Tom Weiner, “Called to Serve: Stories of Men and Women Confronted by the Vietnam War Draft” (Levellers Press, 2011)
In 1969, the United States created and implemented a new method of drafting young men for military service–the “draft lottery.” The old system, whereby local draft boards selected those to enter servi...
31 Jul 20141h 2min
Jacqueline E. Whitt, “Bringing God to Men: American Military Chaplains and the Vietnam War” (University of North Carolina Press, 2014)
In this original and innovative study of the American military chaplaincy, Jacqueline E. Whitt examines the institution’s challenges and struggles in the post-World War II era, with the Vietnam War ac...
5 Jul 20141h 9min
Filip Slaveski, “The Soviet Occupation of Germany” (Cambridge UP, 2013)
For over three years, from June 1941 to late 1944, the German Army and related Nazi forces (the SS, occupation troops, administrative organizations) conducted a Vernichtungskrieg–a war of annihilation...
2 Jul 20141h 10min
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
