War & Conflict

The chapter entitled “Ground Zero in Focus” examines several documentaries composed of candid, amateur footage shot by witnesses in Manhattan and New Jersey as the World Trade Center burned and...

Most readers browsing through the book in a bookstore will probably end up lingering over the fourth chapter, which has not only a catchy title (“Hitler’s Most Intimate Enemy”), but...

The book—really an extended essay—argues that Stalin’s mass killings in the 1930s should be classified as “genocide.” The book suggests that the definition of genocide, as taken from the work of...

There are two main audiences for this book. First, anyone interested in the history of the global jihad movement, including its intellectual precursors, its development, its ideologies, and its structural...

Göring’s Man in Paris is about three things: first, it is a detailed portrait of a Nazi art plunderer (Dr. Bruno Lohse); second, it tells the story of what happened...

Edward Bancroft was born in Westfield, Massachusetts, in 1745 and died in England in 1821. He is most famous (or infamous) today because from 1777 to 1783 he lived in...

Rebels at the Gates is about the United States Civil War in the 1860s. Of course, entire forests have been filled with pages of books on the American Civil War, and rightfully so. It was clearly one of the defining events in American history. However, my angle is new and unexplored...

A fairly standard practice – a look at the introduction and the last chapter – should give the reader a sense of the book. The introduction provides an overview of...

Although it was only in the course of the nineteenth century that the barricade emerged as the preeminent symbol of the modern revolutionary tradition, its origins can be traced as...

It was as a child living in Japan that I first began to wonder about the connection between culture and foreign affairs. In the 70s and 80s China kept exploding...

This book is about how the idea that the Holocaust of European Jews represents the most radical evil of our time shapes discussions of victims in general. The book shows how...

Pages 2 through 5 state what the book is about, its objectives, the historical significance of the story, and my role in it. Allow me to stitch together some of...

Counterfactuals are “what-ifs.” They change a feature of the past in the expectation of changing the present. The antecedent (the change introduced in the past) is connected to the consequent...

When I first heard about the lawsuit, it resonated with me in many ways. I am an art historian, I had been a Getty Fellow, and the Armenian Genocide is...

The Cold War is the one everybody thinks is settled. Three historians were asked what the public still gets most wrong about it. Their answers name different things. Between them they take out a claim about how it ended, a claim about what Russia is, and a claim about what kept the peace, and none of the three is a fringe belief.

Although achieving and maintaining military parity with the United States required a significantly larger share of the Soviet budget than US military spending occupied in the larger American economy, this was seen by successive Soviet leaders as a price worth paying.

This matters today. Russia's war on Ukraine has revived essentialist explanations of Russia as the dominant Western framing, and with them, the fallacy of inevitability. If Russian behaviour stems from some essence, the only acceptable Russia is a defeated and contained Russia, because no other Russia is possible. If it reflects identifiable institutional, ideological, cultural and external configurations, those configurations can change, as they did between 1985 and 1991. Recognising this restores the broader analytical space that essentialism's over-simplification forecloses.

Misunderstanding the role of nuclear weapons during the Cold War has led to two consequences: 1) an unrealistic faith in their power to deter war—even as we see the military forces of nuclear-armed India and Pakistan engaging in periodic wars and nuclear-armed Israel attacked by missiles from Iran and even non-state militia forces; and 2) a reluctance by the nuclear-weapons states to accept the view of the majority of the world’s states, as represented in their endorsement of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, that they are safer without than with them.

This book asks what happens when we take something we’re familiar with and consider it in an unfamiliar light. The “thing” in question is film: not films, the things we...

I wrote Eve of Destruction hoping to get people to understand that the previous era of warfare—one in which there were at least some rules about when and why states...

As German nationalists conceived it, the German “nation” was for most of its history an empire. It was first embodied in the Holy Roman Empire; later in the “second” empire,...

In many ways, Two Faiths, One Banner reveals how the history of Islam and the history of Europe are profoundly intertwined. In an age obsessed with Muslim-Christian so-called civilizational conflict,...

Even as shooting wars are raging in Ukraine, Gaza and Yemen, and may yet be sparked over Taiwan, there is much talk about the ways in which modern states face...

If a browsing reader picked up a copy of the book, I would hope that the Introduction entitled “The Thousand-Person Pit” would hook him or her. An account of an...

Painting is my most natural language and the most honest way for me to communicate with the world. Many of the themes I explore arise from everyday life, but above all from profound personal experiences and memories...

It changed how we write about war, got banned and burned, inspired rock bands, and put phrases into the language—yet the story behind the novel is as gripping as the book itself. A POW digging corpses from the ruins of firebombed Dresden, a discredited historian, and a strange leap into alien abduction: how a masterpiece took twenty-four years to find its shape.

So while I am looking at things historically, I also bring them into the present, to interrogate the concept of “madness” and other states, and to ask how we can do better with mind care.

In order for countries to reconcile after terrible wars, must they apologize, pay reparations, and otherwise “come to terms with the past”?A powerful conventional wisdom, based on the postwar experiences...

Unlikely Collaboration is a study of the unlikely attraction of modernist intellectuals and artists to fascist and authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century. Its focus is on the particular experience...

The Iraq invasion of 2003 was justified by the Bush administration on the grounds of national security. But all of the principal advisors of the administration of president George W....

Between 1933 and 1945, when both Hitler and Stalin were in power, their two regimes murdered some fourteen million people in the lands between Berlin and Moscow, which I call...

The book relates to the changing nature of terrorism and how different groups are either being forced or recruited into these deadly organizations. I address several underlying theories about the nature...

Biological weapons are the least well understood of the so-called weapons of mass destruction, or WMDs. Despite the growing awareness of the threat posed by biological weapons, the history of...

This book examines the War of 1812 between the American republic, the British empire, and their Indian allies. Most of the fighting took place in the hotly contested region between Montreal,...

I would hope that the browser who picked up Through Amateur Eyes in a bookstore would turn to the image section in the middle of the book. The archival images that...

The Rape of Mesopotamia is about the series of missteps, missed opportunities, and miscommunications that led to the massive looting of Iraq’s cultural heritage after the U.S. invasion in 2003....

As an historian, everything I do is anchored in a concern with the past presented in what I hope is a lively narrative. In walking along that path in this...

Traitors in wartime have a long history. During World War Two, both Allied and Axis governments used enemy nationals to broadcast propaganda. When the war ended, the victors prosecuted a...

I think the casual reader might be surprised to discover that the military made significant contributions to over half of the vaccines developed in the twentieth century. Just as military interest...

I'm tempted to say one of the unique things about my book is that there's less of it. There are a lot of very long biographies of Churchill and de Gaulle, and what I hoped, in a funny kind of way, by putting the two men together,

My book set out to answer one general and seemingly simple question: How did international relations function in East Asia from the fourteenth century to the nineteenth, before the arrival...

Clash of Extremes presents a new interpretation of the causes of the Civil War. If the prevailing explanation can be summarized in one word, “slavery,” the argument in my book...

My book offers a fresh way of understanding insurgency and terrorism. I outline a constructive approach to confronting localized insurgencies like those in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the international terrorism...

I wrote this book to help me work my way out of a teaching problem. I simply could not explain the outbreak of the war to my students in one or...

For a few decades in the seventeenth century, Rome was flooded with an astonishing amount of meat—at times a pound of it per person, per day. Why did feeding a city so much lamb and pork become a statement of religious and political power in the age of the Reformation? A story of faith, appetite, and the artisans who moved meat from pasture to table.

What if the destruction of architecture was understood to be just as complicated, just as culturally resonant, and just as open to interpretation as architecture itself—or, indeed, as any other...

The Invention of Ecocide traces the rise and fall of herbicidal warfare in Vietnam from the origins of plant physiology, in Charles Darwin’s laboratory, to the apex of the global...

My book offers a new look at a familiar subject, Executive Order 9066 and the removal and confinement of West Coast Japanese Americans during World War II (commonly called the...

America’s Army is military history of a different kind: it uses the story of the making of the all-volunteer army as a window into the history of American society over...

Among the scientific, historical, and military themes in Six-Legged Soldiers, the reader will find three “big picture” ideas, all of which are cause for curiosity and concern. Using insects as weapons...

I started thinking about this book in the early 2000s. On the policy side, in 2002 the George W. Bush administration announced the National Security Strategy, sometimes called the Bush...

Here in the U.S. we read and watch the news of countless deaths in Iraq and other war-torn countries around the world. We briefly take note of the incidents, sometimes...

In 1997, Jared Diamond published his wonderful book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, which asked why it was that some societies become rich and powerful and others don’t. His explanation was geographical—it...

Philip II of Macedonia did not conquer on the scale Alexander did. And so Philip is not the household name that Alexander is. But Philip changed the course of Greek...

When browsing in a shop or library, my grandfather would always turn to the last few pages of a book. If he liked the end, then it was worth a...

The chapter entitled “Ground Zero in Focus” examines several documentaries composed of candid, amateur footage shot by witnesses in Manhattan and New Jersey as the World Trade Center burned and...

Most readers browsing through the book in a bookstore will probably end up lingering over the fourth chapter, which has not only a catchy title (“Hitler’s Most Intimate Enemy”), but...

The book—really an extended essay—argues that Stalin’s mass killings in the 1930s should be classified as “genocide.” The book suggests that the definition of genocide, as taken from the work of...

There are two main audiences for this book. First, anyone interested in the history of the global jihad movement, including its intellectual precursors, its development, its ideologies, and its structural...

Göring’s Man in Paris is about three things: first, it is a detailed portrait of a Nazi art plunderer (Dr. Bruno Lohse); second, it tells the story of what happened...

Edward Bancroft was born in Westfield, Massachusetts, in 1745 and died in England in 1821. He is most famous (or infamous) today because from 1777 to 1783 he lived in...

Rebels at the Gates is about the United States Civil War in the 1860s. Of course, entire forests have been filled with pages of books on the American Civil War, and rightfully so. It was clearly one of the defining events in American history. However, my angle is new and unexplored...

A fairly standard practice – a look at the introduction and the last chapter – should give the reader a sense of the book. The introduction provides an overview of...

Although it was only in the course of the nineteenth century that the barricade emerged as the preeminent symbol of the modern revolutionary tradition, its origins can be traced as...

It was as a child living in Japan that I first began to wonder about the connection between culture and foreign affairs. In the 70s and 80s China kept exploding...

This book is about how the idea that the Holocaust of European Jews represents the most radical evil of our time shapes discussions of victims in general. The book shows how...

Pages 2 through 5 state what the book is about, its objectives, the historical significance of the story, and my role in it. Allow me to stitch together some of...

Counterfactuals are “what-ifs.” They change a feature of the past in the expectation of changing the present. The antecedent (the change introduced in the past) is connected to the consequent...

When I first heard about the lawsuit, it resonated with me in many ways. I am an art historian, I had been a Getty Fellow, and the Armenian Genocide is...

The Cold War is the one everybody thinks is settled. Three historians were asked what the public still gets most wrong about it. Their answers name different things. Between them they take out a claim about how it ended, a claim about what Russia is, and a claim about what kept the peace, and none of the three is a fringe belief.

Although achieving and maintaining military parity with the United States required a significantly larger share of the Soviet budget than US military spending occupied in the larger American economy, this was seen by successive Soviet leaders as a price worth paying.

This matters today. Russia's war on Ukraine has revived essentialist explanations of Russia as the dominant Western framing, and with them, the fallacy of inevitability. If Russian behaviour stems from some essence, the only acceptable Russia is a defeated and contained Russia, because no other Russia is possible. If it reflects identifiable institutional, ideological, cultural and external configurations, those configurations can change, as they did between 1985 and 1991. Recognising this restores the broader analytical space that essentialism's over-simplification forecloses.

Misunderstanding the role of nuclear weapons during the Cold War has led to two consequences: 1) an unrealistic faith in their power to deter war—even as we see the military forces of nuclear-armed India and Pakistan engaging in periodic wars and nuclear-armed Israel attacked by missiles from Iran and even non-state militia forces; and 2) a reluctance by the nuclear-weapons states to accept the view of the majority of the world’s states, as represented in their endorsement of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, that they are safer without than with them.

This book asks what happens when we take something we’re familiar with and consider it in an unfamiliar light. The “thing” in question is film: not films, the things we...

I wrote Eve of Destruction hoping to get people to understand that the previous era of warfare—one in which there were at least some rules about when and why states...

As German nationalists conceived it, the German “nation” was for most of its history an empire. It was first embodied in the Holy Roman Empire; later in the “second” empire,...

In many ways, Two Faiths, One Banner reveals how the history of Islam and the history of Europe are profoundly intertwined. In an age obsessed with Muslim-Christian so-called civilizational conflict,...

Even as shooting wars are raging in Ukraine, Gaza and Yemen, and may yet be sparked over Taiwan, there is much talk about the ways in which modern states face...

If a browsing reader picked up a copy of the book, I would hope that the Introduction entitled “The Thousand-Person Pit” would hook him or her. An account of an...

Painting is my most natural language and the most honest way for me to communicate with the world. Many of the themes I explore arise from everyday life, but above all from profound personal experiences and memories...

It changed how we write about war, got banned and burned, inspired rock bands, and put phrases into the language—yet the story behind the novel is as gripping as the book itself. A POW digging corpses from the ruins of firebombed Dresden, a discredited historian, and a strange leap into alien abduction: how a masterpiece took twenty-four years to find its shape.

So while I am looking at things historically, I also bring them into the present, to interrogate the concept of “madness” and other states, and to ask how we can do better with mind care.

In order for countries to reconcile after terrible wars, must they apologize, pay reparations, and otherwise “come to terms with the past”?A powerful conventional wisdom, based on the postwar experiences...

Unlikely Collaboration is a study of the unlikely attraction of modernist intellectuals and artists to fascist and authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century. Its focus is on the particular experience...

The Iraq invasion of 2003 was justified by the Bush administration on the grounds of national security. But all of the principal advisors of the administration of president George W....

Between 1933 and 1945, when both Hitler and Stalin were in power, their two regimes murdered some fourteen million people in the lands between Berlin and Moscow, which I call...

The book relates to the changing nature of terrorism and how different groups are either being forced or recruited into these deadly organizations. I address several underlying theories about the nature...

Biological weapons are the least well understood of the so-called weapons of mass destruction, or WMDs. Despite the growing awareness of the threat posed by biological weapons, the history of...

This book examines the War of 1812 between the American republic, the British empire, and their Indian allies. Most of the fighting took place in the hotly contested region between Montreal,...

I would hope that the browser who picked up Through Amateur Eyes in a bookstore would turn to the image section in the middle of the book. The archival images that...

The Rape of Mesopotamia is about the series of missteps, missed opportunities, and miscommunications that led to the massive looting of Iraq’s cultural heritage after the U.S. invasion in 2003....

As an historian, everything I do is anchored in a concern with the past presented in what I hope is a lively narrative. In walking along that path in this...

Traitors in wartime have a long history. During World War Two, both Allied and Axis governments used enemy nationals to broadcast propaganda. When the war ended, the victors prosecuted a...

I think the casual reader might be surprised to discover that the military made significant contributions to over half of the vaccines developed in the twentieth century. Just as military interest...

I'm tempted to say one of the unique things about my book is that there's less of it. There are a lot of very long biographies of Churchill and de Gaulle, and what I hoped, in a funny kind of way, by putting the two men together,

My book set out to answer one general and seemingly simple question: How did international relations function in East Asia from the fourteenth century to the nineteenth, before the arrival...

Clash of Extremes presents a new interpretation of the causes of the Civil War. If the prevailing explanation can be summarized in one word, “slavery,” the argument in my book...

My book offers a fresh way of understanding insurgency and terrorism. I outline a constructive approach to confronting localized insurgencies like those in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the international terrorism...

I wrote this book to help me work my way out of a teaching problem. I simply could not explain the outbreak of the war to my students in one or...

For a few decades in the seventeenth century, Rome was flooded with an astonishing amount of meat—at times a pound of it per person, per day. Why did feeding a city so much lamb and pork become a statement of religious and political power in the age of the Reformation? A story of faith, appetite, and the artisans who moved meat from pasture to table.

What if the destruction of architecture was understood to be just as complicated, just as culturally resonant, and just as open to interpretation as architecture itself—or, indeed, as any other...

The Invention of Ecocide traces the rise and fall of herbicidal warfare in Vietnam from the origins of plant physiology, in Charles Darwin’s laboratory, to the apex of the global...

My book offers a new look at a familiar subject, Executive Order 9066 and the removal and confinement of West Coast Japanese Americans during World War II (commonly called the...

America’s Army is military history of a different kind: it uses the story of the making of the all-volunteer army as a window into the history of American society over...

Among the scientific, historical, and military themes in Six-Legged Soldiers, the reader will find three “big picture” ideas, all of which are cause for curiosity and concern. Using insects as weapons...

I started thinking about this book in the early 2000s. On the policy side, in 2002 the George W. Bush administration announced the National Security Strategy, sometimes called the Bush...

Here in the U.S. we read and watch the news of countless deaths in Iraq and other war-torn countries around the world. We briefly take note of the incidents, sometimes...

In 1997, Jared Diamond published his wonderful book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, which asked why it was that some societies become rich and powerful and others don’t. His explanation was geographical—it...

Philip II of Macedonia did not conquer on the scale Alexander did. And so Philip is not the household name that Alexander is. But Philip changed the course of Greek...

When browsing in a shop or library, my grandfather would always turn to the last few pages of a book. If he liked the end, then it was worth a...