At War

A Township at War takes the reader from rural Canadian field and farm to the slopes of Vimy Ridge and the mud of Passchendaele, and shows how a tightly knit Ontario community was consumed and transformed by the trauma of war. In 1914, the southern Ontario township of East Flamborough was like a thousand other rural townships in Canada, broadly representative in its wartime experience. Author Jonathan Vance draws from rich narrative sources to reveal what rural people were like a century ago—how they saw the world, what they valued, and how they lived their lives. We see them coming to terms with global events that took their loved ones to distant battlefields, and dealing with the prosaic challenges of everyday life. Fall fairs, recruiting meetings, church services, school concerts—all are reimagined to understand how rural Canadians coped with war, modernism, and a world that was changing more quickly than they were. This is a story of resilience and idealism, of violence and small-mindedness, of a world that has long disappeared and one that remains with us to this day.

Montreal at War tells the story of how citizens in Canada's largest city responded to the challenges of the First World War. Drawing from newspapers, journals, government reports, and archival records, Terry Copp - one of Canada's leading military historians - raises important questions about how the Canadian war experience has been interpreted, and the ways in which hindsight has privileged some voices over others. Painting a picture of life in Montreal during the first years of the twentieth century, Montreal at War addresses responses to the outbreak of war in Europe and the process of raising an army for service overseas. It details the shock of intense combat and heavy casualties, studies the mobilization of volunteers, and follows the experience of battalions from Montreal to the Battle of Vimy Ridge. The crisis of conscription is described in the context of national and local developments, and great attention is paid to the experiences of both the army overseas and civilians at home. Challenging long-held assumptions, Montreal at War aims to understand the war experience as it unfolded, approaching history from the perspective of those who lived through it.

At War with War visualizes humanity's 5,000-year-long state of conflict, chaos, and violence on a continuous timeline. Seventy pages of stark black-and-white pen-and-ink drawings and woodcuts illustrate history's most notorious battles -- from 3300 BCE to the present day. Interspersed are contemplations on war from historic thinkers, including excerpts from "The Art of War" by Sun Tsu, "The Complaint of Peace" by Desiderius Erasmus, and "The State" by Randolph Bourne. Searing and sardonic, balancing anger and despair with wit and humanity, these raw illustrations follow in the tradition of great social satirists such as Honoré Daumier, Frans Masereel, Felix Vallotton, and Otto Dix. Seymour Chwast is a design legend. As co-founder with Milton Glaser of Push Pin Studios, he led a revolution in graphic design in the 1960s and '70s, producing bold, vibrant work that pushed the limits of nearly every visual medium.Now, he turns his pen and sketchpad toward creating a new book on a subject that has been a personal obsession for nearly six decades: the fight against war, humankind's never-ending scourge.

Why do democracies win wars? This is a critical question in the study of international relations, as a traditional view--expressed most famously by Alexis de Tocqueville--has been that democracies are inferior in crafting foreign policy and fighting wars. In Democracies at War, the first major study of its kind, Dan Reiter and Allan Stam come to a very different conclusion. Democracies tend to win the wars they fight--specifically, about eighty percent of the time. Complementing their wide-ranging case-study analysis, the authors apply innovative statistical tests and new hypotheses. In unusually clear prose, they pinpoint two reasons for democracies' success at war. First, as elected leaders understand that losing a war can spell domestic political backlash, democracies start only those wars they are likely to win. Secondly, the emphasis on individuality within democratic societies means that their soldiers fight with greater initiative and superior leadership. Surprisingly, Reiter and Stam find that it is neither economic muscle nor bandwagoning between democratic powers that enables democracies to win wars. They also show that, given societal consent, democracies are willing to initiate wars of empire or genocide. On the whole, they find, democracies' dependence on public consent makes for more, rather than less, effective foreign policy. Taking a fresh approach to a question that has long merited such a study, this book yields crucial insights on security policy, the causes of war, and the interplay between domestic politics and international relations.

Includes portions of the diaries of: Pam Ashford, Christopher Tomlin, Tilly Rice, Eileen Potter, and Maggie Joy Blunt.

The country’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, its interventions around the world, and its global military presence make war, the military, and militarism defining features of contemporary American life. The armed services and the wars they fight shape all aspects of life—from the formation of racial and gendered identities to debates over environmental and immigration policy. Warfare and the military are ubiquitous in popular culture. At War offers short, accessible essays addressing the central issues in the new military history—ranging from diplomacy and the history of imperialism to the environmental issues that war raises and the ways that war shapes and is shaped by discourses of identity, to questions of who serves in the U.S. military and why and how U.S. wars have been represented in the media and in popular culture.

With his unmatched investigative skill, Bob Woodward tells the behind-the-scenes story of how President George W. Bush and his top national security advisers led the nation to war. Extensive quotations from the secret deliberations of the National Security Council and firsthand revelations of the private thoughts, concerns and fears of the president and his war cabinet, make BUSH AT WAR an unprecedented chronicle of a modern presidency in a time of grave crisis. Based on interviews with more than a hundred sources and four hours of exclusive interviews with the president, BUSH AT WAR reveals Bush's sweeping, almost grandiose vision for remaking the world. Woodward's virtual wiretap into the White House Situation Room reveals a stunning group portrait of an untested president and his advisers, three of whom might themselves have made it to the presidency. In BUSH AT WAR, Bob Woodward once again delivers a reporting tour de force.

Warfare in the twenty-first century goes well beyond conventional armies and nation-states. In a world of diffuse conflicts taking place across sprawling cities, war has become fragmented and uneven to match its settings. Yet the analysis of failed states, civil war, and state building rarely considers the city, rather than the country, as the terrain of battle. In Cities at War, Mary Kaldor and Saskia Sassen assemble an international team of scholars to examine cities as sites of contemporary warfare and insecurity. Reflecting Kaldor’s expertise on security cultures and Sassen’s perspective on cities and their geographies, they develop new insight into how cities and their residents encounter instability and conflict, as well as the ways in which urban forms provide possibilities for countering violence. Through a series of case studies of cities including Baghdad, Bogotá, Ciudad Juarez, Kabul, and Karachi, the book reveals the unequal distribution of insecurity as well as how urban capabilities might offer resistance and hope. Through analyses of how contemporary forms of identity, inequality, and segregation interact with the built environment, Cities at War explains why and how political violence has become increasingly urbanized. It also points toward the capacity of the city to shape a different kind of urban subjectivity that can serve as a foundation for a more peaceful and equitable future.