Chad R. Diehl, "Resurrecting Nagasaki: Reconstruction and the Formation of Atomic Narratives" (Cornell UP, 2018)
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki both play a central role in any narrative of the end of the East Asia-Pacific War in 1945, yet Hiroshima has consistently drawn more attention in the ensuing decades. In Resurrecting Nagasaki: Reconstruction and the Formation of Atomic Narratives (Cornell University Press, 2018), Chad Diehl argues that the tendency to overlook the bomb’s impact on the citizens of Nagasaki and the city’s arduous, contested process of reconstruction is hardly a coincidence. As Diehl exhaustively demonstrates in this richly documented, multi-dimensional study, Nagasaki’s municipal officials and US Occupation authorities worked together—though not necessarily for the same reasons—to downplay the bomb’s horrific impact in order to promote the city’s identity as an “international cultural city.” At the same time, conflicting interpretations of Nagasaki’s atomic past, present, and future have always competed with the officially sanctioned narrative for national and international attention. Throughout the Occupation era and even into the present day, Nagai Takashi (the “Saint of Urakami”), the city’s Catholic community, and survivor-activists have all contributed to a multivocal discourse that, in Diehl’s analysis, provides new insights into the politics of collective memory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history
11 Des 20181h 14min
McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017)
McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work 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
6 Des 20181h 4min
Daniel Siemens, "Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler’s Brownshirts" (Yale UP, 2017)
In his new book, Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler’s Brownshirts (Yale University Press, 2017, Daniel Siemens, professor of European history at Newcastle University, writes a comprehensive history of the SA, from the early 1920s until Nazi Germany’s total defeat in 1945. Siemens demonstrates how the SA evolved from a small organization to a massive and potent force that directly impacted the Nazi rise to power, and how that organization shaped German society during the Nazi period. He tackles the long-held view that the SA had become largely irreverent after the 1934 purge known as the “Night of the Long Knives,” and shows how the SA had significant impact in the military, the management of conquered territories and the Holocaust. 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 Nov 201847min
Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers, "The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War" (U Chicago Press, 2018)
The prologue to The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War (University of Chicago Press, 2018) begins by provocatively invoking a question American physiologist Walter Cannon first asked in 1926: “Why don’t we die daily?” In the erudite chapters that follow, Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers explore how practitioners and theorists working during and after World War I tried to answer that very thorny problem in light of the challenges of wound shock. This functional disorder demanded that doctors, surgeons, and physiologists account for two medical realities: first, that wound shock was a whole-body, multi-systemic response to trauma; and second, that a fairly homogenous group—namely the young, male soldier-patient—responded to wound shock in highly variable and individuals ways. Whereas the historiography of World War I and trauma has largely focused on psychopathological models, Geroulanos and Meyers illuminate how the work of Henry Head, Réné Leriche, Kurt Goldstein and others enacted a wholesale transformation of the concept of the individual, one that would define medico-physiological individuality as an integrated and indivisible body, but one constantly on “the verge of collapse.” 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 Nov 20181h
Erin Stewart Mauldin, “Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South” (Oxford UP, 2018)
The antebellum South was on the road to agricultural ruin, and the Civil War put a brick on the gas pedal. In Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South (Oxford University Press, 2018), a sweeping reassessment of some of the oldest questions in U.S. historiography, Erin Stewart Mauldin draws on ecology to help her offer a fresh, powerful explanation for why a region that produced so much wealth for centuries became characterized by widespread poverty in the late nineteenth century. She argues that cotton plantations were hardly ecologically sustainable enterprises, yet their habits of shifting cultivation of staple crops and free-range livestock husbandry were better suited to the region’s nutrient-poor soils and oppressive climate than the prevailing land-use practices of northern farmers. But when the war came, the crisis southern farmers had kept in the offing arrived quickly at their shores. Both armies sustained themselves by emptying the South’s granaries, devouring its animals, and razings its forests and fences. Cotton agriculture would never be the same. That is partly because the resources needed to restore it were gone, but also because freed people would not consent to returning to working in gangs on operations large enough to resume shifting cultivation and, when renting or sharecropping fragments of former plantations, refused landowner’s demands that they labor under contract after harvest to maintain the ecological integrity of someone else’s property. So the region turned to growing more cotton in more places and more intensively than before the war and depending on costly fertilizers to do so. Subsistence practices vanished, migrants fled to the cities, and debt ruled the land. Erin Stewart Mauldin is Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. She is book review editor of Agricultural History and the co-editor of A Companion to Global Environmental History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). Brian Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he is Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history
9 Nov 201858min
Nathan K. Finney and Tyrell O. Mayfield, “Redefining the Modern Military: The Intersection of Profession and Ethics” (Naval Institute Press, 2018)
Redefining the Modern Military: The Intersection of Profession and Ethics (Naval Institute Press, 2018), edited by Nathan K. Finney and Tyrell O. Mayfield, is a collection of essays examining military professionalism and ethics in light of major changes to modern warfare. Contributors examine philosophical and legal questions about what constitutes a profession, the requirements of a military professional, and military education. Additionally, the authors tackle questions of ethics related to new technological advancements, such as unmanned aircraft. Finally, an interesting discussion of the military’s relationship with society, and vice versa, is discussed as an important component of oversight of the profession. Today I spoke with Finney and one of the contributors, Brian Laslie. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history
31 Okt 201853min
N. M. Sambaluk, “The Other Space Race: Eisenhower and the Quest for Aerospace Security” (Naval Institute Press, 2015)
Many people place the beginning of the American space program at 7:28pm, October 4, 1957 – the moment the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik I, into orbit. This event prompted the United States to open up its own crash program to put first a satellite, then later, human beings, into space. The primary motivating factor for all this, was the fear of missiles being the primary delivery system for nuclear warheads at the height of the Cold War. Our guest in this episode –Nicholas Michael Sambaluk – makes the case for another perspective on the Eisenhower Administration’s decision to engage in space exploration. In his book The Other Space Race: Eisenhower and the Quest for Aerospace Security (Naval Institute Press, 2015), Sambaluk describes the checkered history of the Dynamic Soarer Space Glider Bomber – a.k.a. “Dyna-Soar,” a heat-resistant single seat-space shuttle that was intended to guarantee American aerospace superiority. Though ultimately canceled, the Dyna-Soar program’s legacy continues to this day in the form of the SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance Aircraft, the Space Shuttle, and future orbiting space vehicles. Sambaluk is an associate professor of strategy at the Air University, at Maxwell Air Force Base, in Montgomery, Alabama. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history
29 Okt 20181h 26min
David Pietrusza, “TR’s Last War: Theodore Roosevelt, the Great War, and a Journey of Triumph and Tragedy” (Lyons Press, 2018)
Teddy Roosevelt had one of the most colorful lives in the American history, but few have deeply explored his final years. Historian David Pietrusza does just that in TR’s Last War: Theodore Roosevelt, the Great War, and a Journey of Triumph and Tragedy (Lyons Press, 2018), taking us through a period in which Roosevelt exhorts an America prone to isolationism to join the war against Germany, only for the war to take the life of one of his sons. Pietrusza tracks how Roosevelt’s alters America’s political history, abandoning his “Bull Moose” party and re-uniting the Republicans in hopes of strengthening American foreign policy. And the author chronicles Roosevelt’s heartbreak, unable to die a glorious death on the battlefield himself, but bereaved to see his son die from a policy he advocated. Pietrusza also offers evidence of a controversial theory: that a depressed Roosevelt ultimately took his own life with an overdose of morphine. Bill Scher is a Contributing Editor for POLITICO Magazine. He has provided political commentary on CNN, NPR and MSNBC. He has been published in The New York Times, The New Republic, and The New York Daily News among other publications. He is author of Wait! Don’t Move to Canada, published by Rodale in 2006. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history
17 Okt 201858min
