As he prepared to wage his war of annihilation on the Eastern Front, Adolf Hitler repeatedly drew parallels between the Nazi quest for Lebensraum, or living space, in Eastern Europe and the United States's westward expansion under the banner of Manifest Destiny. The peoples of Eastern Europe were, he said, his "redskins," and for his colonial fantasy of a "German East" he claimed a historical precedent in the United States's displacement and killing of the native population. Edward B. Westermann examines the validity, and value, of this claim in Hitler's Ostkrieg and the...
As he prepared to wage his war of annihilation on the Eastern Front, Adolf Hitler repeatedly drew parallels between the Nazi quest for Leben...
The conflict that historians have called King Philip's War still ranks as one of the bloodiest per capita in American history. An Indian coalition ravaged much of New England, killing six hundred colonial fighting men (not including their Indian allies), obliterating seventeen white towns, and damaging more than fifty settlements. The version of these events that has come down to us focuses on Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay--the colonies whose commentators dominated the storytelling. But because Connecticut lacked a chronicler, its experience has gone largely untold. As Jason W. Warren...
The conflict that historians have called King Philip's War still ranks as one of the bloodiest per capita in American history. An Indian coalit...
When Union and Confederate forces squared off along Bull Run on July 21, 1861, the Federals expected this first major military campaign would bring an early end to the Civil War. But when Confederate troops launched a strong counterattack, both sides realized the war would be longer and costlier than anticipated. First Bull Run, or First Manassas, set the stage for four years of bloody conflict that forever changed the political, social, and economic fabric of the nation. It also introduced the commanders, tactics, and weaponry that would define the American way of war through the turn of the...
When Union and Confederate forces squared off along Bull Run on July 21, 1861, the Federals expected this first major military campaign would bring an...
It was 1862, the second year of the Civil War, though Kansans and Missourians had been fighting over slavery for almost a decade. For the 250 Union soldiers facing down rebel irregulars on Enoch Toothman's farm near Butler, Missouri, this was no battle over abstract principles. These were men of the First Kansas Colored Infantry, and they were fighting for their own freedom and that of their families. They belonged to the first black regiment raised in a northern state, and the first black unit to see combat during the Civil War. Soldiers in the Army of Freedom is the first...
It was 1862, the second year of the Civil War, though Kansans and Missourians had been fighting over slavery for almost a decade. For the 250 Un...
At a time when Napoleon needed all his forces to reassert French dominance in Central Europe, why did he fixate on the Prussian capital of Berlin? Instead of concentrating his forces for a decisive showdown with the enemy, he repeatedly detached large numbers of troops, under ineffective commanders, toward the capture of Berlin. In Napoleon and Berlin, Michael V. Leggiere explores Napoleon's almost obsessive desire to capture Berlin and how this strategy ultimately lost him all of Germany.
Napoleon's motives have remained a subject of controversy from his own day until...
At a time when Napoleon needed all his forces to reassert French dominance in Central Europe, why did he fixate on the Prussian capital of Berlin? ...
The Battle of Saratoga in 1777 ended with British general John Burgoyne s troops surrendering to the American rebel army commanded by General Horatio Gates. Historians have long seen Burgoyne s defeat as a turning point in the American Revolution because it convinced France to join the war on the side of the colonies, thus ensuring American victory. But that traditional view of Saratoga overlooks the complexity of the situation on the ground. Setting the battle in its social and political context, Theodore Corbett examines Saratoga and its aftermath as part of ongoing conflicts among the...
The Battle of Saratoga in 1777 ended with British general John Burgoyne s troops surrendering to the American rebel army commanded by General Horatio ...
When the 1st Marine Division began its invasion of Peleliu in September 1944, the operation in the South Pacific was to take but four days. In fact, capturing this small coral island in the Palaus with its strategic airstrip took two months and involved some of the bloodiest fighting of the Second World War in the Pacific. Rather than the easy conquest they were led to expect, the Marines who landed on Peleliu faced a war of attrition from the island's Japanese defenders, who had dug tunnels and fortified the island's rugged terrain. When the Marines' advance stalled after a week of heavy...
When the 1st Marine Division began its invasion of Peleliu in September 1944, the operation in the South Pacific was to take but four days. In fact, c...
"Truscott was one of the really tough generals," soldier-cartoonist Bill Mauldin of the 45th Infantry Division once wrote. "He could have eaten a ham like Patton for breakfast any morning and picked his teeth with the man's pearl-handled pistols." Not one merely to act the part of commander, Mauldin remembered, "Truscott spent half his time at the front--the real front--with nobody in attendance but a nervous Jeep driver and a worried aide."
In this biography of Lucian K. Truscott, Jr., author Harvey Ferguson tells the story of how Truscott--despite his hardscrabble...
"Truscott was one of the really tough generals," soldier-cartoonist Bill Mauldin of the 45th Infantry Division once wrote. "He could have eaten...
Some 37,000 soldiers from six German principalities, collectively remembered as Hessians, entered service as British auxiliaries in the American War of Independence. At times, they constituted a third of the British army in North America, and thousands of them were imprisoned by the Americans. Despite the importance of Germans in the British war effort, historians have largely overlooked these men. Drawing on research in German military records and common soldiers letters and diaries, Daniel Krebs places the prisoners on center stage in "A Generous and Merciful Enemy, "portraying them as...
Some 37,000 soldiers from six German principalities, collectively remembered as Hessians, entered service as British auxiliaries in the American Wa...
The British troops who fought so successfully under the Duke of Wellington during his Peninsular Campaign against Napoleon have long been branded by the duke's own words--"scum of the earth"--and assumed to have been society's ne'er-do-wells or criminals who enlisted to escape justice. Now Edward J. Coss shows to the contrary that most of these redcoats were respectable laborers and tradesmen and that it was mainly their working-class status that prompted the duke's derision. Driven into the army by unemployment in the wake of Britain's industrial revolution, they confronted wartime...
The British troops who fought so successfully under the Duke of Wellington during his Peninsular Campaign against Napoleon have long been branded b...
