The Great War transformed the Middle East, bringing to an end four hundred years of Ottoman rule in Arab lands while giving rise to the Middle East as we know it today. A century later, the experiences of ordinary men and women during those calamitous years have faded from memory. A Land of Aching Hearts traverses ethnic, class, and national borders to recover the personal stories of the civilians and soldiers who endured this cataclysmic event.

Among those who suffered were the people of Greater Syria—comprising modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine—as well as the people of Turkey, Iraq, and Egypt. Beyond the shifting fortunes of the battlefield, the region was devastated by a British and French naval blockade made worse by Ottoman war measures. Famine, disease, inflation, and an influx of refugees were everyday realities. But the local populations were not passive victims. Fawaz chronicles the initiative and resilience of civilian émigrés, entrepreneurs, draft-dodgers, soldiers, villagers, and townsmen determined to survive the war as best they could. The right mix of ingenuity and practicality often meant the difference between life and death.

The war’s aftermath proved bitter for many survivors. Nationalist aspirations were quashed as Britain and France divided the Middle East along artificial borders that still cause resentment. The misery of the Great War, and a profound sense of huge sacrifices made in vain, would color people’s views of politics and the West for the century to come.

The First American Volunteer to Serve in the RAF During World War II Who Fought in the Battle of Britain and Then Defended Singapore Against the Japanese Invasion

Addresses the shifting interpretations of the Treaty of Lausanne across national contexts, tracing how its provisions have been legally, socially, and politically reimagined.

The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne remains one of the few interwar peace settlements that has endured into the twenty-first century. Yet, the memory of Lausanne has proved deeply contested. Celebrated by some as a triumph of state sovereignty and peacemaking, it has also come to symbolize forced displacement, the erasure of minority rights, and the codification of population transfers as instruments of international order. 

Just over one hundred years after the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne, The Lausanne Moment revisits this diplomatic, legal, economic, and financial juncture that helped reshape the world and defined new norms of sovereignty, displacement, and identity. Building on a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship and serving as a sequel to They All Made Peace—What is Peace?, also published by Gingko, this edited volume foregrounds the lived realities and long-term legacies of the treaty, critically re-examining the political, cultural, and social consequences of its provisions and aftershocks.

Rather than focusing solely on high diplomacy or legal text, The Lausanne Moment brings into view the human dimension of the Lausanne moment. Through case studies ranging from the refugee experience in Nikaia and Asia Minor orphans in Greece, to the enduring memory of loss in Pontic singing, the symbolic ethnicity of Cretan descendants, and the Kurdish experience in Turkey, the book documents the deeply personal and community-level consequences of forced migration and political rupture. These experiences are not confined to the immediate postwar period; they linger across time, informing the present-day politics of memory, migration, and identity.

This volume also interrogates the geopolitics of Lausanne through new thematic lenses. Essays explore how the treaty facilitated the continuation of imperial practices under new nationalist forms, shaped debates over public debt and cultural heritage, and affected actors and regions often overlooked in Lausanne historiography, such as Albania, Cyprus, and the Kurdish nationalist movements. Lausanne’s cultural afterlives, from its role in shaping archaeology, music, and education policy, are also covered in the book. Through its interdisciplinary and transregional approach, The Lausanne Moment breaks new ground in Lausanne studies, bringing together historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, political scientists, and cultural theorists, and introduces voices and perspectives—Kurdish, Cypriot, Pontic, Albanian, and Cretan—that have been marginal to mainstream narratives. By weaving together policy analysis, oral history, cultural production, and historical research, the volume offers an expansive and textured account of one of the twentieth century’s most consequential, yet paradoxical, peace settlements.

The Lausanne Moment situates the treaty within broader histories of state-led population engineering, colonial eugenic practices, and the moral politics of international humanitarianism. The “peace” of Lausanne, the volume suggests, was neither absolute nor apolitical—it was crafted, contested, and constantly renegotiated. The book’s contributors collectively ask not only what peace meant in 1923, but also what it means today for those still living with its consequences.

Winner of the John Phillip Reed Book Award, American Society for Legal History

A legal historian opens a window on the monumental postwar effort to remake fascist Germany and Japan into liberal rule-of-law nations, shedding new light on the limits of America’s ability to impose democracy on defeated countries.

Following victory in WWII, American leaders devised an extraordinarily bold policy for the occupations of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan: to achieve their permanent demilitarization by compelled democratization. A quintessentially American feature of this policy was the replacement of fascist legal orders with liberal rule-of-law regimes.

In his comparative investigation of these epic reform projects, noted legal historian R. W. Kostal shows that Americans found it easier to initiate the reconstruction of foreign legal orders than to complete the process. While American agencies made significant inroads in the elimination of fascist public law in Germany and Japan, they were markedly less successful in generating allegiance to liberal legal ideas and institutions.

Drawing on rich archival sources, Kostal probes how legal-reconstructive successes were impeded by German and Japanese resistance on one side, and by the glaring deficiencies of American theory, planning, and administration on the other. Kostal argues that the manifest failings of America’s own rule-of-law democracy weakened US credibility and resolve in bringing liberal democracy to occupied Germany and Japan.

In Laying Down the Law, Kostal tells a dramatic story of the United States as an ambiguous force for moral authority in the Cold War international system, making a major contribution to American and global history of the rule of law.

Wars always harm civilians. How wars are waged—with what means and methods, and with what underlying animus—has great impact on civilian suffering and social memory. Across time frames and cultures, this book examines the various distinct features of anti- and post-colonial wars, the two World Wars, and recent wars of the 21st century in terms of their disruption of everyday life and their enduring distortion of social ecosystems. With a lens trained on how civilians and soldiers remember the experience of armed conflict, Legacies of War challenges narrow conceptions of the cost of war.

Jennifer Leaning, a humanitarian and human rights analyst, draws on her diverse experience to describe both the long- and short-term consequences of wars waged in the midst of—or even against—civilian populations. The book illuminates a breakdown of distinction between home front and battlefront and the resulting erosion of civilian protection with the rise of intrastate war and policies of war-at-a-distance. Enlisting seasoned contributors for a wide-ranging set of essays, the book identifies significant trends in the conduct of war, and traces how these trends are later rendered in individual and social rituals of interpretation, commemoration, expiation, or avoidance.

Colonel Pat Proctor’s long overdue critique of the Army’s preparation and outlook in the all-volunteer era focuses on a national security issue that continues to vex in the twenty-first century: Has the Army lost its ability to win strategically by focusing on fighting conventional battles against peer enemies? Or can it adapt to deal with the greater complexity of counterinsurgent and information-age warfare?
 
In this blunt critique of the senior leadership of the U.S. Army, Proctor contends that after the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. Army stubbornly refused to reshape itself in response to the new strategic reality, a decision that saw it struggle through one low-intensity conflict after another—some inconclusive, some tragic—in the 1980s and 1990s, and leaving it largely unprepared when it found itself engaged—seemingly forever—in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The first book-length study to connect the failures of these wars to America’s disastrous performance in the war on terror, Proctor’s work serves as an attempt to convince Army leaders to avoid repeating the same mistakes.
 

A unique collection of letters from a member of the YWCA on her first world tour in the 1930s, Letters from Clara tells one woman’s story of adventure and danger on the eve of World War II. Despite limited financial means, Clara Pagel was richly resourceful and used the YWCA network to find work and places to live in the Far East, along the way meeting other women also working their way around the world. As Clara described in letters to her YWCA friends back home, her sojourn was filled with museums and world-famous landmarks, as well as typhoons, bombings, and earthquakes. These experiences are described in over one hundred pages of letters, annotated throughout by Janet Newman. Upon Clara’s return to the United States in 1939, she enrolled at the University of Chicago and earned an MBA at the age of forty-six. This is the story of a remarkable woman on an unexpected but fulfilling journey to learn about the world and herself.

On January 30, 1933, hearing about the celebrations for Hitler’s assumption of power, Erich Ebermayer remarked bitterly in his diary, “We are the losers, definitely the losers.” Learning of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, which made Jews non-citizens, he raged, “hate is sown a million-fold.” Yet in March 1938, he wept for joy at the Anschluss with Austria: “Not to want it just because it has been achieved by Hitler would be folly.”

In a masterful work, Peter Fritzsche deciphers the puzzle of Nazism’s ideological grip. Its basic appeal lay in the Volksgemeinschaft—a “people’s community” that appealed to Germans to be part of a great project to redress the wrongs of the Versailles treaty, make the country strong and vital, and rid the body politic of unhealthy elements. The goal was to create a new national and racial self-consciousness among Germans. For Germany to live, others—especially Jews—had to die. Diaries and letters reveal Germans’ fears, desires, and reservations, while showing how Nazi concepts saturated everyday life. Fritzsche examines the efforts of Germans to adjust to new racial identities, to believe in the necessity of war, to accept the dynamic of unconditional destruction—in short, to become Nazis.

Powerful and provocative, Life and Death in the Third Reich is a chilling portrait of how ideology takes hold.

Analyzes Mississippian daily life at Cahokia’s environs during wartime
 
In Life in a Mississippian Warscape: Common Field, Cahokia, and the Effects of Warfare Meghan E. Buchanan posits that to understand the big histories of warfare, political fragmentation, and resilience in the past archaeologists must also analyze and interpret the microscale actions of the past. These are the daily activities of people before, during, and after historical events. Within warscapes, battles take place in peoples’ front yards, family members die, and the impacts of violence in near and distant places are experienced on a daily basis. This book explores the microscale of daily lives of people living at Common Field, a large, palisaded mound center, during the period of Cahokia’s abandonment and the spread of violence and warfare throughout the Southeast.

Linking together ethnographic, historic, and archaeological sources, Buchanan discusses the evidence that the people of Common Field engaged in novel and hybrid practices in these dangerous times. At the microscale, they adopted new ceramic tempering techniques, produced large numbers of serving vessels decorated with warfare-related imagery, adapted their food practices, and erected a substantial palisade with specially prepared deposits. The overall picture that emerges at Common Field is of a people who engaged in risk-averse practices that minimized their exposure to outside of the palisade and attempted to seek intercession from otherworldly realms through public ceremonies involving warfare-related iconography.
 

The inspiring letters of philosopher, mystic, and freedom fighter Simone Weil to her family, presented for the first time in English.

Now in the pantheon of great thinkers, Simone Weil (1909–1943) lived largely in the shadows. Assembled here, the letters she wrote to her parents and brother from childhood onward chart her intellectual range as well as her itinerancy and shifting preoccupations, revealing the singular personality at the heart of her brilliant essays.
The daughter of a bourgeois Parisian Jewish family, Weil was a troublemaking idealist who preferred the company of miners and Russian exiles to that of her peers. A scholar of history and politics, she ultimately found a home in Christian mysticism. Weil paired teaching with poetry and even dabbled in mathematics, as evidenced by her correspondence with her brother, André, who won the Kyoto Prize in 1994 for the famed Weil Conjectures.

The first complete collection of Simone Weil’s missives to her family, A Life in Letters vividly illustrates her thought taking shape as she joins the Spanish struggle against fascism and the transatlantic resistance to the Nazis. An introduction and notes contextualize the letters historically and intellectually, providing an ideal entryway into Weil’s treasured philosophical insights.

Life of the 381st Bomb Group depicts the daily life of the men of the 381st Bombardment Group (H) of the Mighty Eighth Air Force during World War II as revealed by its chaplain, James Good Brown, who kept a diary during his time with the bomb group from 1943 until 1945. In his entries, Brown describes with extraordinary candor his observations of the inner workings of the unit during wartime, delighting in the aircrewmen's successes and grieving their many losses. Serving overseas with the 381st Bomb Group while in his early forties, Brown greatly revered the young men, some of them twenty years his junior, who flew the combat missions. More than an unvarnished depiction of the daily activities of a bomb group that participated in 297 bombing raids over Europe fighting against the Luftwaffe, Brown’s diary provides in-depth character assessments of the many men with whom he served. 
 
In addition to judiciously transcribing and paring down Brown’s original document for readability, Korkuc conducted original research to prepare a highly unique appendix to the document, what he calls an Index of Names, in which he tracks down the fate of every member of the many aircrews with whom Brown served. With his Index of Names, Korkuc finishes what Brown started but could not finish by listing the fate of each airman, including those killed in combat, those downed but not accounted for during the war, and those who survived the war. Life of the 381st in World War II provides a rare, firsthand perspective on the early history of the Mighty Eighth Air Force, and on one man’s dedication to his brave team of young airmen. The immediacy of Brown’s narration, combined with Korkuc’s meticulous editing and original contributions, make this a promising new resource to scholars in the field.
 
 

This book of thirteen conversations introduces us to the life of an exceptional person—theatre critic, Germanist, and long-time chair of the Open Lithuania Fund board—Irena Veisaitė. The dialogue between Lithuanian historian Aurimas Švedas and a woman who reflects deeply on her experiences reveals both one individual’s historically dramatic life and the fate of Europe and Lithuania in the twentieth century.

Through the complementary lenses of history and memory, we confront with Veisaitė the horrific events of the Holocaust, which brought about the end of the Lithuanian Jewish world. We also meet an array of world-class cultural figures, see fragments of legendary theatre performances, and hear meaningful words that were spoken or heard decades ago.

This book’s interlocutors do not so much seek to answer the question “What was it like?” but instead repeatedly ask each other: “What, how, and why do we remember? What is the meaning of our experiences? How can history help us to live in the present and create the future? How do we learn to understand and forgive?”

A series of Veisaitė’s texts, statements, and letters, presented at the end of the book suggest further ways of answering these questions.

Like Friends, Like Foes offers a comprehensive analysis of how Nevada residents responded and reacted to the “Japanese Question” during World War II. Both before and during the war, the experience of Japanese American residents of Nevada varied widely. Once the war started, Japanese immigrants experienced an unusual case of mass internment from the mining towns of Ruth and McGill, Nevada, while Japanese American railroad workers and their families, scattered across the state, faced sudden layoffs and evictions. At the same time, most of the Japanese Americans living in Nevada fared much better than their counterparts who resided in the surrounding states.

Andrew Russell’s study examines how variations in local history and local circumstances generated starkly different perspectives and responses to the supposed “Japanese problems” confronting Nevada’s small communities, the state, and the larger region. While Russell’s interpretive history spotlights some highly unusual developments, it nevertheless offers fresh evidence of how individuals or small groups can play significant roles in combating the abuse of civil rights during times of fear and uncertainty.

In Little Helpers, historian John Robert Greene encourages us to rethink the scandals of Harry Truman’s presidency by providing the first political biography of the man who precipitated them—Gen. Harry H. Vaughan. As the former president’s close friend and military aide, Vaughan brought a number of disreputable figures into the White House, in addition to committing plenty of misconduct on his own. Although aware of Vaughan’s misdeeds, Truman remained unwilling to rid his administration of him and his hangers on. Vaughan’s scandals have largely gone overlooked by historians—a tendency that Little Helpers corrects.
 
Greene begins with the story of how Truman and Vaughan met during World War I, then examines Vaughan’s support for Truman for the Senate and later as President. The majority of the book, however, considers the various cronies that surrounded Vaughan and illustrates the significance of his relationship with Truman—and the president’s inability to rein him in.
 
Drawing from primary and archival sources, many never before published, Little Helpers is further distinguished by its use of the correspondence between Vaughan and Truman. Greene also provides a dramatic narrative account of the inner workings of the Truman administration, making the book accessible to the general reader as well as the specialist. 

 

For over half a century, the Vietnamese people have endured the harmful legacies of Agent Orange, the toxic herbicide used by the American military as a type of chemical warfare. While scientists and politicians continue to debate how to best address its human and environmental consequences, the nearly three million Vietnamese whose lives have been shaped by its lingering effects have been largely left out of the conversation.

To understand how Agent Orange has impacted the lives and livelihoods of everyday Vietnamese people, Diane Niblack Fox interviewed families and individuals living with its aftereffects across the northern, central, and southern regions of the country. In powerfully written prose, Fox shares the personal accounts of villagers, as they describe caring for loved ones with chronic illnesses and disabilities and their attempts to secure medical and financial assistance. Living with Agent Orange also chronicles the moving stories of rebuilt lives, of family and community support, and of the overriding power of the human spirit.

In this collection of interrelated essays, Bronson Lemer explores companionship through the lens of a queer veteran, focusing on the difficulty of forming true connections with others, including a “battle buddy” during basic training, the people he meets while teaching in China, and the spirit of a long-dead older sister. Lemer uses lessons from popular culture and literature—the globe-trotting exploits of fictional criminal Carmen Sandiego, the sexual exploration in Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, the expatriate longing in Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, just to name a few—as a means to think more broadly about the role of the outsider and how we navigate aimlessness while searching for stability and meaning. 

Lemer’s distinct take on the veteran’s story boldly engages the intersection of military narratives and queer culture, including examinations into the role of thirst traps in contemporary dating culture, the fears of long-term health damage caused by military service, and the ways in which intimate relationships can lead to a loss of self. Taken together, his essays illustrate how one queer veteran managed to carve out a path that led him, however awkwardly at times, closer to the person he wanted to be.

A veteran of the Second World War and the Korean War, Francis L. Sampson was a real-life hero whose exploits inspired one of the most famous war films of all time, Saving Private Ryan. From rural beginnings in northwestern Iowa, Sampson’s life would take him from the University of Notre Dame to the battlefields of Normandy on D-Day, the ambitious failure of Operation Market Garden, the harshness of a winter as a POW of the Germans during the closing stages of the Second World War, to the fall of North Korean capital Pyongyang in the early stages of the Korean War. Part of the very rare breed of Parachute Chaplains, in his case with the 101 st Airborne Division, Sampson spent much of his career as an army chaplain in the center of maelstroms of the 20 th century. Throughout it all, Sampson offered a valuable Christian witness in the darkest of times and the most difficult of circumstances. This second edition of his memoirs, Look Out Below! contains material on his service during the Korean War and occupation duty in Germany and Japan as well as the Second World War, with a new historical introduction by University of Scranton Professor Sean Brennan.

How Tennessee reformers reconciled Southern heritage with rising nationalism, weaving the Lost Cause into the fabric of American progress and identity.

The Lost Cause and the Great War tells the stories of central Tennessee Progressive-era reformers to illustrate the fascinating broader issue of how Southerners steeped in Lost Cause Civil War mythologies simultaneously developed patriotic American fervor. Focusing on Luke Lea, a prominent politician and American army officer who attempted to capture Kaiser Wilhelm II during World War I, the book reveals the intricate interplay between three competing ideas: attachment to the memory of the Confederacy, intense American nationalism, and advocacy for progressive reforms.

Hunt shows that Lea and his contemporaries sought either to harmonize these competing loyalties or to compartmentalize them to use when needed. Through insightful accounts of Tennessee’s 1928 presidential campaign, the American Legion’s response to cuts to veteran benefits in 1933, and the redefinition of America’s global role post–World War II, Hunt shows how these reformers achieved a balance that held until the Civil Rights movement disrupted this delicate consensus.

Hunt’s rich account reveals how Lea and others like him wove national patriotism and Southern collective memory into a cohesive narrative that supported their broader Progressive goals. The book offers much to readers interested in Southern history, the Gilded Age, Prohibition, World War I, World War II, and the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement. It provides vivid examples of how collective memory and narratives shape social and political movements. General readers will discover how white Southerners who remained devoted to vindicating the Confederacy nonetheless became fervent supporters of America's growing nationalism in the early twentieth century.

Traditionally seen as a master of domestic politics, Lyndon Johnson is frequently portrayed as inept in foreign relations, consumed by the war in Vietnam, and unable to provide vision or leadership for the Western alliance. In this persuasive revisionist history, Thomas Alan Schwartz takes issue with many of the popular and scholarly assumptions about the president seen as the classic "ugly American."

In the first comprehensive study of Johnson's policy toward Europe--the most important theater of the Cold War--Schwartz shows a president who guided the United States with a policy that balanced the solidarity of the Western alliance with the need to stabilize the Cold War and reduce the nuclear danger. He faced the dilemmas of maintaining the cohesion of the alliance, especially with the French withdrawal from NATO, while trying to reduce tensions between eastern and western Europe, managing bitter conflicts over international monetary and trade policies, and prosecuting an escalating war in Southeast Asia.

Impressively researched and engagingly written, Lyndon Johnson and Europe shows a fascinating new side to this giant of twentieth-century American history and demonstrates that Johnson's diplomacy toward Europe deserves recognition as one of the most important achievements of his presidency.