An Improbable War

Author : Holger Afflerbach
Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 0857453106
Total Pages : 381 pages
Book Rating : 4.05/5 ( download)

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Download or read book An Improbable War? written by Holger Afflerbach and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The First World War has been described as the "primordial catastrophe of the twentieth century." Arguably, Italian Fascism, German National Socialism and Soviet Leninism and Stalinism would not have emerged without the cultural and political shock of World War I. The question why this catastrophe happened therefore preoccupies historians to this day. The focus of this volume is not on the consequences, but rather on the connection between the Great War and the long 19th century, the short- and long-term causes of World War I. This approach results in the questioning of many received ideas about the war's causes, especially the notion of "inevitability."

Author : Christopher Coker
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199396272
Total Pages : 230 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Improbable War written by Christopher Coker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Improbable War explains why conflict between the USA and China cannot be ruled out. In 1914 war between the Great Powers was considered unlikely, yet it happened. We learn only from history, and popular though the First World War analogy is, the lessons we draw from its outbreak are usually mistaken. Among these errors is the tendency to over-estimate human rationality. All major conflicts of the past 300 years have been about the norms and rules of the international system. In China and the US the world confronts two 'exceptional' powers whose values differ markedly, with China bidding to challenge the current order. The 'Thucydidean Trap' - when a conservative status quo power confronts a rising new one - may also play its part in precipitating hostilities. To avoid stumbling into an avoidable war both Beijing and Washington need a coherent strategy, which neither of them has. History also reveals that war evolves continually. The next global conflict is likely to be played out in cyberspace and outer space and like all previous wars it will have devastating consequences. Such a war between the United States and China may seem improbable, but it is all too possible, which is why we need to discuss it now.

Author : Kathleen Broome Williams
Publisher : US Naval Institute Press
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 314 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Improbable Warriors written by Kathleen Broome Williams and published by US Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the outbreak of World War II, four scientists left their comfortable college teaching positions to work for the government. Three served in uniform, the fourth oversaw contracts for the Navy. Such dramatic changes in life styles during the period were common -- for men. But these established scientists were women, and each made significant contributions to a Navy embroiled in a modern, science-dependent war. Mary Sears, a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution planktonologist, headed the Hydrographic Office's Oceanographic Unit. Grace Hopper, a Yale-trained mathematician, went to the Bureau of Ships Computation Laboratory at Harvard where she worked on one of the first computers, churning out essential data for ordnance and other projects. Florence van Straten, a New York University chemist, served as an aerological engineer analyzing the use of weather in combat. Mina Rees was the chief technical aide to the applied mathematics panel of the National Defense Research Committee. This book firmly places the women within the context of their times. Deeply rooted in previously unexamined primary sources, the work helps readers understand the personal and professional experiences of women in the military and the attitudes they faced, and fully appreciate the educational and occupational barriers faced by women scientists in the 1930s and 1940s. The author focuses on their efforts during the war, but also discusses the women's skills and training, tells how they came to war work, and examines the contributions they made once there. She further considers how the war changed their lives, especially their professional lives, and how it affected their future careers. While other books havebeen written about women in the military, this is the first to focus on Navy women scientists.

Author : Thibault Muzergues
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000536580
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.84/5 ( download)

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Download or read book War in Europe? written by Thibault Muzergues and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-04-13 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this highly provocative and documented book, Thibault Muzergues describes how war in Europe is now more likely than it has been for at least the past 30 years, how it might come back to Europe and what Europeans can do to avoid getting drawn again in fratricide conflicts. Many consider Europe a continent of peace, with NATO guaranteeing its security and the EU providing the political glue for a Europe Whole and Free. But what if this was not the case anymore? What if, after a decade of crisis, today’s Europe was much more fragile than we thought? The author challenges our assumptions about peace in Europe and forces us to face the realities of a world that has become much more dangerous. Far from being apocalyptic, this book serves as an advance warning to the dangers, both internal and external that are now closing in on Europe – and suggests solutions to avoid them. This book will be key reading for those interested in European politics and history, the European Union, security, and strategic studies, and more broadly to current affairs and international relations.

Author : C.R.M.F. Cruttwell
Publisher : Chicago Review Press
ISBN 13 : 0897336607
Total Pages : 688 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A History of the Great War, 1914–1918 written by C.R.M.F. Cruttwell and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This vivid, detailed history of World War I presents the general reader with an accurate and readable account of the campaigns and battles, along with brilliant portraits of the leaders and generals of all countries involved. Scrupulously fair, praising and blaming friend and enemy as circumstances demand, this has become established as the classic account of the first world-wide war.

Author : Christopher Coker
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0197644228
Total Pages : 198 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Why War? written by Christopher Coker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-01 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are humanity's biological origins? What are the mechanisms, including culture, that continue to drive it? What is the history that has allowed it to evolve over time? And what are its functions--how does it survive and thrive by exploiting the features that define it as a species? These are the four questions of the Tinbergen Method for explaining animal behavior, developed by the Nobel Prizewinning Dutch ethologist Niko Tinbergen. This book contends that applying this method to war--which is unique to humans--can help us better understand why conflict is so resilient. Christopher Coker explores these four questions of our past and present, and looks at our post-human future, assessing how far scientific advances in gene-editing, robotics and AI systems will de-center human agency. He concludes that we won't witness war's end until it has exhausted its evolutionary possibilities--meaning that, well into the future, war is likely to remain what Thucydides first called it: 'the human thing'. From the Ancients to Artificial Intelligence, Why War? is an exhilarating tour d'horizon of humankind's propensity to warfare and its behavioral underpinnings, offering new ways of thinking about our species' unique and deadly preoccupation.

Author : Joshua Kurlantzick
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1451667892
Total Pages : 360 pages
Book Rating : 4.99/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Great Place to Have a War written by Joshua Kurlantzick and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-01-24 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The untold story of how America’s secret war in Laos in the 1960s transformed the CIA from a loose collection of spies into a military operation and a key player in American foreign policy. January, 1961: Laos, a tiny nation few Americans have heard of, is at risk of falling to communism and triggering a domino effect throughout Southeast Asia. This is what President Eisenhower believed when he approved the CIA’s Operation Momentum, creating an army of ethnic Hmong to fight communist forces there. Largely hidden from the American public—and most of Congress—Momentum became the largest CIA paramilitary operation in the history of the United States. The brutal war lasted more than a decade, left the ground littered with thousands of unexploded bombs, and changed the nature of the CIA forever. With “revelatory reporting” and “lucid prose” (The Economist), Kurlantzick provides the definitive account of the Laos war, focusing on the four key people who led the operation: the CIA operative whose idea it was, the Hmong general who led the proxy army in the field, the paramilitary specialist who trained the Hmong forces, and the State Department careerist who took control over the war as it grew. Using recently declassified records and extensive interviews, Kurlantzick shows for the first time how the CIA’s clandestine adventures in one small, Southeast Asian country became the template for how the United States has conducted war ever since—all the way to today’s war on terrorism.

Author : Harlow G. Unger
Publisher : UPNE
ISBN 13 : 1584659254
Total Pages : 255 pages
Book Rating : 4.59/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Improbable Patriot written by Harlow G. Unger and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2011 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The outrageous true story of the French plot to supply arms and ammunition to Washington's Continental Army, and the bold French spy, inventor, playwright, and rogue behind it all

Author : Fred Anderson
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307425398
Total Pages : 902 pages
Book Rating : 4.93/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Crucible of War written by Fred Anderson and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 902 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this engrossing narrative of the great military conflagration of the mid-eighteenth century, Fred Anderson transports us into the maelstrom of international rivalries. With the Seven Years' War, Great Britain decisively eliminated French power north of the Caribbean — and in the process destroyed an American diplomatic system in which Native Americans had long played a central, balancing role — permanently changing the political and cultural landscape of North America. Anderson skillfully reveals the clash of inherited perceptions the war created when it gave thousands of American colonists their first experience of real Englishmen and introduced them to the British cultural and class system. We see colonists who assumed that they were partners in the empire encountering British officers who regarded them as subordinates and who treated them accordingly. This laid the groundwork in shared experience for a common view of the world, of the empire, and of the men who had once been their masters. Thus, Anderson shows, the war taught George Washington and other provincials profound emotional lessons, as well as giving them practical instruction in how to be soldiers. Depicting the subsequent British efforts to reform the empire and American resistance — the riots of the Stamp Act crisis and the nearly simultaneous pan-Indian insurrection called Pontiac's Rebellion — as postwar developments rather than as an anticipation of the national independence that no one knew lay ahead (or even desired), Anderson re-creates the perspectives through which contemporaries saw events unfold while they tried to preserve imperial relationships. Interweaving stories of kings and imperial officers with those of Indians, traders, and the diverse colonial peoples, Anderson brings alive a chapter of our history that was shaped as much by individual choices and actions as by social, economic, and political forces.

Author : Hugh Mallory Falconer
Publisher : Pen and Sword
ISBN 13 : 1526721848
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Gestapo's Most Improbable Hostage written by Hugh Mallory Falconer and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2018-03-30 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I remember very clearly the day on which I was supposed to dieSo starts the story of Squadron Leader Hugh Mallory Falconer, British Special Operations Executive agent and prisoner of the Nazis for over two and a half grueling years.When he was caught out of uniform by the Gestapo in Tunisia not long after the culmination of Operation Torch in 1942, he had no right to expect anything but the worst. Quite miraculously however, his papers vanished whilst he was being sent to Gestapo HQ in Berlin and, as a result, no-one could make out who he was. This, coupled with his quick-thinking and cunning whilst under interrogation, led to the Nazis including him in a group of high-profile hostages, holding him alongside such notable figures as the former French Minister Leon Blum.The group was intended to save the Nazi leaders' necks as the War ground down to its inevitable end. Offered a certain amount of protection on account of their special status in the eyes of their captors, they experienced the war from a unique vantage point. Held at a variety of infamous camps, including Sachsenhausen, Dachau and Buchenwald, Squadron Leader Mallory was taken on a virtual grand tour of the Third Reich, witnessing the full extent of its horrors.Then in 1945, he was forced to new heights of cunning when the Nazis began exterminating their captives. His daughter, who has painstakingly transcribed the only copy of her fathers memoirs, describes this book, published here for the first time, as a personal manual on keeping your sanity when your weight has dropped to that of a small German Shepherd dog, you are covered in vermin, you are alone and you have everything to fear. It makes for vital and compelling reading.