HISTORIOGRAPHY
The Laws of War
Fazal, Tanisha M. Wars of Law: Unintended Consequences in the Regulation of Armed Conflict. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020.
Hull, Isabel V. A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law During the Great War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014.
Witt, John Fabian. Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History. New York: Free Press, 2012.
Just War Theory
Bess, Michael. Choices Under Fire: Moral Dimensions of World War II. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.
Burleigh, Michael. Moral Combat: Good and Evil in World War II. New York: Harper Perennial, 2012.
Walzer, Michael. Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations. New York: Basic Books, 1977.
The Eastern Front
Fritz, Stephen G. Ostkrieg: Hitler’s War of Extermination in the East. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2015.
Hallbeck, Jochen and Christopher Tauchen, trans. Stalingrad: The City that Defeated the Third Reich. New York: Public Affairs, 2015.
Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic Books, 2010.
The War in Asia
Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. New York: Basic Books, 2012.
Mitter, Rana. Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937-1945. Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.
Paine, S. C. M. The Wars for Asia, 1911-1949. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
The Pacific War
Dower, John W. War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993.
Heinrichs, Waldo and Marc Gallicchio. Implacable Foes: War in the Pacific, 1944-1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Scott, James M. Rampage: MacArthur, Yamashita, and the Battle of Manila. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.
Dirty Wars
Morningstar, James Kelly. War and Resistance in the Philippines, 1942-1944. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2021.
Porch, Douglas. Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Shepherd, Ben H. Terror in the Balkans: German Armies and Partisan Warfare. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.
The Bombing War
Biddle, Tami Davis. Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914-1945. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.
Grayling, A. C. Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan. New York: Walker & Co., 2007.
Overy, Richard. The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War Over Europe, 1940-1945. New York: Viking Press, 2014.
Holocaust & Genocide
Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: Harper Perennial, 1998.
Friedlander, Saul. The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008.
Koonz, Claudia. The Nazi Conscience. Cambridge, MA; London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005.
Nuclear War
Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi. Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman and the Surrender of Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Rotter, Andrew. Hiroshima: The World’s Bomb. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Walker, J. Samuel. Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan, 3d ed. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.
Occupation: Collaboration, Resistance & Survival
Exeler, Franziska. Ghosts of War: Nazi Occupation and Its Aftermath in Soviet Belarus. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022
Deák, István. Europe on Trial: The Story of Collaboration, Resistance, and Retribution During World War II. London: Routledge, 2013.
Gildea, Robert. Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2015.
Population Wars & Ethnic Cleansing
Bartov, Omer. Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019.
Douglas, R. M. Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.
Naimark, Norman M. Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Colonialism & Anti-Colonialism
Khan, Yasmin. India at War: The Subcontinent and the Second World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Overy, Richard. Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945. New York: Viking, 2022.
Yellen, Jeremy A. The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019.
War & Peace
Dower, John W. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York: W. W Norton & Co., 1999.
Lowe, Keith. Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II. New York: Picador, 2013.
MacDonogh, Giles. After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation. New York: Basic Books, 2009.
Naimark, Norman M. Stalin and the Fate of Europe: The Postwar Struggle for Sovereignty. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2019.
Military Tribunals: Nuremberg & Tokyo
Hirsch, Francine. Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal After World War II. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Priemel, Kim Christian. The Betrayal: The Nuremberg Trials and German Divergence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Ryan, Allan A. Yamashita’s Ghost: War Crimes, MacArthur’s Justice, and Command Accountability. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2012.
Moral Legacies
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin Books, 2006.