Kevin Weddle, "The Compleat Victory: Saratoga and the American Revolution" (Oxford UP, 2021)
British hopes that the American War for Independence would be brought to a swift conclusion began to wane in the early months of 1777. Despite brilliant victories over Washington and his continentals ...
4 Feb 20211h 9min
Olga Dror, "Making Two Vietnams: War and Youth Identities, 1965-1975" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
We are familiar with the history of the division of Vietnam in 1954 into two states, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north and the Republic of Vietnam in the south. What started out essentia...
1 Feb 20211h 1min
Emmanuel Kreike, "Scorched Earth: Environmental Warfare as a Crime Against Humanity and Nature" (Princeton UP, 2021)
In Scorched Earth: Environmental Warfare as a Crime Against Humanity and Nature (Princeton UP, 2021), Emmanuel Kreike offers a global history of environmental warfare and makes the case for why it sho...
25 Jan 20211h 22min
Michael Gorra, "The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War" (Liveright, 2020)
Today I talked to Michael Gorra about his new book The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War (Liveright, 2020). This episode touches on two of William Faulkner’s novels in particular: The Sound ...
21 Jan 202136min
D. Barno and N. Bensahel, "Adaptation Under Fire: How Militaries Change in Wartime" (Oxford UP, 2020)
Few human enterprises are as complex, dynamic, and unpredictable as war. Armed conflict substitutes the relatively ordered reality of peace with the undeniably chaotic reality of combat. Militaries, b...
8 Jan 20211h 2min
Jeremy Black, "A History of the Second World War in 100 Maps" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
The First World War was marked by an exceptional expansion in the use and production of military cartography. But World War II took things even further, employing maps, charts, reconnaissance, and the...
6 Jan 202128min
Kelly A. Hammond, "China's Muslims and Japan's Empire: Centering Islam in World War II" (UNC Press, 2020)
The 1930s-40s expansion of the Japanese empire was marked by significant interest among Japan-based scholars and policy-makers in China’s Muslim population and how best to write them into a new pan-As...
30 Des 202059min
Donald F. Johnson, "Occupied America: British Military Rule and the Experience of Revolution" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020)
When we read the Declaration of Independence, what tends to jump off the page are the lofty propositions concerning natural rights. Yet over a third of the brief document is taken up with a set of cha...
28 Des 202034min
