David Armitage, “Civil Wars: A History in Ideas” (Yale UP, 2017)
Civil wars are among the most intractable conflicts in the world. Yet exactly distinguishes civil war from other types of armed struggle? In his book Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (Vintage Books, 201...
2 Mar 201841min
John Broich, “Squadron: Ending the African Slave Trade” (Overlook Duckworth Press, 2017)
Despite the British being early abolitionists, a significant slave trade remained in the western Indian Ocean through the mid-1800s, even after the cessation of most imperial slave trading activities ...
1 Mar 201832min
Mahon Murphy, “Colonial Captivity during the First World War: Internment and the Fall of the German Empire, 1914-1919” (Cambridge UP, 2017)
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...
14 Feb 201858min
Thomas Whigham, “The Road to Armageddon: Paraguay versus the Triple Alliance, 1866-1870” (U Calgary Press, 2017)
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 ...
14 Feb 201856min
Christopher Hager, “I Remain Yours: Common Lives in Civil War Letters” (Harvard UP, 2018)
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...
12 Feb 20181h
Gregory A. Daddis, “Westmoreland’s War: Reassessing America’s Strategy in Vietnam” (Oxford UP, 2014)
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 supple...
9 Feb 20181h 10min
Robert Aquinas McNally, “The Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America’s Gilded Age” (Bison Books, 2017)
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-...
9 Feb 201855min
David W. Grua, “Surviving Wounded Knee: The Lakotas and the Politics of Memory” (Oxford UP, 2016)
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?...
5 Feb 201836min
