Stephen R. Platt, “Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War” (Vintage, 2012)
Stephen R. Platt‘s new book is a beautifully written and intricately textured account of the bloodiest civil war of all time. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the...
3 Jun 20141h 15min
Geoffrey Wawro, “A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire” (Basic Books, 2014)
When I was in graduate school, those of us who studied World War One commented regularly on the degree to which historians concentrated their attention on the Western front at the expense of the other...
27 Mai 20141h
Christine Knauer, “Let Us Fight as Free Men: Black Soldiers and Civil Rights” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014)
Recent controversies over integrating the military have focused on issues of gender and sexuality. In the 1940s and 50s, however, the issue was racial integration. As Christine Knauer shows in her new...
20 Mai 20141h 3min
Matthew Muehlbauer and David Ulbrich, “Ways of War” (Routledge, 2013)
In their new survey for Routledge, military historians Matthew Muehlbauer and David Ulbrich move beyond a simplified critique of Russell F. Weigley’s critical “American Way of War” thesis to offer a r...
7 Mai 20141h 8min
Tobie Meyer-Fong, “What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in Nineteenth-Century Century China” (Stanford UP, 2013)
Tobie Meyer-Fong‘s beautifully written and masterfully argued new book explores the remains (in many senses and registers, both literal and figurative) of the Taiping civil war in nineteenth-century C...
1 Apr 20141h 14min
Robert Neer, “Napalm: An American Biography” (Harvard UP, 2013)
Just as there is no one way to write a biography, nor should there be, so there is no rule dictating that biography must be about the life of a person. In recent years, the jettisoning of this traditi...
13 Feb 201447min
Waitman Beorn, “Marching into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus” (Harvard UP, 2013)
The question of Wehrmacht complicity in the Holocaust is an old one. What might be called the “received view” until recently was that while a small number of German army units took part in anti-Jewish...
10 Jan 20141h 18min
Ken MacLeish, “Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community” (Princeton UP, 2013)
Ken MacLeish offers an ethnographic look at daily lives and the true costs borne by soldiers, their families, and communities, in his new book Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Milita...
12 Nov 201345min
