Kevin M. Levin, "Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth" (UNC Press, 2019)

The title of Guy Laron’s The Six-Day War: The Breaking of the Middle East (Yale University Press, 2017) says it all. As Laron notes in this interview, the fact that the war led to ongoing conflicts in the Middle East is an accepted interpretation of the war’s meaning. However, through his research Laron has provided a new lens by which to understand the war. Using a holistic perspective that situates the war in the context of the Cold War and the economic development of the non-western world, Laron argues that several broader trends pushed the Israeli and Arab states into conflict in 1967. As developmental aid disappeared, Arab and Israeli governments alike were facing crises of confidence from their own populations. Reliance on the military became a way to earn legitimacy with a public that was becoming disenchanted, though it also fed into a number of increasingly belligerent moves that ultimately led to war on June 5, 1967. Laron’s research shows as well the role of the superpowers in this conflict. As development aid gave way to military aid, they fueled the rise of militarism in these countries, and their often-contradictory diplomacy only muddied an already difficult situation. The legacy of the war, in addition to the ongoing conflicts that Israel faces in Palestine and its issues with neighbors such as Syria, was an erosion of civil-military relations that gave outsized roles to generals in the region. To write this history, Laron drew on archival research in the archives of former Soviet states and the literature that already existed on the topic. In doing so, he moves the study of the war from being a strictly regional issue to a global one. Zeb Larson is a PhD Candidate in History at The Ohio State University. His research is about the anti-apartheid movement in the United States. To suggest a recent title or to contact him, please send an e-mail to zeb.larson@gmail.com. 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 Juli 201855min

Though Great Britain’s warships ruled the waves throughout the First World War, their greatest challenge came from just underneath them. Nowhere was this better demonstrated in the Western Approaches, where, as Steve R. Dunn details in his book Bayly’s War: The Battle for the Western Approaches in the First World War (Naval Institute Press, 2018), the Royal Navy found themselves hard pressed even to secure the trade routes just off their western shores from the threat posed by Germany U-boats. At the start of the war, the command covering the region, the Coast of Ireland station, was something of a backwater, one not anticipated to be a major area of the war. The U-boat campaign against British trade soon changed this, as sinkings such as those of the liner Lusitania demonstrated the vulnerability of shipping in the region. In response the Admiralty nominated the dynamic Lewis Bayly to take over as commander. Setting a focused, no-nonsense tone from the start, Bayly soon moved to protect merchant shipping and hunt down U-boats by every means possible. Bayly’s greatest success, though, came with the entry of the United States into the war in 1917, as he presided over the successful integration of American naval vessels into his command, where they provided the necessary protection for the ships transporting American soldiers to the battlefields of the Western Front. 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 Juli 201839min

Though there are numerous books about the naval history of the Second World War, very few of them attempt to cover the span of the conflict within the confines of a single volume. Craig Symonds undertakes this challenge in his book World War II at Sea: A Global History (Oxford University Press, 2018), which provides him with a perspective that produces a new understanding into how the conflict was waged. Symonds demonstrates that the naval campaigns were pivotal in determining the winners of the war, given the vast mobilization of resources undertaken by many of the combatants. For the Germans, disrupting this was key, and the fall of France dramatically changed the balance of the naval war in Europe. Yet the British and the Americans were hard pressed to focus on the German threat to British trade once Japan attacked their Asian colonies in an effort to expand their own empire. The result was a juggling act, as the western Allies were forced to constantly readjust finite naval resources to wage two maritime struggles on opposite ends of the Earth. 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 Juli 201855min

In Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research During the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2013), Joy Rohde discusses the relationship between the social sciences, academia, and national security institutions.  Through an examination of the use of military research during the Cold War, Dr. Rohde raises questions about the ethics of scholarship, the military industrial complex, and the role of expertise in the national security arena.  This book is a thought provoking read on the implications of military-funded social science. 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

27 Juni 201849min

Coincident with the hundredth anniversary of the first American engagements in the First World War, Andrew J. Huebner joins New Books in Military History to talk about his book, Love and Death in the Great War (Oxford University Press, 2018).  Through a collection of vignettes – some quite personal to him – Huebner considers the First World War through the lens of the average American citizen soldier and his family.  Accordingly he describes how Americans genuinely believed they were taking part in a war to keep their families and futures safe from German aggression.  Following a course largely set by propaganda, Americans personalized and romanticized the war far more than historians have thought in the past.  Rather than being an agent for change, Huebner also presents the war as a call to normalcy, one which would reassert white Anglo-Saxon masculine prerogatives in a society that, under the Progressives, had for many become unmoored from its past. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

26 Juni 20181h 17min

The First World War is usually associated with Trench Warfare, industrial mobilization, and the Lost Generation. In her recent book, Sexual Treason in Germany during the First World War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), Lisa M. Todd reveals an obsession among elites, the state, and everyday people with sex in the midst of such disruptive warfare. She argues that the state, the churches, and even their neighbors viewed men and women who had sex outside of marriage as traitors to the nation. Critically exploring explosive debates among moral Christians, sex reformers, military figures, and politicians, this book demonstrates the profound ambiguities of the era. Balancing everyday stories with major legal changes and cultural discourse, Todd assesses sexual encounters on the western, eastern, and home fronts. She analyzes fraught issues such as sex work, POW labor, and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Combining dynamic individual stories from a rich archival base, this book is one that will appeal to many listeners. Michael E. O’Sullivan is Associate Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He will publish Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in the fall of 2018. 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 Juni 20181h 2min

Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict (Princeton University Press, 2018), Eli Berman, Joseph H. Felter, and Jacob N. Shapiro, takes a data-based approach to examine how actions can affect violence in asymmetric conflicts.  Using data sets from Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Philippines, the authors evaluate several variables, including the role of civilians, mobile communications, and foreign aid projects.  The book is data-rich and accessible, with findings presented at a tactical level and a policy level. 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

7 Juni 201855min

Sit alongside a disabled teenage Southerner as he records his experience in The War Outside My Window: The Civil War Diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham, 1860-1865 (Savas Beatie, 2018). This unique document—rare for its teenager’s perspective, rare for its register of daily pain across five years—is a testament to what it means to watch the world of the Confederacy slowly fall as one’s body fails, too. LeRoy Gresham, from Macon, Georgia, began writing his diary at twelve years old. His leg had been smashed by falling rubble from a chimney of a burned-out house that he and friends were exploring. LeRoy writes daily, most often from a reclined position and with a mind full of good humor and acid wit. Snark lurks quietly in his words. He covers the goings on of his home, family, slaves, and the people who pass through town and his house, as well as what he reads in newspapers and in a never-ending stream of novels. The war proceeds with fits and starts, and he adds his cheers for the Confederacy, until, finally, the dream of that nation comes to an end, and he also dies, at the age of seventeen. The cause, it is today decided in a detailed medical afterward written by a specialist in nineteenth-century medicine, was spinal tuberculosis, something much more insidious than a broken leg. Janet Elizabeth Croon—recently retired from teaching International Baccalaureate History in Fairfax County, Virginia—has transcribed, edited, and annotated the diary, and provides detailed information about the people around LeRoy, as well as the results of battles and the realities of his ailments at which he could only guess. Listen to my conversation with Janet as we talk about how the not so trivial details of food and weather and playing chess become momentous in his felt understanding of the world. Although he could see his body deteriorate, the point of LeRoy’s own written record is that the experience of pain is never completely localizable. The more his body was down, the more his ears were perked, receptive to the latest vagaries of the time. One of the ongoing themes in our conversation is that LeRoy’s physical separation from the fight opened a wider space to consider it, inciting much laughter at his own predicament (and the country’s), and a deep absorption of the trials and joys around him. Eventually his thoughts on the talents and blunders of the war’s commanders and his thoughts on his daily pain become one. He comes to an end, and the world has changed. Michael Amico holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. His dissertation, The Forgotten Union of the Two Henrys: A History of the “Peculiar and Rarest Intimacy” of the American Civil War, is about the romance between Henry Clay Trumbull and Henry Ward Camp of the Tenth Connecticut Regiment. He will be a Researcher at the Center for the History of Emotions in Berlin beginning this fall. He is the author, with Michael Bronski and Ann Pellegrini, of “You Can Tell Just by Looking”: And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People (Beacon, 2013), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Nonfiction. He can be reached at mjamico@gmail.com.   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 Maj 20181h 1min