Stephen Cushman, "The Generals' Civil War: What Their Memoirs Can Teach Us Today" (UNC Press, 2021)
In the decades following the American Civil War, several of the generals who had laid down their swords picked up their pens and published accounts of their service in the conflict. In The Generals’ C...
17 Nov 202156min
Naoko Wake, "American Survivors: Trans-Pacific Memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
The little-known history of U.S. survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings reveals captivating trans-Pacific memories of war, illness, gender, and community. The fact that there are inde...
16 Nov 20211h 29min
Mark Mazower, "The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe" (Penguin, 2021)
In the exhausted, repressive years that followed Napoleon's defeat in 1815, there was one cause that came to galvanize countless individuals across Europe and the United States: freedom for Greece. Ma...
16 Nov 202154min
Gershom Gorenberg, "War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East" (PublicAffairs: 2021)
The Second Battle of El-Alamein, alongside Stalingrad and Midway, is taught in schools the world over as one of the turning points of the Second World War—or, depending on who you talk to, the turning...
11 Nov 202141min
Samuel Moyn, "Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War" (FSG, 2021)
Geographic and temporal limits have typically contained modern wars—rulers can ask their populace to risk lives and treasure for so long before losing legitimacy. But wars have also been horrifyingly ...
10 Nov 20211h
Yuri Kostenko, "Ukraine's Nuclear Disarmament: A History" (HURI, 2020)
Yuri Kostenko’s Ukraine’s Nuclear Disarmament: A History (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2020) is a meticulous account of how the Ukrainian government made a decision in the 1990s to give up th...
9 Nov 202129min
War Stories: The Military Tactics of Ancient Egyptian Rulers As Illustrated by War Records
The lives of ancient Egyptians were truly colorful, and of them, the royals led the most vivid lives. The military pharaohs have left behind many records that give us a glimpse into their warfare styl...
3 Nov 202114min
Gil Hahn, "Campaign for the Confederate Coast" (West 88th Street Press, 2021)
Aubrey L. Glazer's Mystical Vertigo: Contemporary Kabbalistic Hebrew Poetry Dancing Over the Divide (Academic Studies Press, 2013) immerses readers in the experience of the contemporary kabbalistic He...
3 Nov 202149min
