The War And Its Shadow

In Spain today, its civil war remains 'the past that will not pass away.' The long shadow of World War II also brings back to central focus its most disquieting aspects, revealing to a broader public the stark truth already known by specialist historians - that in Spain, as in the many other internecine wars that would soon convulse Europe, war was waged predominantly upon civilians: millions were killed, not by invaders and strangers, but by their own compatriots, including their own neighbors. Across the continent, Hitler's war of territorial expansion after 1938 would detonate a myriad 'irregular wars' of culture, as well as of politics, which took on a 'cleansing' intransigence, as those driving them sought to make 'homogeneous' communities, whether ethnic, political, or religious. So much of this was prefigured with primal intensity in Spain in 1936, where, on July 17-18, a group of army officers rebelled against the socially-reforming Republic. Saved from almost certain failure by Nazi and Fascist military intervention, and by a British inaction amounting to complicity, these army rebels unleashed a conflict in which civilians became the targets of mass killing. The new military authorities authorized and presided over an extermination of those sectors associated with Republican change, especially those who symbolized cultural change and thus posed a threat to old ways of being and thinking: progressive teachers, self-educated workers, 'new' women. In the Republican zone, resistance to the coup also led to the murder of civilians. This extrajudicial and communal killing in both zones would fundamentally make new political and cultural meanings that changed Spain's political landscape forever. The War and Its Shadow explores the origins, nature, and long-term consequences of this exterminatory war in Spain, charting the resonant forms of political, social, and cultural resistance to it and the memory/legacy these have left behind in Europe and beyond. Not least is our growing sense of the enormity of what, in greater European terms, the Republican war effort resisted: Nazi adventurism and the continent-wide wars of ethnic and political 'purification' it would unleash.

Isaacs talks to the veterans unable to forget the war no one wanted to talk about. He explores the class divisions deepened by a conflict in which the privileged avoided service that an earlier generation had embraced as a duty. And he shows how the "Vietnam Syndrome" continues to affect nearly every major U.S. foreign policy decision, from the Persion Gulf to Somalia, Bosnia, and Haiti.

Annotation This book captures the human face of the frontlines, revealing both the visible and the hidden realities of contemporary war, power, and international profiteering in the 21st century.

For more than a century successive US and UK governments have sought to thwart nationalist, socialist and pro-democracy movements in the Middle East. Through the Cold War, the ‘War on Terror’ and the present era defined by the Islamic State, the Western powers have repeatedly manipulated the region’s most powerful actors to ensure the security of their own interests and, in doing so, have given rise to religious politics, sectarian war, bloody counter-revolutions and now one of the most brutal incarnations of Islamic extremism ever seen. This is the utterly compelling, systematic dissection of Western interference in the Middle East. Christopher Davidson exposes the dark side of our foreign policy – dragging many disturbing facts out into the light for the first time. Most shocking for us today is his assertion that US intelligence agencies continue to regard the Islamic State, like al-Qaeda before it, as a strategic but volatile asset to be wielded against their enemies. Provocative, alarming and unrelenting, Shadow Wars demands to be read – now.

Winner of the 2014 PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for the Best Work of History. "If you only read one book about the First World War in this anniversary year, read The Long Shadow. David Reynolds writes superbly and his analysis is compelling and original." —Anne Chisolm, Chair of the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize Committee, and Chair of the Royal Society of Literature. One of the most violent conflicts in the history of civilization, World War I has been strangely forgotten in American culture. It has become a ghostly war fought in a haze of memory, often seen merely as a distant preamble to World War II. In The Long Shadow critically acclaimed historian David Reynolds seeks to broaden our vision by assessing the impact of the Great War across the twentieth century. He shows how events in that turbulent century—particularly World War II, the Cold War, and the collapse of Communism—shaped and reshaped attitudes to 1914–18. By exploring big themes such as democracy and empire, nationalism and capitalism, as well as art and poetry, The Long Shadow is stunningly broad in its historical perspective. Reynolds throws light on the vast expanse of the last century and explains why 1914–18 is a conflict that America is still struggling to comprehend. Forging connections between people, places, and ideas, The Long Shadow ventures across the traditional subcultures of historical scholarship to offer a rich and layered examination not only of politics, diplomacy, and security but also of economics, art, and literature. The result is a magisterial reinterpretation of the place of the Great War in modern history.

Examines American engagement with the world from the fall of Soviet communism through the opening years of the Trump administration.

Filled with revelations and replete with telling detail, this riveting book lifts the curtain on the United States' secret intelligence operations in the war against Nazi Germany.

The Long Shadow of the Civil War relates uncommon narratives about common Southern folks who fought not with the Confederacy, but against it. Focusing on regions in three Southern states--North Carolina, Mississippi, and Texas--Victoria E. Bynum introduces Unionist supporters, guerrilla soldiers, defiant women, socialists, populists, free blacks, and large interracial kin groups that belie stereotypes of Southerners as uniformly supportive of the Confederate cause. Centered on the concepts of place, family, and community, Bynum's insightful and carefully documented work effectively counters the idea of a unified South caught in the grip of the Lost Cause.