David J. Silbey, “A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902” (Hill and Wang, 2008)
The Spanish-American War was not only the beginning of a new imperial period for the United States, David Silbey observes in his book A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902 (Hill and Wang, 2008), it was also the point at which the Filipino people first began to conceive of themselves as a nation. Where Americans sought to conquer, control, and pacify their newly-purchased possessions, a nascent nationalist movement sought to create some sense of unity from the hundreds of different tribes, clans, and ethnic groups living in the archipelago. As David Silbey creates a new narrative of this highly controversial, yet little-understood period in American history, he also unveils a series of new interpretations of the war’s conduct, its haphazard administration across thousands of miles, and the new relationships growing between Filipinos and Americans even amidst war. In the end, the Philippine-American War certainly was a strange moment in the history of the US Army and American foreign policy. It was a counter-insurgency that worked, despite the pressures of racial intolerance and mutual misperceptions on the part of its participants. Silbey’s gifts as a writer combined with his skill as a historian create a short yet vital account of this generally forgotten period that is extremely relevant for readers 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
8 Apr 201158min
Thomas Bruscino, “A Nation Forged in War: How World War II Taught Americans to Get Along” (University of Tennessee Press, 2010)
Prior to 1945, the United States was still largely a collection of different ethnic and racial communities, living alongside each other in neighborhoods, villages, and towns. There was only a faint “American identity.” In his new book A Nation Forged in War: How World War II Taught Americans to Get Along (University of Tennessee Press, 2010), Thomas Bruscino argues that the act of military service in the Second World War changed created such a unified identity. As individual men from thousands of small homogenous communities across America entered the military in wartime, they were compelled to work together, sleep together, train together, and if need be, fight together against a common foe. Over the course of the war these representatives of their own unique ethnic enclaves came together to create a new American identity – a mutually accepted unilateral form of whiteness transcending existing racial hierarchies that were a legacy of the nineteenth century. Yet while this new consensus went on after the war to promote a new sense of tolerance that created post-war prosperity and stability, sadly it also remained tied to the color line, as African-Americans and other non-whites learned as they sought equal access to the fruits of American democracy. Bruscino’s book is a valuable and insightful study of how tightly intertwined war, society, and identity are in the American experience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history
25 Mars 20111h 16min
Beth Bailey, “America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force” (Harvard UP, 2009)
The United States Army is a product of our society and its values (for better and for worse), but it also makes claims to shape our society – and of course to defend it. What is the relationship between military service and citizenship? How do we as Americans balance the competing demands of liberty and equality when we establish armed forces to defend us? How are our changing ideas about race, gender, andcivil rights reflected in our military? These are just some of the important questions raised by Beth Bailey‘s America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force (Harvard UP, 2009). By focusing on the transition from a draft army to a volunteer force in 1973 and the ongoing efforts of the United States Army to reform itself and recruit soldiers, Bailey has in effect written an institutional history of the Army over the past four decades. It is a book that should be (andis being) avidly read by members of the armed forces and military bureaucracies as well as citizens interested in the role of our armed forces from a social as well as a military perspective. 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 Mars 20111h 7min
David Day, “Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others” (Oxford UP, 2008)
People will often say that “this land”–wherever this land happens to be–is theirs because their ancestors “have always lived there.” But you can be pretty sure that’s not true. It’s probably the case that somebody else’s ancestors once lived on “this land,” and somebody else’s before that. From the very earliest moments of human history, people have been taking each other’s territory. This seemingly endless cycle is the subject of David Day’s excellent new book Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others (Oxford UP, 2008). Day points out that the process of “supplanting” has a kind of deep structure, no matter when or where it occurs. Claims are made, territories are mapped, colonists settled, soil is tilled, natives are moved about or exterminated, and comforting stories are told, often about how “our ancestors have always lived here.” It’s a rather sad spectacle, though we should thank David for holding this mirror up to us. 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 Mars 201159min
Mark Bradley, “Vietnam at War” (Oxford UP, 2009)
My uncle fought in Vietnam. He flew F-105 Thundercheifs, or “Thuds.” He bombed the heck out of an area north of Hanoi called “Thud Ridge.” He’d come home on leave and tell us that it was okay “over there” and not to worry. I didn’t because I was sure “we” would win and my uncle would come home a hero. Of course, neither of these things happened (though my uncle did come home). Since then, I’ve read many books about the war In an effort to try to figure out “what happened,” which is to say why it all went so horribly wrong. But I’d never read one quite like Mark P. Bradley’s Vietnam at War (Oxford University Press, 2009). Mark succeeds in doing something very unusual–and perhaps unique–in the American literature on the Vietnam conflict: he shows us the war from the Vietnamese point of view, and more particularly the North Vietnamese point of view. He’s mined Vietnamese archives, literature, and popular culture to see the war through Vietnamese eyes, and he’s done a marvelous job of it. My uncle’s war was very different from the one Mark presents. He fought the “Vietnam War”; they fought the “French War” and the “American War.” He saw it from a cockpit; they lived it on the ground, under the bombs. He was in their country; they were in their own country. He was sure he would leave; they were sure they would stay, and grasp victory once the invaders were gone. Now that I think about it, there is something strangely familiar about this story. 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 Mars 20111h 25min
Mark Bradley and Marilyn Young, “Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars” (Oxford UP, 2008)
What to think about the Vietnam War? A righteous struggle against global Communist tyranny? An episode in American imperialism? A civil war into which the United States blindly stumbled? And what of the Vietnamese perspective? How did they–both North and South–understand the war? Mark Bradley and Marilyn Young have assembled a crack team of historians to consider (or rather reconsider) these questions in Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars: Transnational and International Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). The book is part of the National History Center‘s Reinterpreting History series. The pieces in it are wide-ranging: some see the war from the heights of international diplomacy, others from the hamlets of the Mekong Delta. They introduce new themes, for example, the role of American racial stereotypes in the conflict. More than anything else, however, they are nuanced. Their authors provide no simple answers because there are none. You will not find easy explanations, good guys and bad guys, or ideological drum-beating in these pages. What you will find is a sensitive effort to understand an event of mind-boggling, irreducible complexity. There’s a lesson here: we may think we know what we are doing on far-away shores, but we are fooling ourselves. Reminds one a bit of Tolstoy’s thoughts on the philosophy of history at the end of War and Peace. Still worth a read, as is this book. 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 Mars 20111h 11min
Gregory J. W. Urwin, “Victory in Defeat: The Wake Island Defenders in Captivity” (Naval Institute Press, 2010)
Gregory J. W. Urwin’s Victory in Defeat: The Wake Island Defenders in Captivity (Naval Institute Press, 2010) tells the story of the Americans captured on Wake Island in December 1945. The Wake Island garrison’s defeat of the initial Japanese landing attempt was one of the few bright spots for Americans in the opening weeks of the Second World War and earned the praise of President Roosevelt. The surrender of the small Marine garrison and the civilian contractors working on the atoll on December 23, 1941 may have ended the battle, but for those men, the struggle for survival was just beginning. They spent the remaining three and a half years of the war in various Japanese prison camps. And survive most of them did. Of the 1621 Americans taken prisoner, 1378 returned – a mortality rate roughly half that suffered by Allied prisoners of the Japanese as a whole. Urwin argues that discipline, outside aid, and a good measure of luck accounted for the survival of so many of the Wake Islanders. He also highlights the important role that Japanese policy and behavior played. The captives certainly suffered their share of cruelties and the crimes of the Japanese army and navy against these men were many. But without the humanity, and even occasionally the kindness, of their captors, many more of these Americans would have died. Victory in Defeat is an impressive book that tells a gripping and important story. 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 Mars 20111h 2min
J. E. Lendon, “Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins” (Basic, 2010)
Reading J. E. Lendon’s writerly Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins (Basic Books, 2010) took me back to the eventful days of my youth at Price Elementary School, or rather to the large yardon which we had recess. We called it a “playground.” But we did not play on it. We did battle. We did not fight for treats or for love or for sport. These things were trivial to us. No, we fought for honor. One achieved honor not by getting good grades, or by having the best lunch, or by making the most friends. Everyone knew that these things were the spoils of honor, not the causes of it. Rather, one gained honor by physical intimidation and, if necessary, combat. Honor was fair: it paid regard to neither sex, nor race, nor class. Girls and boys, blacks and whites, rich and poor could all have whatever honor they could earn. But honor was also brutal: the strong and brave (or should we say “reckless”) usually had it, while the weak and timid (or should we say “sensible”) usually did not. Interestingly, the former did not “bully” the latter very often. At least at Price Elementary School, humiliating a much weaker opponent was considered, somehow, dishonorable. But among the strong and brave there were constant contests of honor, often violent. The “hegemons,” if we may so speak, enjoyed high honor. But they also suffered from constant fear that they might lose it. And so anxious class champions would challenge one another, fight, and the victor would humiliate the vanquished (“Say ‘uncle’!”). For the defeated party, eager to regain his or her honor, there was only one honorable course: revenge–swift, ruthless, and public. So it went, day in and day out on the “playground” at Price Elementary School. And so it went, year in and year out, on the battlefields of fifth-century Greece. 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 Feb 20111h 7min
