homes is becoming increasingly unlikely. In many cases, their homes have been destroyed as the result of violence.Why are the homes of certain populations targeted for destruction? What are the impacts of loss of home upon children, adults, families, communities, and societies? If having a home is a fundamental human right, then why is the destruction of home not viewed as a rights violation and punished accordingly?From Bureaucracy to Bullets: Extreme Domicide and the Right to Home (Rutgers University Press, 2022) by Dr. Bree Akesson & Dr. Andrew Basso answers these questions and more by focusing on the violent practice of extreme domicide, or the intentional destruction of the home, as a central and overlooked human rights issue. They present a typology of extreme domicide and investigate a number of historical and contemporary case studies: the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya (1952-1960), domicide in Cyprus (1974), domicide and the Cherokee Trail of Tears (1838-1839), the occupation of Palestine (1945-present), Chechnya’s generations of domicide (1944-2009), domicide in Bosnia (1992-1995), the Syrian War (2011-present), and the Rohingya in Myanmar (2012-present).This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. 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 Soviet Myth of World War II: Patriotic Memory and the Russian Question in the USSR (Cambridge UP, 2021), Jonathan Brunstedt examines how Soviet society, a community committed to the Marxist ideals of internationalism, reconciled itself to notions of patriotist, Russian nationalism, and the glorification of war. Brunstedt does through the lens of the myth and remembrance of victory in World War II – arguably the central defining event of the Soviet epoch. The book shows that while the experience and legacy of the conflict did much to reinforce a sense of Russian exceptionalism and Russian-led ethnic hierarchy, the story of the war enabled an alternative, supra-ethnic source of belonging, which subsumed Russian and non-Russian loyalties alike to the Soviet whole. The tension and competition between Russocentric and 'internationalist' conceptions of victory, which burst into the open during the late 1980s, reflected a wider struggle over the nature of patriotic identity in a multiethnic society that continues to reverberate in the post-Soviet space. The book sheds new light on long-standing questions linked to the politics of remembrance and provides a crucial historical context for the patriotic revival of the war's memory in Russia today.Douglas Bell is a writer, teacher, and historian who lives in the Netherlands. His research interests center on American military history, American foreign policy, German history, and European Studies. Tweet him @douglasibell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Eminent jurist, Oxford professor, advocate to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Travers Twiss (1809–1897) was a model establishment figure in Victorian Britain, and a close collaborator of Prince Metternich, the architect of the Concert of Europe. Yet Twiss’s life was defined by two events that threatened to undermine the order that he had so stoutly defended: a notorious social scandal and the creation of the Congo Free State. In King Leopold's Ghostwriter: The Creation of Persons and States in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton UP, 2021), Dr. Andrew Fitzmaurice tells the incredible story of a man who, driven by personal events that transformed him from a reactionary to a reformer, rewrote and liberalised international law—yet did so in service of the most brutal regime of the colonial era.In an elaborate deception, Twiss and Pharaïlde van Lynseele, a Belgian prostitute, sought to reinvent her as a woman of suitably noble birth to be his wife. Their subterfuge collapsed when another former client publicly denounced van Lynseele. Disgraced, Twiss resigned his offices and the couple fled to Switzerland. But this failure set the stage for a second, successful act of re-creation. Twiss found new employment as the intellectual driving force of King Leopold of Belgium’s efforts to have the Congo recognised as a new state under his personal authority. Drawing on extensive new archival research, King Leopold’s Ghostwriter recounts Twiss’s story as never before, including how his creation of a new legal personhood for the Congo was intimately related to the earlier invention of a new legal personhood for his wife.Combining gripping biography and penetrating intellectual history, King Leopold’s Ghostwriter uncovers a dramatic, ambiguous life that has had lasting influence on international law.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Today I talked to Matthew Delmont about his new book Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad (Viking, 2022)Delmont is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of History at Dartmouth College. A Guggenheim Fellow and expert on African American history and the history of civil rights, he is the author of four books: Black Quotidian, Why Busing Failed, Making Roots, and The Nicest Kids in Town. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, NPR, and several academic journals. Originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Delmont earned his B.A from Harvard University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Brown University.Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

During the American Civil War, thousands of citizens in the Deep South remained loyal to the United States. Though often overlooked, this small number of individuals possessed broad symbolic importance and occupied an outsized place in the strategic thinking and public discourse of both the Union and the Confederacy. In True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South during the Civil War and Reconstruction (LSU Press, 2022), Clayton Butler investigates the lives of white Unionists in three Confederate states, revealing who they were, why and how they took their Unionist stand, and what happened to them as a result. He focuses on three Union regiments recruited from the Deep South and explores how Northerners and southerners alike thought about Deep South Unionism throughout the war, often projecting their hopes and apprehensions onto these embattled dissenters.Douglas Bell is a writer, teacher, and historian who lives in the Netherlands. His research interests center on American military history, American foreign policy, German history, and European Studies. Tweet him @douglasibell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Today I will be talking to Carly Buxton about her book Unthinking collaboration: American Nisei in transwar Japan, which came out this year [2022] with the University of Hawaiʹi Press. Unthinking Collaboration uncovers the little-known history of Japanese Americans who spent World War II in Japan. Japanese Americans who found themselves in Japan during the war, could not leave but also, unlike their compatriots, were not interned. But, to survive many had to serve the Japanese state and act as Japanese during the war. When the war ended these same people were mobilized again, but now in the service of the American occupation. Weaving archival data with oral histories, personal narratives, material culture, and fiction, Unthinking Collaboration emphasizes the heterogeneity of Japanese immigrant experiences, and sheds light on broader issues of identity, race, and performance of individuals growing up in a bicultural or multicultural context. By distancing “collaboration” from its default elision with moral judgment, and by incorporating contemporary findings from psychology and behavioral science about the power of the subconscious mind to influence human behavior, Carly Buxton offers an alternative approach to history—one that posits historical subjects as deeply embedded in the realities of their physical and discursive environment. Walking beside Nisei as they navigate their everyday lives in war time and post war Japan, readers are urged to “un-think” long-held assumptions about the actions and decisions of individuals as represented in history. Unthinking Collaboration is an ambitious historical study that relates to broader questions of race and trust, empire-building, World War II, and its legacy on both the Western and Pacific fronts, as well as the questions of loyalty, treason, assimilation, and collaboration.Ran Zwigenberg is an associate professor at Pennsylvania State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Robert Hutchinson's After Nuremberg: American Clemency for Nazi War Criminals (Yale UP, 2022) is about the fleeting nature of American punishment for German war criminals convicted at the twelve Nuremberg trials of 1946–1949. Because of repeated American grants of clemency and parole, ninety-seven of the 142 Germans convicted at the Nuremberg trials, many of them major offenders, regained their freedom years, sometimes decades, ahead of schedule. High-ranking Nazi plunderers, kidnappers, slave laborers, and mass murderers all walked free by 1958. High Commissioner for Occupied Germany John J. McCloy and his successors articulated a vision of impartial American justice as inspiring and legitimizing their actions, as they concluded that German war criminals were entitled to all the remedies American laws offered to better their conditions and reduce their sentences. Based on extensive archival research (including newly declassified material), this book explains how American policy makers’ best intentions resulted in a series of decisions from 1949–1958 that produced a self-perpetuating bureaucracy of clemency and parole that “rehabilitated” unrepentant German abettors and perpetrators of theft, slavery, and murder while lending salience to the most reactionary elements in West German political discourse.Nicholas Misukanis is a doctoral candidate in the history department at the University of Maryland - College Park. He studies modern European and Middle Eastern history with a special emphasis on Germany and the role energy autonomy played in foreign and domestic German politics during the twentieth century. He is currently working on his dissertation which analyzes why the West German government failed to convince the public to embrace nuclear energy and the ramifications this had on German politics between 1973 and 1986. His work has been published in Commonweal, America: The Jesuit Review, The United States’ Naval Academy’s Tell Me Another and Studies on Asia. He can be reached at Misukani@umd.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Gwen Shuni D'Arcangelis's book Bio-Imperialism: Disease, Terror, and the Construction of National Fragility (Rutgers UP, 2020) focuses on an understudied dimension of the war on terror: the fight against bioterrorism. This component of the war enlisted the biosciences and public health fields to build up the U.S. biodefense industry and U.S. global disease control. The book argues that U.S. imperial ambitions drove these shifts in focus, aided by gendered and racialized discourses on terrorism, disease, and science. These narratives helped rationalize American research expansion into dangerous germs and bioweapons in the name of biodefense and bolstered the U.S. rationale for increased interference in the disease control decisions of Global South nations. Bio-Imperialism is a sobering look at how the war on terror impacted the world in ways that we are only just starting to grapple with.Rachel Pagones is an acupuncturist, educator, and author. Before moving to the UK in 2021 she was chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history