Tiffany Earley-Spadoni, "Landscapes of Warfare: Urartu and Assyria in the Ancient Middle East" (UP Colorado, 2025)

Officially, women in the Soviet Union enjoyed a degree of equality unknown elsewhere in Allied countries at the time. However, long-standing norms of gendered behavior and stereotypes that cast women as morally weak, politically fallible, and sexually tempting meant that women in the army or living behind enemy lines were viewed with skepticism, seen as weak points easily exploited by the enemy. Concerned about sabotage, espionage, and ideological corruption, authorities categorized women who fraternized with the enemy—or who were suspected of doing so—as “socially dangerous,” a uniquely Soviet legal designation that exposed the accused to prosecution, imprisonment, and exile. Even without official sanction, women rumored to be involved with German occupiers were reviled, and treated accordingly, by their neighbors. By reading official reports against the grain and incorporating rare personal documents, Kazyulina provides a multifaceted study of the realities for non-Jewish Soviet women—in the army or resistance, or at home in occupied territories—during and after Nazi occupation. Guest: Regina Kazyulina (she/her), is the assistant director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and a visiting assistant professor of history. She teaches in the Graduate Certificate Program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Her research interests include everyday life under German occupation, the “Holocaust by Bullets,” and the gendered lived experiences of Soviet civilians. Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990. Scholars@Duke: https://scholars.duke.edu/pers... Linktree: https://linktr.ee/jennapittman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

23 Jul 47min

Emerging from an award-winning article in International Security, China's Gambit examines when, why, and how China attempts to coerce states over perceived threats to its national security. Since 1990, China has used coercion for territorial disputes and issues related to Taiwan and Tibet, yet China is curiously selective in the timing, target, and tools of coercion. This book offers a new and generalizable cost-balancing theory to explain states' coercion decisions. It demonstrates that China does not coerce frequently and uses military coercion less when it becomes stronger, resorting primarily to non-militarized tools. Leveraging rich empirical evidence, including primary Chinese documents and interviews with Chinese and foreign officials, this book explains how contemporary rising powers translate their power into influence and offers a new framework for explaining states' coercion decisions in an era of economic interdependence, particularly how contemporary global economic interdependence affects rising powers' foreign security policies. Nomeh Anthony Kanayo, Ph.D. Candidate in International Relations at Florida International University, with research interest in Africa's diaspora relations, African-China relations, great power rivalry and IR theories. Check out my new article https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sciaf.2025.e02699 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

21 Jul 1h 11min

Alex J. Kay (senior lecture of History at Potsdam University in Berlin) and David Stahel (senior lecturer in History at the University of New South Wales in Canberra) have edited a groundbreaking series of articles on German mass killing and violence during World War II. Four years in the making, this collection of articles spans the breadth of research on these topics and includes some non-English speaking scholars for the first time in a work of this magnitude. Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe (Indiana UP, 2018) argues for a more comprehensive understanding of what constitutes Nazi violence and who was affected by this violence. The works gathered consider sexual violence, food depravation, and forced labor as aspects of Nazi aggression. Contributors focus in particular on the Holocaust, the persecution of the Sinti and Roma, the eradication of "useless eaters" (psychiatric patients and Soviet prisoners of war), and the crimes of the Wehrmacht. The collection concludes with a consideration of memorialization and a comparison of Soviet and Nazi mass crimes. While it has been over 70 years since the fall of the Nazi regime, the full extent of the ways violence was used against prisoners of war and civilians is only now coming to be fully understood. Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe provides new insight into the scale of the violence suffered and brings fresh urgency to the need for a deeper understanding of this horrific moment in 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

20 Jul 42min

World War II endures in the popular imagination as a heroic struggle between good and evil, with villainous Hitler driving its events. But Hitler was not in power when the conflict erupted in Asia—and he was certainly dead before it ended. His armies did not fight in multiple theaters, his empire did not span the Eurasian continent, and he did not inherit any of the spoils of war. That central role belonged to Joseph Stalin. The Second World War was not Hitler’s war; it was Stalin’s war. Drawing on ambitious new research in Soviet, European, and US archives, Stalin's War: A New History of World War II (Basic Books, 2021) by award winning historian, Sean McMeekin, Professor of History at Bard College, revolutionizes our understanding of this global conflict by moving its epicenter to the east. Hitler’s genocidal ambition may have helped unleash Armageddon, but as McMeekin shows, the war which emerged in Europe in September 1939 was the one Stalin wanted, not Hitler. So, too, did the Pacific war of 1941–1945 fulfill Stalin’s goal of unleashing a devastating war of attrition between Japan and the “Anglo-Saxon” capitalist powers he viewed as his ultimate adversary. McMeekin also reveals the extent to which Soviet Communism was rescued by the US and Britain’s self-defeating strategic moves, beginning with Lend-Lease aid, as American and British supply boards agreed almost blindly to every Soviet demand. Stalin’s war machine, McMeekin shows, was substantially reliant on American materiél from warplanes, tanks, trucks, jeeps, motorcycles, fuel, ammunition, and explosives, to industrial inputs and technology transfer, to the foodstuffs which fed the Red Army. This unreciprocated American generosity gave Stalin’s armies the mobile striking power to conquer most of Eurasia, from Berlin to Beijing, for Communism. A groundbreaking reassessment of the Second World War, Stalin’s War is revisionist history at its very best: breaking down old paradigms and narratives and bringing to the fore new understandings of the historical process. All from a historian who has the best claim to be the closest, modern-day American equivalent of A. J. P. Taylor. Charles Coutinho Ph. D. 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/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

20 Jul 1h 15min

Today I’m speaking with Marcus Golding, historian and Director of Educational Operations at ClioVis. ClioVis is an incredible software and learning tool that allows educators and studies to create digital timelines, network visualizations, and interactive presentations. Founded by UT Austin history professor Erika Bsumek, ClioVis is made for professors and teachers by current professors and scholars. I’m thrilled to get the chance today to speak with Marcus about this software to share with our listeners how they can enhance their own work and teaching. Visit ClioVis' website to learn more: Click Here 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 Jul 22min

During the war in Vietnam, thousands of young men served as conscientious objector medics. They had been certified by their local draft boards as noncombatants, but many would know intense combat nonetheless. Without weapons training, they ran through the infantry lines, answering the desperate call, "Medic!" Many displayed exemplary heroism even at the cost of their lives. With the end of the draft, we will never see their like again. Conscientious Objectors at War: The Vietnam War's Forgotten Medics (Texas Tech University Press, 2025) tells their stories within the background context of pacifist churches in America. It is the first book exclusively devoted to such men, who emerged initially from the historic peace churches--Quakers, Brethren, Mennonites--and from Seventh-day Adventists, who would comprise roughly half of all conscientious objector medics serving in the Vietnam War. From World War II on, growing numbers of men from mainstream churches made the same choices, and after a Supreme Court decision in 1965, so too would men who claimed humanist and secular justification. The pages contain the stories of pantheists and Catholics, among others from the peace traditions. Gary Kulik, who also served as a conscientious-objector medic, interweaves his own story into those he recounts, stories of fierce combat, stumbling accidents, moments of fleeting honor and ever-present death. Gary Kulik served as a deputy director of the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, near Wilmington, Delaware. Previously, he was a department head and assistant director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History and the editor of American Quarterly. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. 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 Jul 55min

The history of the world’s most successful military alliance, from the wrecked Europe of 1945 to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. As they signed NATO into being after World War II, its founders fervently believed that only if the West’s democracies banded permanently together could they avoid a catastrophic global atomic conflict. Over the 75 years since, the alliance has indeed avoided war with Russia, also becoming a major political, strategic and diplomatic player well beyond its borders. It has survived disagreements between leaders from Eisenhower, Churchill and de Gaulle to Trump, Stoltenberg and Merkel, faced down Kremlin foes from Stalin to Putin and endured unending questions and debate over what new nations might be allowed to join. Deterring Armageddon: A Biography of NATO (Hachette UK, 2024) takes the reader from backroom deals that led to NATO’s creation, through the Cold War, the Balkans and Afghanistan to the current confrontation with the Kremlin following the invasion of Ukraine. It examines the tightrope walked by alliance leaders between a powerful United States sometimes flirting with isolationism and European nations with their ever-evolving wishes for autonomy and influence. Having spent much of its life preparing for conflicts that might never come, NATO has sometimes found itself in wars that few had predicted – and with its members now again planning for a potential major European conflict. It is a tale of tension, danger, rivalry, conflict, big personalities and high-stakes military and diplomatic posturing – as well as espionage, politics and protest. From the Korean War to the pandemic, the Berlin and Cuba crises to the chaotic evacuation from Kabul, Deterring Armageddon tells how the alliance has shaped and been shaped by history – and looks ahead to what might be the most dangerous era it has ever faced. Peter Apps is global defence correspondent for Reuters news agency and is currently on sabbatical as executive director of the Project for Study of the 21st Century (PS21). He is the author of two Kindle Singles. BEFORE EBOLA (2014) describes his experiences covering haemorrhagic fever in Angola in 2005 while CHURCHILL IN THE TRENCHES (2015) reconstructs the experiences of Britain's future prime minister at the front line during the First World War. Peter's podcast, focusing on modern military topics, as part of PS21 can be found here. Sidney Michelini is a post-doctoral researcher working on Ecology, Climate, and Violence at the Peace Research Institute of Frankfurt (PRIF). Book Recomendations: Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow Tom Clancy novels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

18 Jul 58min

In the early hours of March 24, 1976, the streets of Buenos Aires rumble with tanks as soldiers seize the presidential palace and topple Argentina’s leader. The country is now under the control of a military junta, with army chief Jorge Rafael Videla at the helm. With quiet support from the United States and tacit approval from much of Argentina’s people, who are tired of constant bombings and gunfights, the junta swiftly launches the National Reorganization Process or El Proceso—a bland name masking their ruthless campaign to crush the political left and instill the country with “Western, Christian” values. The junta holds power until 1983 and decimates a generation. One of the military’s most diabolical acts is kidnapping hundreds of pregnant women. After giving birth in captivity, the women are “disappeared,” and their babies secretly given to other families—many of them headed by police or military officers. For mothers of pregnant daughters and daughters-in-law, the source of their grief is twofold—the disappearances of their children, and the theft of their grandchildren. A group of fierce grandmothers forms the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, dedicated to finding the stolen infants and seeking justice from a nation that betrayed them. At a time when speaking out could mean death, the Abuelas confront military officers and launch protests to reach international diplomats and journalists. They become detectives, adopting disguises to observe suspected grandchildren, and even work alongside a renowned American scientist to pioneer groundbreaking genetic tests. A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children (Simon & Schuster, 2025) by Haley Cohen Gilliland is the rarest of nonfiction that reads like a novel and puts your heart in your throat. It is the product of years of extensive archival research and meticulous, original reporting. It marks the arrival of a blazing new talent in narrative journalism. In these pages, a regime tries to terrorize a country, but love prevails. The grandmothers’ stunning stories reveal new truths about memory, identity, and family. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 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 Jul 50min