Introduction For midshipmen at the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, the social highlight of their second year is the Ring Dance. It is an event replete with tradition and symbolism during which the midshipman’s class ring is ceremonially dipped in a brass binnacle filled with water from world’s oceans; the ceremony makes it clear that the young officer can […]
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 MoreIf you enjoyed Diana Lary's post last Wednesday, read on for a longer excerpt from her book China's Civil War about how WWII shaped Chinese society.
Read MoreTimothy Parsons, an editor of Africa and World War II, discusses the legacy of the sub-Saharan Africans whose role in the Second World War is rarely acknowledged. View a clip from a forthcoming documentary about Kenyan veterans of World War II and download an excerpt from Judith Byfield's preface at the end of the post.
Read MoreIn this excerpt from Eric T. Jennings' Free French Africa in World War II, rediscover the story of French Equatorial Africa and Cameroon's roles in the Second World War.
Read MoreWe live today in a world that grew out of World War II. When I worked for fourteen years on a history of that war, a question that often puzzled me was that of the aims of the leaders of the major participants. What sort of world were they aiming for? One of the issues […]
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