Mark Cornwall, "Sarajevo 1914: Sparking the First World War" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
In June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. This key event in 20th-century history continues to fascinate the public imagination, yet few historians hav...
17 Dec 202042min
Jeremy Black, "Tank Warfare" (Indiana UP, 2020)
The story of the battlefield in the 20th century was dominated by a handful of developments. Foremost of these was the introduction and refinement of tanks. In Tank Warfare (Indiana UP, 2020), promine...
16 Dec 202052min
Jiří Hutečka, "Men Under Fire: Motivation, Morale, and Masculinity among Czech Soldiers in the Great War, 1914–1918" (Berghahn Books, 2019)
In historical writing on World War I, Czech-speaking soldiers serving in the Austro-Hungarian military are typically studied as Czechs, rarely as soldiers, and never as men. As a result, the question ...
9 Dec 20201h 2min
Rana Mitter, "China's Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism" (Harvard UP, 2020)
Although World War II had been largely remembered in the People’s Republic of China as an experience of victimization since its founding in 1949, that view has been changing since the Deng Xiaoping er...
8 Dec 20201h 2min
Michael Brenes, "For Might and Right: Cold War Defense Spending and the Remaking of American Democracy" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020)
Donald Trump campaigned on a great many things in 2016, but one of the issues he used to criticize Democrats was their role in supporting sequestration and cuts to the military budget. While partisan ...
3 Dec 20201h 4min
Covell F. Meyskens, "Mao's Third Front: The Militarization of Cold War China" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
In 1964, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) made a momentous policy decision. In response to rising tensions with the United States and Soviet Union, a top-secret massive military industrial complex in...
1 Dec 20201h 29min
Paul Jankowski, "All Against All: The Long Winter of 1933 and the Origins of the Second World War" (Harper, 2020)
In his latest monograph, All Against All: The Long Winter of 1933 and The Origins of the Second World War (Harper, 2020), Professor Paul Jankowski (Brandeis University) provides a wide-angled account ...
30 Nov 202050min
Jeremy Black, "Geopolitics and the Quest for Dominance" (Indiana UP, 2016)
History and geography delineate the operation of power, not only its range but also the capacity to plan and the ability to implement. Approaching state strategy and policy from the spatial angle, Jer...
30 Nov 20201h 5min
