Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019)

In historical writing on World War I, Czech-speaking soldiers serving in the Austro-Hungarian military are typically studied as Czechs, rarely as soldiers, and never as men. As a result, the question of these soldiers' imperial loyalties has dominated the historical literature to the exclusion of any debate on their identities and experiences. Men Under Fire: Motivation, Morale, and Masculinity among Czech Soldiers in the Great War, 1914–1918 (Berghahn Books, 2019) provides a groundbreaking analysis of this oft-overlooked cohort, drawing on a wealth of soldiers' private writings to explore experiences of exhaustion, sex, loyalty, authority, and combat itself. It combines methods from history, gender studies, and military science to reveal the extent to which the Great War challenged these men's senses of masculinity, and to which the resulting dynamics influenced their attitudes and loyalties. Jiří Hutečka is an Associate Professor at the Institute of History, University of Hradec Králové, Czech Republic.  Steven Seegel is Professor of History at the University of Northern Colorado. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

20 Aug 20241h 2min

From Schmelt Camp to "Little Auschwitz" Blechhammer's Role in the Holocaust (Purdue UP, 2024) is the first in-depth study of the second largest Auschwitz subcamp, Blechhammer (Blachownia Śląska), and its lesser known yet significant prehistory as a so-called Schmelt camp, a forced labor camp for Jews operating outside the concentration camp system. Drawing on previously untapped archival documents and a wide array of survivor testimonies, the book provides novel findings on Blechhammer's role in the Holocaust in Eastern Upper Silesia, a formerly Polish territory annexed to Nazi Germany in the fall of 1939, where 120,000 Jews lived. Established in the spring of 1942 to construct a synthetic fuel plant, the camp's abhorrent living conditions led to the death of thousands of young Jews conscripted from the ghettos or taken off deportation convoys from Western Europe. Blechhammer was not only used for selecting parts of the Jewish ghetto population for Auschwitz, but also for killing pregnant women and babies. As an Auschwitz satellite, Blechhammer became the scene of brutal executions and massacres of prisoners refusing to go on the Death March. This microhistory unearths the far-reaching complicity of often overlooked perpetrators, such as the industrialists, factory guards, policemen, and "ordinary" civilians in these atrocities, but more importantly, it focuses on the victims, reconstructing the prisoners' daily life and suffering, as well as their survival strategies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

19 Aug 20241h 2min

Amid the bloody Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2021 and the escalating tensions across the Taiwan Strait, the geopolitical balance of power has changed significantly in a very short period. If current trends continue, we may be witnessing a tectonic realignment unseen in more than a century. In 1904, Halford Mackinder delivered a seminal lecture entitled "The Geographical Pivot of History" to a packed house at the Royal Geographical Society in London about the historic changes then taking place on the world stage. Britain was the great power of that historical moment, but its political, military, and economic primacy was under serious challenge from the United States, Germany, and Russia. Mackinder predicted that the "heartland" of Eastern Europe held the key to global hegemony and that the struggle for control over this region would be the next great conflict. Ten years later, when an assassin's bullet in Sarajevo launched the world into a calamitous war, Mackinder's analysis proved prescient. As esteemed historian Jeremy Black argues in Rethinking Geopolitics (Indiana UP, 2024), the 2020s may be history's next great pivot point. The continued volatility of the global system in the wake of a deadly pandemic exacerbates these pressures. At the same time, the American public remains divided by the question of engagement with the outside world, testing the limits of US postwar hegemony. The time has come for a reconsideration of the 120 years from Mackinder's lecture to now, as well as geopolitics of the present and of the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

17 Aug 202439min

A sweeping account of how small wars shaped global order in the age of empires. Imperial conquest and colonization depended on pervasive raiding, slaving, and plunder. European empires amassed global power by asserting a right to use unilateral force at their discretion. They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence (Princeton UP, 2024) is a panoramic history of how these routines of violence remapped the contours of empire and reordered the world from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. In an account spanning from Asia to the Americas, Lauren Benton shows how imperial violence redefined the very nature of war and peace. Instead of preparing lasting peace, fragile truces ensured an easy return to war. Serial conflicts and armed interventions projected a de facto state of perpetual war across the globe. Benton describes how seemingly limited war sparked atrocities, from sudden massacres to long campaigns of dispossession and extermination. She brings vividly to life a world in which warmongers portrayed themselves as peacemakers and Europeans imagined "small" violence as essential to imperial rule and global order. Holding vital lessons for us today, They Called It Peace reveals how the imperial violence of the past has made perpetual war and the threat of atrocity endemic features of the international order. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

16 Aug 202449min

Britain and Russia maintained a frosty civility for a few years after Napoleon's defeat in 1815. But, by the 1820s, their relations degenerated into constant acrimonious rivalry over Persia, the Ottoman Empire, Central Asia--the Great Game--and, towards the end of the century, East Asia. The First Cold War: Anglo-Russian Relations in the 19th Century (Hurst, 2024) presents for the first time the Russian perspective on this 'game', drawing on the archives of the Tsars' Imperial Ministry. Both world powers became convinced of the expansionist aims of the other, and considered these to be at their own expense. When one was successful, the other upped the ante, and so it went on. London and St Petersburg were at war only once, during the Crimean War. But Russophobia and Anglophobia became ingrained on each side, as these two great empires hovered on the brink of hostilities for nearly 100 years. Not until Britain and Russia recognized that they had more to fear from Wilhelmine Germany did they largely set aside their rivalries in the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, which also had major repercussions for the balance of power in Europe. Before that came a century of competition, diplomacy and tension, lucidly charted in this comprehensive new history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

13 Aug 202438min

The Brink: President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1983 (Simon & Schuster, 2018), by Marc Ambinder, is a history of US-Soviet Relations under Ronald Reagan and an exploration of nuclear command and control operations. Ambender weaves together accounts of military exercises, false alarms, and espionage to tell the story of how close the U.S. and the former Soviet Union came to nuclear war in 1983. The Brink is a narrative-style book that also details the evolution of U.S. nuclear war decision-making practices, continuity of government planning, and U.S. interactions with NATO and allies in during the 1980s. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

13 Aug 202458min

Tens of thousands of Italian civilians perished in the Allied bombing raids of World War II. More of them died after the Armistice of September 1943 than before, when the air attacks were intended to induce Italy’s surrender. Allied Air Attacks and Civilian Harm in Italy, 1940–1945 (Routledge, 2023) addresses this seeming paradox, by examining the views of Allied political and military leaders, Allied air crews, and Italians on the ground. It tells the stories of a little-known diplomat (Myron Charles Taylor), military strategist (Solly Zuckerman), resistance fighter (Aldo Quaranta), and peace activist (Vera Brittain) – architects and opponents of the bombing strategies. It describes the fate of ordinary civilians, drawing on a wealth of local and digital archival sources, memoir accounts, novels, and films, including Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and John Huston’s The Battle of San Pietro. The book will be of interest to readers concerned about the ethical, legal, and human dimensions of bombing and its effects on civilians, to students of military strategy and Italian history, and to World War II buffs. They will benefit from a people-focused history that draws on a range of eclectic and rarely used sources in English and Italian. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

11 Aug 202458min

One of the most well-told episodes of the First World War, the 1915 Gallipoli expedition, also has its own long-ignored aspects - specifically, the story of how the Allied force successfully evacuated in the middle of winter under the guns of the Turkish defenders. Our guest for this episode of New Books in Military History is an expert on the Gallipoli campaign, retired chief oral historian of the Imperial War Museum in London, U.K., Peter Hart. In a rollicking and engaging interview with host Bobby WIntermute, Peter discusses his most recent book, The Gallipoli Evacuation (Living History, 2020), the oral historian's craft, and the overall conditions faced by British, ANZAC, French, and Turkish troops in the waning months of the campaign.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

10 Aug 20241h 4min