Giles Tremlett, "The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

One of the most recent additions to the well-known and highly regarded Eerdmans series, the Library of Religious Biography, is The Religious Life of Robert E. Lee (Eerdmans, 2017), by R. David Cox, a professor of history at Southern Virginia University. Professor Cox’s book presents his perennially controversial subject was a consistently religious thinker, working from the deist and evangelical influences of Lee’s parents towards the religious convictions and commitments of his maturity. But what does Christian faith look like in times of civil war? Did Lee think about slavery within any kind of religious frame? And how could a man of sincere, if evolving, Episcopal faith come to terms with the fact that hundreds of thousands of men had died under his leadership? In today’s podcast, Professor Cox steers us through these troubled times. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

14 Dec 201843min

In her new book, Filming the Colonial Past: The New Zealand Wars on Screen (Otago University Press, 2018), Annabel Cooper, an Associate Professor in the Gender Studies Programme at the University of Otago, explores how filmmakers have portrayed the New Zealand wars of the 19th century and how those productions serve as a snapshot of the complex cultural moment of their creation. Exploring today's new forms of media and innovative platforms, Cooper charts the growth of Maori creative control in telling these important national stories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

14 Dec 201817min

Was World War II really the 'Good War'? In the years since the declaration of peace in 1945 many myths have sprung up around the conflict in the victorious nations, especially the United Kingdom. In his newest book, The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion (I.B. Tauris, 2018), writer and journalist, Peter Hitchens, past winner of the Orwell Prize and regular columnist for the Mail on Sunday, takes on the myth of World War II as the 'good war', and in the process he deconstructs the many fables which have become associated with this highly popular historical narrative. Whilst not per se arguing against the idea that at some point in time Hitler's Germany had to be defeated, Hitchens queries the need to have commenced that war in September 1939. Along the way, Hitchens queries and or attacks various other myths such as Anglo-American solidarity and the so-called 'Special Relationship'; that the Battle of Britain was an important turning point in the war, or that British and American involvement were the key aspect to the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany. By turns, erudite, unorthodox and even funny, Hitchens book is a must read for anyone who is interested in the run-up to World War II and the way in which that conflict was fought. Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. It you have a recent title to suggest for a podcast, please send an e-mail to Charlescoutinho@aol.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

12 Dec 201846min

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 Dec 20181h 14min

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 Dec 20181h 4min

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

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

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