Social Military History

In his shocking and revelatory new work, celebrated journalist William Langewiesche investigates the burgeoning threat of nuclear-weapons production and the inexorable drift of nuclear-weapons technology from the hands of the rich into the hands of the poor. As more unstable and undeveloped nations acquire the ultimate arms, the stakes of state-sponsored nuclear activity have soared to frightening heights. Even more disturbing is the likelihood of such weapons being used by guerrilla non-state terrorists.

During World War II, as the United States called on its citizens to serve in unprecedented numbers, the presence of gay Americans in the armed forces increasingly conflicted with the expanding anti-homosexual policies and procedures of the military. In Coming Out Under Fire, Allan Berube examines in depth and detail these social and political confrontations - not as a story of how the military victimized homosexuals, but as a story of how a dynamic power relationship developed.

In Men at War, Turner looks beyond the increasingly retrogressive and jingoistic ideal of a Britain that never was to discover a much richer history. He goes inside the machines of war and strips away uniform cloth to discover the true depth and complexity of men of war as creatures of love, fear, hope and desire. From writers, filmmakers, artists and ordinary men - including those in his own family - Turner assembles a broad cast of characters to bring the war to life.

Nasty, brutish, and short. This is the way English philosopher Thomas Hobbes described the living conditions into which humans inevitably fall without a strong, central authority. However, Hobbes would agree that living under a brutal dictator could lead to the same conditions. This exciting new book from historian Michael Rank looks at the lives and times of the worst dictators in history.

1879 was a year of bloody conflict on the African continent. Cetsywayo, the Zulu chieftain, had wielded his armies with precision and care, defeating and driving his enemies before him. This courageous force finally butted heads with the British on the sweeping plains of Africa, inflicting grievous losses on the empire’s red coats. This book covers the conflict and the major political and military events that took place. Written the year after the war came to an end, the author weaves a compelling narrative that’s hard to put down.

As she did so provocatively with military spouses in Army Wives, Tanya Biank gives us the inside story of women in today’s military - their professional and personal challenges from the combat zone to the home front. Since 9/11, more than 240,000 women have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan - more than 140 have died there, and they currently make up 14 percent of the total active-duty forces. Despite advances, today’s servicewomen are constantly pressed to prove themselves.

The summer that Patty Bergen turns twelve is a summer that will haunt her forever. When her small hometown in Arkansas becomes the site of a camp housing German prisoners during World War II, Patty learns what it means to open her heart. Even though she’s Jewish, she begins to see a prison escapee, Anton, not as a Nazi, but as a lonely, frightened young man. As their gentle friendship blossoms, Patty experiences a kind of love she never felt from her abusive father or her distant mother.

In late 1936, as Franco’s armies stormed toward Madrid, Stalin famously termed the defence of Spain “the common cause of all advanced and progressive mankind.” As a German emigrant to Winnipeg, Hans Ibing recognized the importance of the Spanish Civil War to the struggle against worldwide fascism in a way that most people in Canada did not - joining the International Brigades in their fight to defend the Spanish Republic was his “chance to fight Hitler.”

Committed in utmost secrecy in April-May 1940 by the NKVD on the direct orders of Joseph Stalin, for nearly 50 years the Soviet regime succeeded in maintaining the fiction that Katyn was a Nazi crime, their story unchallenged by Western governments fearful of upsetting a powerful wartime ally and Cold War adversary. Surviving Katyn explores the decades-long search for answers, focusing on the experience of those individuals with the most at stake.

This audiobook challenges several longstanding notions about the American way of war. It examines US military practice (strategic and operational) from the War of Independence to the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan to determine what patterns, if any, existed in the way Americans have used military force. Echevarria surveys all major US wars and most every small conflict in the country's military history.

Now, for the first time, the nation's most respected reporters share their stories as the eyes and ears of the nation to create a fascinating oral history. Some of the most influential journalists of our time, including Christiane Amanpour, Walter Cronkite, Morley Safer, Peter Arnett, and Andy Rooney convey the facts, the brutality, and the drama of warfare and examine issues such as censorship, propaganda, ethics, the power of the press, and the future of war reporting, especially after September 11th.

Charles Stewart Henry Vane-Tempest-Stewart, the 7th Marquess of Londonderry, was born to power and command. But history has not been kind to "Charley", as the king called him, because, in his own words, he "backed the wrong horse", and a very dark horse indeed: Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party. Londonderry was hardly the only British aristocrat to do so, but he was the only Cabinet member to do so, and it ruined him. Author Ian Kershaw is not out to rehabilitate Lord Londonderry but to understand him and to expose why he was made a scapegoat.

The J. G. Randall Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Illinois and associate editor of North and South magazine, Bruce Levine presents a gripping chronicle of the cultural and economic upheaval the South experienced during and after the Civil War. Drawing upon a treasure trove of diaries, letters, newspaper articles, and government documents, Levine offers a unique perspective on the old South's demise through the voices of those who lived through the conflict.

The year 2020 marks 75 years since the end of World War II, yet even as the war slips from living memory, its legacies continue to influence current political and military thinking. This anthology will analyze these legacies for a number of countries and regions, including China, Russia, the United States, the Near East, and Germany, illustrating in detail how World War II is not merely a historical event, but a defining moment for current military and political thinking around the globe.

Prisons and Patriots provides a detailed account of 41 Nisei (second-generation Japanese Americans), known as the Tucsonians, who were imprisoned for resisting the draft during WWII. Cherstin Lyon parallels their courage as resisters with that of civil rights hero Gordon Hirabayashi, well known for his legal battle against curfew and internment, who also resisted the draft. These dual stories highlight the intrinsic relationship between the rights and the obligations of citizenship, particularly salient in times of war.

At Milliken's Bend, Louisiana, a Union force composed predominantly of former slaves met their Confederate adversaries in one of the bloodiest small engagements of the war. This important fight received some attention in the North and South but soon drifted into obscurity. The fighting at Milliken's Bend occurred in June 1863, about fifteen miles north of Vicksburg on the west bank of the Mississippi River, where a brigade of Texas Confederates attacked a Federal outpost.

Feature films have created the stereotype of the Second World War prisoner of war. But the reality was much more extraordinary. POWs staged shows, concerts and sporting fixtures and took up crafts and pastimes using materials they found around them. Men studied, attended lectures, learned languages, sat for qualifications and exams, on such a scale that one camp was nicknamed 'The Barbed-Wire University'. And often the years in captivity proved a turning-point in their lives.

Si pongono al servizio degli altri, della difesa della loro comunità, assecondano il destino, gli ideali o l'ambizione, intervengono sul corso della storia con le armi, la fede e il valore: sono gli eroi della guerra.

Americans are deeply divided over the Second Amendment. Some passionately assert that the Amendment protects an individual's right to own guns. Others, that it does no more than protect the right of states to maintain militias. Now, in the first and only comprehensive history of this bitter controversy, Saul Cornell proves conclusively that both sides are wrong. Cornell, a leading constitutional historian, shows that the Founders understood the right to bear arms as neither an individual nor a collective right, but as a civic right.

A powerful wartime saga recounting the extraordinary story of the 761st Tank Battalion, the first all-Black armored unit to see combat in World War II.