The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 are often understood in dichotomy: Americans as those who used the bombs, the Japanese as those affected. I wanted to break the dichotomy by writing a history of American survivors—Japanese Americans and Korean Americans—who were in either city in 1945. Their stories have surprisingly unspooled many […]
Read More"War and Childhood in the Era of the Two World Wars" takes a global look at how modern societies imagined childhood as a space of sheltered existence, while at the same time mobilizing their children to help fight their wars and turning them into both victims and actors in the twentieth century's greatest conflicts.
Read MoreWhile accessing oral histories and autobiographical writings about Indigenous participation in the Second World War, I had a strange epiphany: very few firsthand accounts ever explicitly explained why they got involved in the war effort. There were some hints here and there about the economy or tradition, but many Indigenous men and women who enlisted […]
Read MoreIntroduction to Part I by Michael Geyer and Adam Tooze The First World War had been won by global economic force. The global superiority of the victorious powers, foremost the USA and Great Britain, was smothering in the aftermath of the war. In the 1930s, it took the brinkmanship of states set on destroying the international system, a veritable revolution […]
Read MoreIn the introduction to Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front, Jeff Rutherford examines the German war effort in the campaign against the Soviet Union.
Read MoreHiroshima (Nagasaki) and the politics of commemoration In 1962 a young Jewish American psychiatrist by the name of Robert Lifton visited the Hiroshima Peace Museum. Lifton described his visit to the museum in a letter to his friend David Riesman as follows: “I had seen many such pictures before … but somehow seeing these pictures in Hiroshima was entirely different […]
Read MoreIntroduction The battle of Moscow involved 2.5 million men on both sides of the eastern front, making it one of the largest and, without question, one of the most important battles of the Second World War. According to Andrew Roberts, Hitler’s offensive towards the Soviet capital was nothing less than decisive: ‘It is no exaggeration to state that the […]
Read MoreDiana Lary, the author of China's Civil War, reveals how the end of World War II left China in devastation.
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