Oleg Benesch and Ran Zwigenberg, "Japan's Castles: Citadels of Modernity in War and Peace" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

Great Britain’s victory in the First World War brought with it the competing challenges of defending an expanded empire while reducing military expenditures. In The Royal Navy in the Age of Austerity, 1919-22: Naval and Foreign Policy under Lloyd George (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), Harry Bennett details how British policymakers responded to the quandary that the postwar strategic and political situation posed to them. Though triumphant against the German High Seas Fleet, the British faced the prospect of a new naval arms race against the United States and Japan at a time when the British electorate sought cuts in wartime levels of taxes and spending and the reduction in naval construction threatened to add to the problem of industrial unemployment. With divergent demands on domestic, naval and strategic policy, the Lloyd George government sought to resolve their dilemma with their participation in the Washington Naval Conference of 1921-22, which established limits on the tonnage of capital ships that effectively mitigated against construction sprees while maintaining a degree of warship-building capacity. As Bennett demonstrates, the decisions taken during this period not only shaped policy for years afterward but determined events in the Second World War, offering lessons about the intersection of politics, strategy, and policy formulation that remain valuable today. 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 Sep 201750min

When Charles de Gaulle issued his famous call in June 1940 for the French people to continue fighting Nazi Germany, among those within Occupied France who took up the cause was his young niece Genevieve. In The General’s Niece: The Little Known de Gaulle Who Fought to Free Occupied France (Chicago Review Press, 2017), Paige Bowers tells the story of her life, one lived in perilous times. The daughter of Charles’s oldest brother Xavier, when war broke out Genevieve found herself buffeted by the dislocations that resulted. In the aftermath of the German conquest, she moved from small acts of individual defiance to full participation in the burgeoning Resistance movement, where she helped to educate her countrymen about her previously obscure uncle. Though her possession of the de Gaulle name often drew unwanted attention from the Occupation authorities, she found daring ways to use it to her advantage. Genevieve’s arrest in June 1943 led to her detention in the Ravensbruck concentration camp, an experience which as Bowers shows fueled her postwar activities on behalf of her fellow Resistance detainees, as well as her subsequent activism to fight to end chronic poverty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

19 Sep 201754min

If you were a cadet at West Point and knew with virtual certainty that upon graduation you would be sent into the teeth of the Vietnam war, what would you do? Well, if you were Tom Carhart and five of his buddies, you’d decide to have one last hurrah and steal the Navy’s mascot before the Army-Navy game. Students at West Point had stolen said mascot–“Bill the Goat”–once before, namely in 1954. To avoid further embarrassment at the hands of its arch-rivals, the Navy thereafter placed “Bill” in a high-security facility under Marine guard. No matter, Tom and his fellow cadets said. Even if they were caught (and they knew they would be found out eventually), what could the Army do? Send them to Vietnam? That was in the works anyway. So, as Tom explains in his terrific book The Golden Fleece: High-Risk Adventure at West Point (Potomac Books, 2017), off they went to steal the goat…and off they went to Vietnam. Tom’s a great storyteller, and his book is at moments funny and touching. Moreover, he offers deep insight into what it was like to be a cadet in the 1960s, to know that you were going to war, and to go to war and come back. Not everyone did, of course. I highly recommend you pick up The Golden Fleece. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

15 Sep 201757min

In the third podcast of Arguing History, historians William J. Cooper and Richard Carwardine address the question of the role presidential leadership played in determining the outcome of the American Civil War. Considering the respective positions of both Abraham Lincoln and his Confederate counterpart Jefferson Davis, they discuss the respective backgrounds of the two men, the political environment in which each of them operated, their relationship to their military commanders, and their contributions to the questions of slavery and emancipation as they pertained to the war. In discussing their abilities and actions, Carwardine and Cooper describe some of the important ways in which the two men shaped the conflict and its legacy for us today, in ways both intended and unexpected. William J. Cooper is Boyd Professor of History emeritus at Louisiana State University and the author of several books about American history, including Jefferson Davis, American; We Have the War Upon Us: The Onset of the Civil War, November 1860-April 1861; and, most recently, The Lost Founding Father: John Quincy Adams and the Transformation of American Politics. Richard Carwardine is Rhodes Professor of American History emeritus and the former President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford University. Among his works are Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power and his newest book, Lincoln’s Sense of Humor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

12 Sep 20171h 15min

The civil war in Yemen today harkens back to a similar conflict half a century ago, when the overthrow of the ruling imam, Muhammad al-Badr, in 1962 sparked a conflict that dragged on for the rest of the decade. While primarily driven by domestic politics, as Asher Orkaby explains in his book Beyond the Arab Cold War: The International History of the Yemen Civil War, 1962-68 (Oxford University Press, 2017), the fighting drew in a variety of foreign powers and multinational organizations, each with an agenda that played an important role in defining events. Despite the ongoing Cold War of that time, the United States and the Soviet Union found themselves in the curious position of both supporting the new republican government that took power in the aftermath of Badr’s ousting, though their involvement was quickly eclipsed by that of Egypt. Seizing the opportunity to advance his vision of Arab nationalism, Gamal Abdel Nasser dispatched thousands of troops to Yemen, where they soon found themselves in an intractable struggle that they were poorly prepared to fight. Nevertheless, Egyptian forces secured the republicans hold on Yemen’s major population areas, forcing the royalists to wage a guerrilla war from the mountainous countryside where, with the backing of Saudi Arabia and support from Great Britain and Israel, they were able to prolong the conflict in ways that shaped the history of not just Yemen but the entire Middle East as well. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

5 Sep 201759min

In the wake of the Arab Spring and the ensuing Syrian Civil War, the stories of the millions displaced by the conflict as well as the millions Syria has lost since 2011 remain largely untold. Wendy Pearlman‘s We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled (Custom House, 2017) attempts to fill that void. Almost entirely comprised of interviews with Syrian refugees, conducted in Arabic then painstakingly translated and organized to tell the story of the Syrian Civil War. Pearlman covers the period before the Civil War, the revolution itself and the tragic aftermath. Heartbreaking, inspiring, and informative all at once, We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled is hopefully the first of many such compilations to tell the multifaceted Syrian story. NA Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

30 Aug 201756min

In the 10th century, a succession of Byzantine rulers reversed centuries of strategic policy by embarking on a series of campaigns that dramatically reshaped their empire. This effort and its consequences for the history of the region is the focus of Anthony Kaldellis‘s Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood: The Rise and Fall of Byzantium, 955 A.D. to the First Crusade (Oxford University Press, 2017), which provides the first survey of this important era of Byzantine history written in over a century. Kaldellis sees the campaigns that began in the 950s as a consequence of the collapse of the Carolingian empire and the decline of the Abbasid caliphate, which provided the Byzantines with an opportunity to stabilize their southeastern frontiers and to extend and consolidate their holdings in the Balkans and in Italy. Effected through a combination of military conquest and traditional Byzantine “soft power,” the result was a greatly expanded domain, one centered now in Europe rather than in Asia. As Kaldellis explains, what brought this period to an end was not any factor internal to the empire but the simultaneous threats posed in the late 11th century by the Normans, the Pechenegs, and the Seljuk Turks, which in the end proved too much for the Byzantine state to manage successfully even with the help of the warriors of the First Crusade. 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 Aug 201756min

Hussein Fancy’s book The Mercenary Mediterranean: Sovereignty, Religion, and Violence in the Medieval Crown of Aragon (University of Chicago Press, 2016) begins with the description of five Muslim jenets, or cavalrymen, journeying through Spain in 1285 to serve as soldiers for the crown of Aragon. As Fancy explains, these men were not outliers, but just a few of the many thousands who were employed by successive Aragonese kings over the course of the 13th and 14th centuries, and their service challenges many of our long-held assumptions of the divide between the Christian and Islamic worlds during the Middle Ages. For the kings of Aragon, hiring jenets gave them a powerful force of light cavalry that could be used to foster their imperial ambitions, while the jenets themselves saw their service for Christian kings as fully compatible with their tradition of jihad. By describing their relationship, Fancy’s work highlights one of the many ties that linked Christian Aragon to Muslim North Africa, two regions that are usually treated separately rather than part of the interconnected Mediterranean world that emerges from his pages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

12 Aug 201747min