New Books in Military History

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day. The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education. Today I spoke with Leslie Harris about the book. Dr. Harris is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia). Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

28 Apr 202059min

In her new book Duty Beyond the Battlefield: African American Soldiers Fight for Racial Uplift, Citizenship, and Manhood, 1870-1920 (Southern Illinois University Press, 2020), Le’Trice D. Donaldson investigates how African American soldiers used their military service to challenge white notions of an African American second-class citizenry and forged a new identity as freedom fighters, demanding the rights of full citizenship and manhood. Donaldson identifies the often-overlooked era between the Civil War and the end of World War I as the beginning of black soldiers’ involvement in the long struggle for civil rights. Donaldson interrogates the association between masculinity and citizenship and the ways in which performing manhood through military service influenced how these men struggled for racial uplift. Following the Buffalo soldier units and two regular army infantry units from the frontier and the Mexican border to Mexico, Cuba, and the Philippines, she investigates how these locations and the wars therein provide windows into how the soldiers’ struggles influenced black life and status within the United States. Duty beyond the Battlefield demonstrates that from the 1870s to 1920s military race men laid the foundation for the “New Negro” movement and the rise of Black Nationalism that influenced the future leaders of the twentieth century Civil Rights movement. Dr. Le’Trice Donaldson is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Stout and the author of A Voyage through the African American Experience. She is also the creator and co-editor of The Blerdy Report a blog dedicated to all things Black and nerdy in film, television, and the comic universe. You can find her on Twitter @eboninerd and on Instagram @letrice_blackladynerd Dr. Isabel Machado is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Memphis. Her forthcoming book uses Carnival as a vehicle to understand social and cultural changes in Mobile, Alabama (USA) in the second half of the 20th century. Her new research project is an investigation of different generations of artists and performers who challenge gender normativity in Monterrey, Nuevo León (Mexico). She also works as an Assistant Producer for the Sexing History podcast.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

28 Apr 20201h 14min

Why did the Allies win World War II? In the this podcast of Arguing History, Professor of History Emeritus at Exeter University, Jeremy Black and Dr. Charles Coutinho of the Royal Historical Society, discuss the the respective roles of military resources vs. fighting quality in the Second World War. One view has it that while the Germans were tactically and operationally superior to the Allies, they simply could not overcome the Allies' superiority in terms of men and materiel. But what role did improvements in Allied military training and tactics during the course of the war prove an equally important variable? 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 recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

27 Apr 202036min

In this interview we discuss Fight Fight (Braveship Books, 2018), book 3 of the Raven One series. In Fight Fight, former aviator Kevin Miller explores the next big fight in the South China Sea when errors and miscalculations on the grandest scale drive the world’s greatest maritime powers into conflict. From aboard a nuclear powered super-carrier in the center of the maelstrom readers get a front row seat to the action as well as the planning and deliberation that goes into waging war. In Fight Fight the reader experiences the angst of a pilot about to catapult into the night sky and the frustration of being at the end of a long decision-making whip. Captain Miller also successfully paints the fog of modern war where near instant communications and extremely effective sensors give the decision-makers the illusion of knowledge. As an avid fan of military fiction, I have had an itch for this particular type of book since the Late Tom Clancy left the literary field. Consider the itch scratched. In the interview we also discuss the wider strategic and tactical realities that would face US Naval forces in any campaign in the South China Sea, and the policy decisions that effect that environment. Captain Kevin Miller, a 24-year veteran of the U.S. Navy, is a former tactical naval aviator and has flown the A-7E Corsair II and FA-18C Hornet operationally. He commanded a carrier-based strike-fighter squadron, and, during his career, logged over 1,000 carrier-arrested landings, made possible as he served alongside outstanding men and women as part of a winning team. Captain Miller lives and writes in Pensacola, Florida. Fight Fight is the third novel in his Flip Wilson series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

27 Apr 202053min

Jeremy Black, professor of history at Exeter University, is one of the most insightful historians of military strategy from early modernity to the present day. In his most recent book, Military Strategy: A Global History (Yale University Press, 2020), he sets out to demonstrate the ways in which strategic thinking has changed over time, paying attention to the changes in technology, ideology and ambition by which it has been shaped. This is a compelling account of a complex and various subject. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

24 Apr 202029min

Adam H. Domby, an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Charleston, has written a rigorous analysis of American political memory as it connects to the Civil War and long shadow of the Confederacy. The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory (University of Virginia Press, 2020) unpacks a variety of threads all connected to the Lost Cause ideology, and all based on falsehoods. These dimensions of the ideology include Domby’s examination of the history of dishonest claims to confederate pensions by white veterans, and also the accusations of fraud associated with claims made by former slaves and free people of color for much smaller pensions. The False Cause digs into the historical claims made about the heroics demonstrated on the battlefield during the Civil War. In this context, The False Cause unpacks the myth that the Confederate army was one of the best ever, and these heroic claims, many of which were made at least forty years after the war itself, are not the only heroic assertions made in context of the Lost Cause ideology. Domby also explores the “soldiers who weren’t” – the enslaved individuals who were compelled to accompany their masters to war, and were then transformed, within this constructed political memory, into Black Confederates, which is yet another myth within the ideology. The book begins with an extremely topical component of the Lost Cause ideology and political memory, the monuments to confederate soldiers that were built long after the war, and that have become contemporary political lightning rods. Through all of these cases, Domby weaves the thread of how each particular area was used to buttress white supremacy and to re-narrate or re-cast the Civil War itself and those who engaged in it. Issues of white masculinity and grievance are embedded within the mythology and are also unpacked in context of these heroic declarations. This is an important historical examination that leads the reader through the facts and the subsequently created mythologies, which continue to shape and impact American politics and historical understandings. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).   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 Apr 202055min

Obedience is integral to the military, to society, and to communities. To bring individuals together to work cohesively and successfully towards a common goal, be it seizing an objective on the battlefield, creating an enduring political or social project, or simply running a local soup kitchen, obedience must be present. But how many of us, whether soldiers or civilians, ever stop to consider just what obedience is? Is obedience a core military virtue? Is it a core civilian virtue, and if so why? Why should soldiers or citizens be obedient? When should they be disobedient? And how might or should conflicting or overlapping obediences influence the conduct of modern American citizen-soldiers? These questions are the driving force behind Pauline Shanks Kaurin's nuanced, insightful meditation on the nature of obedience, On Obedience: Contrasting Philosophies for the Military, Citizenry, and Community (Naval Institute Press, 2020). Dr. Kaurin convincingly argues that our current understanding of obedience is incomplete. While legal and pragmatic definitions abound, few have substantively addressed obedience's moral dimensions. Kaurin offers a welcome corrective to this oversight, forcefully advocating for the cultivation of "critical obedience" in the military, in civil society, and in our communities. An important wok in the field of military ethics, On Obedience provides a robust framework for thinking not only about our future as soldiers and citizens, but about how obedience, as a social and cultural factor, shaped our shared political and military past. Pauline Shanks Kaurin holds a PhD in Philosophy from Temple University, with a specialization in military ethics, just war theory, and applied ethics. Currently, she is a Professor of Professional Military Ethics at the US Naval War College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

22 Apr 202057min

The opposing powers had already suffered casualties on a scale previously unimaginable by October 1914. On both the Western and Eastern fronts elaborate war plans lay in ruins and had been discarded in favour of desperate improvisation. In the West this soon resulted in the remorseless world of the trenches; in the East all eyes were focused on the old, beleaguered Austro-Hungarian fortress of Przemysl. The great siege that unfolded at Przemysl was the longest of the Great War. In the defence of the fortress and the struggle to relieve it Austria-Hungary suffered some 800,000 casualties. Almost unknown in the West, this battle was one of the great turning points of the conflict. If the Russians had broken through in the Fall of 1914, they could have invaded Central Europe and probably knocked Austria out of the war. But by the time the fortress fell in March 1915, the Russian’s strength was so sapped they could go no further. In The Fortress: The Siege of Przemysl and the Making of Europe's Bloodlands (Basic Books, 2020), Professor Alexander Watson, Professor of History at the University of London, prize-winning author of Ring of Steel, has written one of the great epics of the First World War. Comparable to Stalingrad in 1942-3, Przemysl shaped the course of Europe's future. This book, described by Sir Christopher Clark, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, as a ‘splendid book’, is a must read for both layman and scholar alike. It is based upon voluminous archival research and is without a doubt the definitive treatment of the subject. 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 recently for Chatham House’s International Affairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

6 Apr 202053min