G. Kurt Piehler, ed. The United States in World War II: A Documentary Reader.

The Second World War commenced in 1939 when Germany’s Nazi regime invaded the nation-state of Poland.  The violation of Polish sovereignty by both Germany and the Soviet Union compelled the British and the French to stand alongside their Polish allies as was stipulated in pre-existing treaty obligations.  In spite of Nazi-Soviet cooperation in Poland, war between the two ultimately came to fruition in 1941 when Hitler initiated Operation Barbarossa.  With all major powers involved in the war,..

D. C. Gill. How We Are Changed By War: A Study of Letters and Diaries from Colonial Conflicts to Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Writing in the early 1800s, the Prussian military theorist Carl Von Clausewitz, articulated the often quoted dictum which essentially suggests that war is the continuation of politics by other means.  Clausewitz’s realist approach to politics, and war, by extension, has continued to have relevance up through to the present, even surviving Michel Foucault’s inversion of the phrase as well as the changing nature and dynamics of war in the postmodern age.  Such reflections represent a particular..

Ian Tyrrell and Jay Sexton, eds. Empire’s Twin: U.S. Imperialism from the Founding Era to the Age of Terrorism.

Not long after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld expressed confidently to Al-Jazeera the following about American foreign policy:  “We don’t do empire.  We’re not imperialistic.  We never have been.  I can’t imagine why you’d even ask the question.” His undisguised denial of an American empire, either in the past or present, runs up against rather compelling evidence which suggests otherwise.  Reluctance to acknowledge a persistent and strong current of imp..

Ian Tyrrell and Jay Sexton, eds. Empire’s Twin: U.S. Imperialism from the Founding Era to the Age of Terrorism.

Not long after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld expressed confidently to Al-Jazeera the following about American foreign policy:  “We don’t do empire.  We’re not imperialistic.  We never have been.  I can’t imagine why you’d even ask the question.” His undisguised denial of an American empire, either in the past or present, runs up against rather compelling evidence which suggests otherwise.  Reluctance to acknowledge a persistent and strong current of imp..

John Dumbrell, Rethinking the Vietnam War.

Since the conclusion of the Vietnam War in the early 1970s, the USA has been involved in a number of wars and military interventions throughout the world.  From the US invasion of Grenada in 1983 and the Persian Gulf War of 1991, to the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 21st century, the USA has found a variety of justifications and rationales in pursuing its national interests through the implementation of war.  In spite of the frequency and impacts of US military interventions ov..

Heinz-Dietrich Fischer, editor. Caricatures on American Historical Phases 1918 - 2018: Pulitzer Prize Winning Editorial Cartoons from Wilson to Trump

Heinz-Dietrich Fischer, editor. Caricatures on American Historical Phases 1918 - 2018: Pulitzer Prize Winning Editorial Cartoons from Wilson to Trump Lit Verlag GmbH &Co. KG Wien, 2019. Pp. 216. ISBN: 978-3-643-91154-4 Joseph Michael Gratale, The American College of Thessaloniki The first sentence in John Berger’s book titled Ways of Seeing, the author states the following: “Seeing comes before words.” Although Berger’s book was first published over forty years ago, his book’s opening sente..

Noel Maurer and Carlos Yu. The Big Ditch: How America Took, Built, Ran, and Ultimately Gave Away the Panama Canal

In 1959, William Appleman Williams published The Tragedy of American Diplomacy.  It was a book that boldly set out to trace the contours of America’s imperial trajectory from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century.  Williams’ approach to U.S. foreign policy put him in the vanguard of what would become New Left historical revisionism during the 1960s.  His reassessment of American history which in part involved his deployment of such concepts as imperialism and empi..

David C. Hendrickson, Republic in Peril: American Empire and the Liberal Tradition

David C. Hendrickson, Republic in Peril: American Empire and the Liberal Tradition Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 287. ISBN: 978-0190660383. Joseph Michael Gratale In early July of 2019 leaked diplomatic cables from the UK’s ambassador to the USA, Kim Darroch, were divulged to the public by a British newspaper. The British ambassador is reported to have said the following about the Trump administration back in the summer of 2017: “As seen from here, we really don’t believe that this admin..

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, We Know All About You: The Story of Surveillance in Britain and America

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, We Know All About You: The Story of Surveillance in Britain and America Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. 290. ISBN: 9780191066542. Joseph Michael Gratale Reading a book on the topic of surveillance would expectantly, from the standpoint of the reader, include coverage of some key theoretical interventions from the past half-century or so. Numerous references to Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Kevin Haggerty, among others, would appear throughout the a..