New Books in Military History

It’s a sad story known well. In dead of winter at Wounded Knee Creek in 1890, U.S. soldiers with the Seventh Cavalry Regiment gunned down over two hundred Lakota men, women, and children. Their crime? Taking part in the Ghost Dance ritual. What happened afterwards is a story told less often. David W. Grua, historian and editor with the Joseph Smith Papers project, tells about the competing memory and counter-memory of Wounded Knee as the U.S. Army first shaped the narrative, and later, Lakotas attempted to have their side of the story heard. In his Robert M. Utley Prize winning book, Surviving Wounded Knee: The Lakotas and the Politics of Memory (Oxford University Press, 2016), Grua argues that race, official memory, and public memorialization served the purposes of white supremacy on the northern Great Plains throughout much of the early twentieth century. Official army reports as well as physical memorialization at the massacre site spun a narrative of Indian savagery and white innocence that helped make the case for the twenty Medals of Honor awarded to soldiers who took part in the bloodshed. The truth was, of course, far more complicated, as Lakota activists like Joseph Horn Cloud would prove in an effort to gain restitution and justice from the American government. Surviving Wounded Knee is an important story about what happens to a massacre site once the smoke clears, and is a testament to the power of public history. Stephen Hausmann is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and Visiting Instructor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. He is currently writing his dissertation, a history of race and the environment in the Black Hills and surrounding northern plains region of South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana. 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 Feb 201836min

Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914-1921 (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a masterful account of the Russian revolutionary era by Laura Engelstein, Professor Emerita at Yale University. Spanning the pre-revolutionary period immediately prior the First World War to the end of the Russian Civil War, Russia in Flames provides a rich and comprehensive view of the whys and the wherefores of Revolutionary Russia. Russia in Flames provides both the academic and the general reader with a rich and flowing account of the seminal event of the twentieth century. All from the historian who is in the words of the periodical Kritika: “one of the most important figures in the field of Russian history” today. 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

31 Jan 20181h 4min

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law and History at Vanderbilt University, narrates a postbellum struggle that raged in the Northern Rockies in Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War (W.W. Norton and Company, 2017). In the summer of 1877, General Oliver Otis Howard, a champion of African American civil rights during Reconstruction, ruthlessly pursued hundreds of Nez Perce families who resisted moving onto a reservation. Standing in his way was Chief Joseph, a young leader who never stopped advocating for Native American sovereignty and equal rights. Thunder in the Mountains is the spellbinding story of two legendary figures and their epic clash of ideas about the meaning of freedom and the role of government in American life. Ryan Tripp is an adjunct instructor for several community colleges, universities, and online university extensions. In 2014, he graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in History. His Ph.D. double minor included World History and Native American Studies, with an emphasis in Linguistic Anthropology and Indigenous Archeology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

24 Jan 20181h 14min

In the fifth podcast of Arguing History, Lynn Dumenil and Christopher Capozzola consider the relationship between America’s involvement in World War I and the granting of women the right to vote. As they note, when the war broke out women were enjoying considerable momentum at the state level, having won the right in several states. Together they discuss the impact of the war upon their efforts, looking at how the war fractured some organizations, led to the creation of new ones, and introduced new concepts of citizenship and participating into the public discourse that challenged both the suffrage movement and its opponents. Lynn Dumenil is Robert Glass Cleland Professor of American History, Emerita at Occidental College and the author of The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I; The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s; and Through Women’s Eyes, which she coauthored with Ellen Carol DuBois. Christopher Capozzola is associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen and co-curator of The Volunteers: Americans join World War I, a multi-platform public history initiative commemorating the centennial of America’s First World War. 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 Jan 201857min

In 1917: War, Peace, and Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2018), David Stevenson examines a pivotal chapter of the First World War. Two and a half years of death and destruction had brought the belligerents to new nadirs of attrition and zeniths of strategic calculation. Deeply invested in the war, with unprecedented losses of blood and treasure, and no longer optimistic about their chances of victory, all sides were looking for a quick exit but had few prospects of finding one. In 1917, the Germans gambled in escalating their submarine warfare, which drew the hesitant Americans into the conflict, the French faced mutinies, and the Russians plunged the throes of Revolution. The war thus raged, spreading across two oceans to four continents, finally turning toward its conclusion. In this episode of the podcast, David Stevenson discusses the causes, course, and effects of these events with us, and shares his insights about judging historical forces and human agency, evaluating counterfactuals, and drawing comparisons between 1917 and subsequent events of the last 100 years, including the Second World War, the Vietnam War, and conflicts of the twenty-first century. Professor Stevenson is Stevenson Chair of International History at the London School of Economics, and has published several important works on the World War I including With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918, and 1914-1918: The History of the First World War. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of the Early Modern Spanish Empire specializing on culture, diplomacy, and travel. He completed his PhD in 2017 at UC Berkeley where he is now a Visiting Scholar; he also teaches at Los Medanos College and Berkeley City College.   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 Jan 201856min

Russell Shorto‘s Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom (Norton, 2017) is a history of many revolutions, kaleidoscopic turns through six individual lives. There is Cornplanter, a leader of the Seneca Indians; George Germain, who led the British war strategy during the Revolution; Margaret Moncrieffe Coghlan, the daughter of a British major; the always worried and wearied George Washington; Venture Smith, an African slave who eventually purchased his freedom in Connecticut; and Abraham Yates, the self-taught rabble rouser from Albany who helped shape the politics of New York, and the country. With each turn in their stories, these six lives continuously remerge and recolor the text, and together make one Revolution. Shorto keeps the reader on the ground, so that we can see how the term “freedom,” among other concepts of the time, gained its meaning and importance. We feel each individual’s fight for self-determinacy, including its ugly and oppressive aspects, across their life spans. In our conversation, Shorto and I talk about the insecurities and failures, the feelings of incompleteness, and the attempts at asserting or gussying up one’s self that drive the stories of all these historical subjects. The book slips and slides into ‘great’ events through wonderfully stark portraits of contingency, circumstance, and personality. What Shorto’s approach makes viscerally clear, and what we return to as we talk, is that no one person determined the Revolution more than any other, and no individual view contains all. This matters for the very reason that this Revolution song is no fiction. It is a history with many parts in contrapuntal relation that resolve only to hear a new dissonance and seek another resolution. It is a song we continue to sing. Michael Amico holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. His dissertation, The Forgotten Union of the Two Henrys: The True Story 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 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

13 Jan 20181h 1min

Marie von Clausewitz: The Woman Behind the Making of On War (Oxford University Press, 2016) is an important and fascinating book that not only tells the story of a remarkable woman’s life during the tumultuous years of the French Revolution and Restoration. Based on a recently discovered cache of letters between Marie von Clausewitz and her renowned husband, Carl, it also dramatically expands our understanding of the process by which Carl’s famous treatise, On War, came to be. Vanya E. Bellinger, currently a visiting professor at the United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, argues that Marie was a crucial foil for the development of Carl’s ideas over many years. Marie’s connections to the Prussian court (she was born into the prominent von Bruhl family) also helped to secure her husband’s often precarious position. Bellinger freely acknowledges Carl’s military genius but places Marie alongside her husband as an intellectual partner and political confidante, who played an important role in bringing one of the most famous works of military theory to the world. 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 Jan 201840min

What were the dreams of the Civil War? Find out by listening to my conversation with Jonathan White about his new book Midnight in America: Darkness, Sleep, and Dreams during the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Jonathan W. White is associate professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University. He is the author of several books and almost one hundred articles, essays, and reviews about the Civil War. His earlier book, Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln, was the winner and finalist for a number of book prizes. Now he has written a book about a subject few, if anyone, has known much about—and that in itself is a feat for Civil War history. Midnight in America surveys the dreams of soldiers, civilians, African Americans, the dying, and Abraham Lincoln, including how those dreams were represented in popular culture. The dreams he includes are truly strange, with all the wacky juxtapositions we expect in our own dreaming. Indeed, what White’s book shows overall is that it is the dreams during the Civil War, and not any more the wakeful, sober analyses of official accounts, that most clearly reveal the life of the country, with all its fears, desires, and struggles. Soldiers’ dreams of home (the most prominent ‘theme’ of their dreams) pivoted around feelings of vulnerability and mortality, and, consequently, the need for care and affection. We talk about how their dreams harbored fears of being cheated upon, forgotten, no longer important, and even replaced—fears many times instigated by not having received a letter from home recently. Dreaming is how we get through the day, even as, in their most free-ranging forms, dreams can reveal that which we are trying to escape. As we discuss in our conversation, surveying the content of these dreams offers a view of the emotional dynamics that underwrote ‘the war,’ as well as the dreamer’s drive to fight. We also discuss the differences between white and black cultures of dreaming. The stark divides of the relationships that appeared in the dreams of soldiers and their families back home were on full display in the daily lives of slaves. In contrast to white people, African-Americans gave dreaming a more central, ritualistic place in their cultural practices. And while in public slaveowners presented a ‘rational’ defense of slavery, their dreams evinced a complex recognition of the humanity of black people. The very “dream” of a perfect union, with clear differences between good and evil, especially as sentimentalized in popular culture, was premised on the fear of disunion, disconnection, and incompleteness in ones own life. For better and worse, the war was a dream. Michael Amico holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. His dissertation, “The Forgotten Union of the Two Henrys: The True Story 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 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. 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 Dec 201759min