Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, “Jews in the Russian Army, 1827-1917” (Cambridge UP, 2008)
Every Jew knows the story. The evil tsarist authorities ride into the Shtetl. They demand a levy of young men for the army. Mothers’ weep. Fathers’ sigh. The community mourns the loss of its young. It’s a good story, and some of it’s even true. The reality, of course, was much more complex as we learn in Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern‘s excellent Jews in the Russian Army, 1827-1917 (Cambridge UP, 2008). The drafting of Jews into the Russian army was not really an act of oppression, but, as Petrovsky-Shtern argues, integration. By calling up Jews, the government was de facto recognizing them as full-fledged subject of the empire, the equals of other imperial minorities and even Russians themselves. Of course they were subject to discrimination. But they were not simply victims: the Jewish soldiers changed the culture of the army just as the army changed what it meant to be Jewish within the empire. As Petrovsky-Shtern points out, all this was part and parcel of the process of making both entities–the Jews and empire–modern. So, did your bubbe tell you the story about the wicked Russians press-ganging your poor great grandfather Moishe and then forcibly converted him to Christianity? Read this book and find out what really happened. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. 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 Feb 20091h 19min
Edwin Burrows, “Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners During the Revolutionary War” (Basic Books, 2008)
While researching his Pulitzer-Prize-winning Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (with Mike Wallace; Oxford UP 1999), Edwin Burrows uncovered the story of thousands of American soldiers who had been held prisoner by the British during the Revolutionary War in and around New York. Now he’s back to tell the tale in a full-length book: Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners During the Revolutionary War(Basic Books, 2008). Burrows explains that the British faced a dilemma when deciding what to do with the Americans. On the one hand, if they granted them the status of prisoners of war, that would to some degree legitimate the American cause. Only the soldiers of legal combatants could be POWs, and in the eyes of the British the Americans weren’t legal combatants but rather rebels. On the other hand, if the British classified them as rebels, then they would be placing the Americans–as English subjects–under the protection of English law. That would mean the Americans could not be held without formal charges being brought and trials undertaken. The British weren’t ready to do that. So they opted to suspend habeas corpus and leave the Americans to rot in fetid jails and horrific prison ships. American protests went unanswered, American prisoners died like flies, and when it was all over almost no one bothered to remember. Except Ted Burrows. We should thank him for reviving a story that is all too relevant today as Americans deal with their own dilemmas regarding “enemy combatants.” Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. 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 Nov 200857min
Richard Fogarty, “Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914-1918” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2008)
The thing about empire building is that when you’re done building one, you’ve got to figure out what to do with it. This generally involves the “extraction of resources.” We tend to think of this in terms of things like gold, oil, or rubber. But people can be “extracted” as well. The French empire of the later nineteenth century offers a case in point. Havingfound themselves in a very nasty war with the Germans, the French decided that it might be useful to enlist their African and Southeast Asian colonials in the fighting. As Richard Fogarty demonstrates in his excellent new book Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914-1918 (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), this effort to draft the colonials led to no end of paradoxes. France was the home of Republicanism, and Republicans are supposed to be keen on liberte, egalite, fraternite. But the colonials weren’t at liberty–they were subjects. Neither were they equal–they enjoyed few of the rights of the native French. And of course they weren’t brothers–rather they were “children” of France. Yet the French felt free to ask their colonial underlings to undertake the highest act of civic sacrifice, namely, to fight and die for la Patrie. Would this sacrifice earn themliberte, egalite, fraternite? No. In fact, it didn’t earn them much but a hellish trip to what looked like the end of the world. For, as Fogarty shows, French racism trumped French Republicanism throughout the war (and after, one might add). The colonial soldiers were segregated, stereotyped, and often used as cannon fodder. Some French felt bad about this. But most didn’t. After all, the colonials needed to be “civilized” in order to enjoy the fruits of Republicanism, and presumably the French believed that asking them to die for their would-be motherland would help accomplish this feat. All it probably did was engender bitterness, as the French were to discover some decades later when their empire slipped away. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history
3 Nov 20081h 2min
Mark Mazower, “Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe” (Penguin, 2008)
It’s curious how historical images become stereotyped over time. One hears the word “Nazi,” and immediately the Holocaust springs to mind. This reflexive association is probably a good thing, as it reminds us of the dangers of ethnic hatred in an era that knows it too well. But in another way the Nazi = Holocaust equation obscures part of the story of Hitler’s insanity and that of all genocidal madness. For as Mark Mazower points out in his excellent new book Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (Penguin, 2008), Hitler’s homicidal aims went well beyond the Holocaust. Of course the Jews would have to go. But that was hardly to be the end of it. The Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, and other residents of the East would have to go too. They were all to be eliminated and replaced by “Aryan” settlers. That was the goal, anyway. That it went unrealized was not due to any lack of effort or nerve. As Mazower shows, the Nazi occupiers uprooted, enslaved, and murdered millions, often with the slightest moral qualms. They failed because they lost the war. We should have no doubt that had they won it–or even defeated the Soviets and brought the West to a stalemate–the Germans would have tried to obliterate the Slavic populations of Eastern Europe. (Whether they might have succeeded in this effort is a hypothetical better not contemplated.) The Jewish Holocaust, then, was but the first in a planned series of mass slaughters aimed at creating a pan-European Nazi Empire. Thank God–and the Allied armies–that it proved to be the last. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history
2 Okt 200846min
James Willbanks, “Abandoning Vietnam: How America Left and South Vietnam Lost Its War” (University of Kansas Press, 2008)
U.S. forces invade a distant country in order to disarm an international threat to American security. They fight well, and win every major battle decisively. They become occupiers, and find themselves engaged in a low-level guerrilla war against a determined though shadowy enemy. The American-backed government has a tenuous hold on power, and it is unclear whether it can survive without significant U.S. military aid. Nevertheless, the American political climate favors rapid withdrawal. The U.S. forces are ordered to prepare the country’s military to take over “major combat operations.” The results of these efforts are mixed. No one seems to know what will happen in the country, but one thing is sure: the Americans are leaving. That was the situation in Vietnam in 1970; so too is it the situation in Iraq today. Thus there could be no more timely moment to revisit Lt. Col. James Willbanks’ (ret.) outstanding Abandoning Vietnam: How America Left and South Vietnam Lost Its War (University of Kansas, 2004; reissue, 2008). Lt. Col. Willbanks is uniquely positioned to tell the tale. He is an excellent historian with a gift for plainspoken, even-handed analysis. But not only that: he was also there. Lt. Col. Willbanks served as an adviser to the South Vietnamese forces during the era of “Vietnamization” in the early 1970s. In Abandoning Vietnam, Willbanks shows just how the Nixon administration’s plan to win “peace with honor” won neither. There are lessons here. Let us hope that whomever is charged with the unenviable task of extricating the U.S. from Iraq will heed them. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. 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 20081h 6min
Howard Jones, “The Bay of Pigs” (Oxford UP, 2008)
There is just something about Fidel Castro that American presidents don’t like very much. Maybe it’s the long-winded anti-American diatribes. Maybe it’s the strident communism (to which he came rather late, truth be told ). Maybe it’s the beard. In any event, it’s clear that Eisenhower, JFK, and Johnson held personal grudges against the Cuban generalissimo. In fact, they all tried to kill him, as Howard Jones shows in his masterful The Bay of Pigs (Oxford, 2008). If you think the Bush administration’s foreign policy is ham-fisted, you really need to read this book. The Bay of Pigs makes it seem as if Kennedy’s “best and brightest” couldn’t have successfully organized a bake sale, let alone an invasion. The CIA got the intelligence wrong, the Joint Chiefs fouled up the military planning, and executive branch was living in bizarro world. Sound familiar? I would laugh, but the fact of the matter is that Kennedy and his crew left 1200 exiles–patriots all–to die on the Playa Giron. There are lessons here, if any one cares to draw them. Thanks to Howard Jones for bringing them to our attention when we need them most. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. 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 20081h 4min
Christopher Capozzola, “Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of The Modern American Citizen” (Oxford UP, 2008)
I confess I sometimes wonder where we got in the habit of proclaiming, usually with some sort of righteous indignation, that we have the “right” to this or that as citizens. I know that the political theorists of the eighteenth century wrote a lot about “rights,” and that “rights” made their way into the the U.S. and French constitutions. But when did they begin to dominate political discourse in the way they do today? Christopher Capozzola has written a terrific book tracing the rights reflex to the aftermath of World War I. It’s called Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of The Modern American Citizen (Oxford UP, 2008). The book focuses on a particular aspect of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American political culture that Chris calls “coercive voluntarism”: putting pressure on one’s confederates to “voluntarily” participate in a state-sponsored enterprise. He finds echoes of it throughout the American experience in World War I, and sees its fallout as one of the origins of rights talk. I can’t force you to read this book, but if I could I would. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. 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 Juli 20081h 7min
John Lukacs, “Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: The Dire Warning” (Basic Books, 2008)
Much has been written about Winston Churchill recently. Some love him, some hate him. But few understand him, at least as well as John Lukacs. That’s hardly a surprise as Lukacs has been thinking and writing about Churchill for over fifty years. He’s written a wonderful book focusing on one of Churchill’s best known speeches, namely the one he gave upon becoming Prime Minister on May 13, 1940. In it, Churchill uttered the memorable and ringing statement that he had nothing to offer the British people but “blood, toil, tears and sweat.” Hence the title of Lukacs’ book: Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat. The Dire Warning (Basic Books, 2008). Things were bad, very bad, in May of 1940. Churchill knew it. We, as Lukacs points out, seem to have forgotten it. Britain was not only losing the war, but according to many had already lost it. For most, Churchill included, the question was not simply how to make the best of a bad situation, but whether the UK, the Empire, Europe and the cause of freedom would survive at all. Churchill wanted to tell all who would listen how disastrous and momentous things were. He found just the right words, though people at the time didn’t realize it. Only as the scope of the task became clear did “blood, toil, tears and sweat” gain the reality–and meaning–that they have for us today. We should thank John Lukacs for reminding us of them. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history
18 Juli 200839min
