New Books in Military History

Military historian Jeremy Black follows his engagement with the American Civil War (St. Augustine's Press, 2025) with a review of the Revolutionary War in North America and the strategic asymmetry it presents. This was a key episode for global affairs and formative for the United States, but also fascinating for military history as a whole. Black's earlier treatment of this war (1991) remains operational, but he thought it "necessary to revisit the subject and reconsider not only the specifics of assessment, but also the more general ways of analyzing and presenting the struggle." Black's rendering of the war is accurate, well researched, and successfully hits his target without undue speculation. Identifying all the factors at play is one of Black's strengths, as is his sober restraint in applying hindsight while evaluating leadership and campaigns throughout. His field of vision is expansive and refers to the global theatre when offering any kind of final statements--for example, in his claim that the Revolution was largely lost long after the conclusion of battles, and that Canada in British hands underlined the failure of revolutionary efforts and the embodiment of continued threats. The Revolutionary War (St. Augustine's Press, 2026) is a masterful treatment of an historical event and also the very nature of revolutionary warfare. Black is a fair-handed assessor of 'American' interests and strategic politics, and likewise observant in explaining that Britain was not entirely bested by the revolution even in losing the war. His discussion of the aftermath is as critical as his illustration of the beginning of hostilities, as in his chapter dedicated to "heritages, lessons, and retrospectives." Black is one of the most important and prolific historians of his generation, a writer whose concise and thorough manner renders readers in the United States a refreshing service of understanding their history more deeply. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Martialling Peace: How the Peacekeeper Myth Legitimises Warfare (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) by Dr. Nicole Wegner is not a book about peacekeeping practices. This is a book about storytelling, fantasies and the ways that people connect emotionally to myths about peacekeeping. The celebration of peacekeeping as a legitimate and desirable use of military force is expressed through the unproblematised acceptance of militarism.Introducing a novel framework – martial peace – the book offers an in-depth examination of the Canadian Armed Forces missions to Afghanistan and the use of police violence against Indigenous protests in Canada as case examples where military violence has been justified in the name of peace. It critically investigates the peacekeeper myth and challenges the academic, government and popular beliefs that martial violence is required to sustain peace.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

German military history is typically viewed as an inexorable march to the rise of Prussia and the two world wars, the road paved by militarism and the result a specifically German way of war. Peter Wilson challenges this narrative. Looking beyond Prussia to German-speaking Europe across the last five centuries, Wilson finds little unique or preordained in German militarism or warfighting.Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples Since 1500 (Harvard UP, 2023) takes as its starting point the consolidation of the Holy Roman Empire, which created new mechanisms for raising troops but also for resolving disputes diplomatically. Both the empire and the Swiss Confederation were largely defensive in orientation, while German participation in foreign wars was most often in partnership with allies. The primary aggressor in Central Europe was not Prussia but the Austrian Habsburg monarchy, yet Austria's strength owed much to its ability to secure allies. Prussia, meanwhile, invested in militarization but maintained a part-time army well into the nineteenth century. Alongside Switzerland, which relied on traditional militia, both states exemplify the longstanding civilian element within German military power.Only after Prussia's unexpected victory over France in 1871 did Germans and outsiders come to believe in a German gift for warfare--a special capacity for high-speed, high-intensity combat that could overcome numerical disadvantage. It took two world wars to expose the fallacy of German military genius. Yet even today, Wilson argues, Germany's strategic position is misunderstood. The country now seen as a bastion of peace spends heavily on defense in comparison to its peers and is deeply invested in less kinetic contemporary forms of coercive power.AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Military historian Jeremy Black continues his review of the global context of martial conflict and spatial conquest into the modern era (16th-20th centuries) in Britain's Imperial Histories (St. Augustine's Press, 2025), focusing on the British empire and its lasting effect on this landscape. Black offers a representation of the "imperial experience" that is eye-opening for a generation of readers who associate this with a strictly negative connotation. But the notion of an empire is not understood at all if this is true. Indeed, not only is there "no one type of empire, no prototype," the basis of empire is much more 'order' than it is 'invasion.' Furthermore, reflecting on the unavoidable cultural and sociological symbiosis and transfer, Black makes the case that in all instances of influence and encounter, sameness between peoples never results. But how does one distinguish influence from control? What are the long-term benefits among peoples? "To many today, empire might seem obvious: governors with ostrich-feathers in their colonial garb ruling non-White peoples; but this scarcely describes the situation across time and place." Why did the European empires ultimately fall? When approaching this question, Britain's Imperial Histories proposes that the perspective of "making and remaking of the international system" be made distinct from the "rational pursuit of power and wealth and the use of technology." As seen in earlier work, Black's brilliance is centered in his capacity to incorporate the complexity of war and its battles in his assessments, while never neglecting the fact that wars themselves have specific and broad contexts that must be read thoroughly. Another highlight of the present work includes more insight into the British-American relationship and American political identity. "If the British empire is blamed for many of the aspects of modernization and globalization, is also serves as a way of offering historical depth to a critique of American power." Yet he is also adept at drawing in Asia into the study and does so with uncommon acumen. This book provides an approach to history that has been neglected, especially in the New World, and connects the present to the past with a kind of hermeneutical responsibility that has been of late abandoned. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

As World War II raged in North Africa, General Erwin Rommel was guided by an uncanny sense of his enemies' plans and weaknesses. In the summer of 1942, he led his Axis army swiftly and terrifyingly toward Alexandria, with the goal of overrunning the entire Middle East. Each step was informed by detailed updates on British positions. The Nazis, somehow, had a source for the Allies' greatest secrets.Yet the Axis powers were not the only ones with intelligence. Brilliant Allied cryptographers worked relentlessly at Bletchley Park, breaking down the extraordinarily complex Nazi code Enigma. From decoded German messages, they discovered that the enemy had a wealth of inside information. On the brink of disaster, a fevered and high-stakes search for the source began.In War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East (Public Affairs, 2021), Gershom Gorenberg tells the cinematic story of the race for information in the North African theater of World War II, set against intrigues that spanned the Middle East. Years in the making, this book is a feat of historical research and storytelling, and a rethinking of the popular narrative of the war. It portrays the conflict not as an inevitable clash of heroes and villains but a spiraling series of failures, accidents, and desperate triumphs that decided the fate of the Middle East and quite possibly the outcome of the war.Gershom Gorenberg is a columnist for the Washington Post and a senior correspondent for the American Prospect, as well as an Adjunct Faculty at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Through the diaries and personal papers of a German woman, Vera Conrad, This Horrible Uncertainty: A German Woman Writes War, 1939-1948 (Berghahn Books, 2024) documents her wartime experiences and deepens our understanding of the complex experiences of trauma and grief that National Socialist supporters experienced. Building on scholarship about mourning and widowhood that largely focuses on state policies and public discourses, This Horrible Uncertainty provides an interpretive framework of people’s perceptions of events and their capacity to respond to them. Using a history of emotions approach, Erika Quinn establishes that keeping the diary allowed Conrad to develop different selves in response to her responsibilities, fear, and grief after her husband was declared missing in 1943.Deep Acharya is a PhD student and a George L. Mosse fellow of Modern European Cultural History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison working on the history of fatherhood in 20th century Germany.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

In A Nasty Little War: The Western Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution (Basic Books, 2024), award-winning reporter Anna Reid tells the extraordinary story of how the West tried to reverse the Russian Revolution.In the closing months of the First World War, Britain, America, France and Japan sent arms and 180,000 soldiers to Russia, with the aim of tipping the balance in her post-revolutionary Civil War. From Central Asia to the Arctic and from Poland to the Pacific, they joined anti-Bolshevik forces in trying to overthrow the new men in the Kremlin, in an astonishingly ambitious military adventure known as the Intervention.Fresh, in the case of the British, from the trenches, they found themselves in a mobile, multi-sided conflict as different as possible from the grim stasis of the Western Front. Criss-crossing the shattered Russian empire in trains, sleds and paddlesteamers, they bivouacked in snowbound cabins and Kirghiz yurts, torpedoed Red battleships from speedboats, improvised new currencies and the world’s first air-dropped chemical weapons, got caught up in mass retreats and a typhus epidemic, organised several coups and at least one assassination. Taking tea with warlords and princesses, they also turned a blind eye to their Russian allies’ numerous atrocities.Two years later they left again, filing glumly back onto their troopships as port after port fell to the Red Army. Later, American veterans compared the humiliation to Vietnam, and the politicians and generals responsible preferred to trivialise or forget. Drawing on previously unused diaries, letters and memoirs, A Nasty Little War brings an episode with echoes down the century since vividly to life.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Jason Burke's The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s (Knopf, 2026) is an epic, authoritative, gripping account of the years when a new wave of revolutionaries seized the skies and the streets to hold the world for ransom In the 1970s, an unprecedented wave of international terrorism broke out around the world. More ambitious, networked and far-reaching than ever before, new armed groups terrorized the West with intricately planned plane hijackings and hostage missions, leaving governments scrambling to cope. Their motives were as diverse as their methods. Some sought to champion Palestinian liberation, others to topple Western imperialism or battle capitalism; a few simply sought adventure or power. Among them were the unflappable young Leila Khaled, sporting jewelry made from AK-47 ammunition; the maverick Carlos the Jackal with his taste for cigars, fine dining, and designer suits; and the radical leftists of the Baader-Meinhof Gang or the Japanese Red Army. Their attacks forged a lawless new battlefield thirty thousand feet in the air, evading the reach of security agencies, policymakers, and spies alike. Their operations rallied activist and networks in places where few had suspected their existence, leaving a trail of chaos from Bangkok to Paris to London to Washington, D.C. Veteran foreign correspondent Jason Burke provides a thrilling account of this era of spectacular violence. Drawing on decades of research, recently declassified government files, still secret documents, and original interviews with hijackers, double agents, and victims still grieving their loved ones, The Revolutionists provides an unprecedented account of a period which definitively shaped today’s world and probes the complex relationship between violence, terrorism, and revolution. From the deserts of Jordan and the Munich Olympics to the Iranian Embassy Siege in London and the Beirut bombings of the early 1980s, Burke invites us into the lives and minds of the perpetrators of these attacks, as well as the government agents and top officials who sought to foil them. Charting, too, such shattering events as the Iranian Revolution and the Lebanese civil war, he shows how, by the early 1980s, a campaign for radical change led by secular, leftist revolutionaries had given way to a far more lethal movement of conservative religious fanaticism that would dominate the decades to come. Driven by an indelible cast of characters moving at a breakneck pace, full of detail and drama, The Revolutionists is the definitive account of a dark and seismic decade. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

The character of the conflict that erupted in 1914 defied the expectations of many political leaders and military analysts. Despite the mountains of books and articles published on World War I, there has been surprisingly little systematic or comparative research on how military commanders and politicians framed and interpreted the conflict—or, indeed, on how they understood war itself—and how that understanding shaped their decision-making. Wars are fought by organizations and people who have disparate visions of the world they live in and the conflict they are fighting. In Framing the First World War: How Divergent Views Shaped a Global Conflict (UP of Kansas, 2025), a team of leading scholars explore the gulf between imagined warfare and the realities of battle. By doing so, they investigate how the military forces that contested the First World War framed the conflict they were involved in and how those perspectives shaped and influenced the ways in which they sought to understand, conduct, and respond to the war. Guided by editors Dr. Michael P.M. Finch, Dr. Aimée Fox and Dr. David G. Morgan-Owen, the authors use the notion of “frames” and the concept of “framing” to enable us to engage directly with the complexity and diversity of the conflict, which was fought for different reasons and in different ways, incorporating a range of issues with implications for the conduct of the war. Improving our appreciation of how commanders saw the world around them and their views on the war they were conducting opens up valuable new approaches for understanding debates over the higher direction of the conflict and the civil-military relations that underpinned them. The contributors to Framing the First World War work towards a fuller historical appraisal of how military figures understood the war, moving beyond a purely military analysis to incorporate broader cultural and social topics, including education, medicine, politics, and law. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Dropping the atomic bombs on Japan during World War II was, arguably, the most controversial decision of the 20th century. The responsibility for that “decision” has logically fallen on US President Harry S. Truman. But in The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age (Harper, 2025), Alex Wellerstein argues that Truman's actual decision wasn’t what everyone thinks it was. The conventional narrative is that American leaders had a choice: Invade Japan, which would have cost millions of Allied and Japanese lives, or instead, use the atom bomb in the hope of convincing Japan to surrender. Truman, the story goes, carefully weighed the pros and cons before deciding that the atomic bomb would be used against Japanese cities, as the lesser of two evils. But nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein argues that is not what happened. Not only did Truman not take part in the decision to use the bomb, but the one major decision that he did make was a very different one — one that he himself did not fully understand until after the atomic bomb was used. The weight of that decision, and that misunderstanding, became the major reason that atomic bombs have not been used again since World War II. Based on a close reading of the historical record, The Most Awful Responsibility shows that, despite his reputation as an ardent defender of the atomic bomb, Truman: Wanted to avoid the “murder” and “slaughter” of innocent civilians Believed that the atomic bomb should never be used again Hoped that nuclear weapons would be outlawed in his lifetime Wellerstein makes a startling case that Truman was possibly the most anti-nuclear American president of the twentieth century, but his ambitions were strongly constrained by the domestic and international politics of the postwar world and the early Cold War. This book is a must-read for all who want to truly understand not only why the bomb was dropped on Japan but also why it has not been used since. Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on his first book which examines why the United States pursued victory at practically all costs during World War II. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or here. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history