The nineteenth century witnessed the birth of German nationalism and the unification of Germany as a powerful nation-state. In this era the reading public's obsession with the most destructive and divisive war in its history-the Thirty Years' War-resurrected old animosities and sparked a violent, century-long debate over the origins and aftermath of the war. The core of this bitter argument was a clash between Protestant and Catholic historians over the cultural criteria determining authentic German identity and the territorial and political form of the future German nation. This...

The Grand Illusion analyzes the impact of European military institutions on Hispanic America in general and examines the putative Prussianization of the Chilean army in particular. The authors focus on Chile s attempt to import and assimilate foreign military methods, doctrine, and materiel. They incorporate research from Chilean, Austrian, German, British, and American archives to offer a new interpretation of Chile s military reforms.The authors argue that the Chilean army adopted only the most superficial aspects of the German military ethos, which eventually led to the creation of...

For centuries prior to 1945, the German officer corps constituted a social and political elite in Central Europe. And as this book shows, the debacle of the Second World War, the scorn of the German populace, and the control of the Allies did not entirely diminish the officers' critical role. By tracing the changing role of the officer corps from its position in the National Socialist dictatorship to its current status in a Western-style democracy, Soldiers as Citizens illuminates both the development of a democratic ideology in the Federal Republic and the influence of warfare in German...

Historians typically depict nineteenth-century militiamen as drunken buffoons who stumbled into crooked lines, poked each other with cornstalk weapons, and inevitably shot their commander in the backside with a rusty, antiquated musket. Citizens More than Soldiers demonstrates that, to the contrary, the militia remained an active civil institution in the early nineteenth century, affecting the era s great social, political, and economic transitions. In fact, given their degree of community involvement, militiamen were more influential in Kentucky s maturation than any other formal...

A startling omission from the extensive literature on the Pacific events of World War II is an analysis of Allied psychological operations. Allison B. Gilmore makes a strong case for the importance of psychological warfare in this theater, countering the usual view of fanatical resistance by Japanese units. Gilmore marshals evidence that Japanese military indoctrination did not produce soldiers who were invulnerable to demoralization and the survival instinct. Allison B. Gilmore is an associate professor of history at The Ohio State University at Lima.

Kenneth M. Pollack, formerly a Persian Gulf military analyst at the CIA and Director for Persian Gulf Affairs at the National Security Council, describes and analyzes themilitary history of the six key Arab states Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Syria during the post World War II era. He shows in detail how each Arab military grew and learned from its own experiences in response to the specific objectives set for it and within often constrained political, economic, and social circumstances. This first-ever overview of the modern Arab approach to warfare provides a better...