Comprehensive Bibliography of Military History

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

Joseph Fouche found Williamson Murray’s comprehensive bibliography of military history in an obscure corner of the Web and decided to repost it:

Ancient Warfare to 500 AD

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War: Either the Rex Warner translation or The Landmarck Thucydides

Victor David Hanson, The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece: Agriculture and warfare in ancient Greece.

The Eighteenth Century (1686-1789)

Winston S. Churchill, The Life of Marlborough. A bit of family history.

Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766: The reconstruction of George Washington’s first military skirmish by itself justifies the price of admission.

General Works: Military History and Strategy

Carl von Clausewitz, On War (Howard and Paret translation): You’ve never read Clausewitz until you’ve read it in the original Klingon.

Peter Paret, Clausewitz and the State: By one of the translators of the definitive contemporary version.

The French Revolution and [Nabulione Buonaparte] (1789-1815)

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace: Take a week off and do nothing else to finish.

The American Civil War (1861-1865)

Ulysses S. Grant, Memoirs: Mark Twain called it the best piece of writing in English in the nineteenth century (of course, he was the publisher).

James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

General Works: Military History and Theory

Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience: Why the West has such a hard time with war.

The First World War: Literature

Frederic Manning, The Middle Parts of Fortune

Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth. Enough that the Nazi’s were going to liquidate her.

The Interwar Period (1919-1939)

Allan R. Millett, In Many a Strife, General Gerald C. Thomas and the US Marine Corps, 1917-1956

The Second World War: General Works

R.V. Jones, The Wizard War: British Scientific Intelligence, 1939-1945

MacGregor Knox, Mussolini Unleashed: Politics and Strategy in Fascist Italy

Gerhard Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II

The Second World War: Strategy

Michael Howard, Grand Strategy, Volume IV, August 1942-September 1943 History of the Second World War

The Second World War: Airpower

Sir Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, The Strategic Bombing Offensive Against Germany

The Second World War: Memoirs, Diaries, Biographies, and Literature

George MacDonald Fraser, Quartered Safe Out Here: A Recollection of the War in Burma

William Slim, Defeat into Victory

E.B. Sledge, With the Old Breed at Pelilu and Okinawa

The Second World War: The War at Sea and in the Pacific

Richard B. Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire

The Second World War: Intelligence (1939-1945)

Patrick Beesly, Very Special Intelligence

War and Strategy Since 1945

Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954-1962: Of recent interest.

Lt. Gen. Harold Moore and Joseph Galloway, We Were Soldiers Once…and Young: Ia Drang — The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam: Good movie too.

Posted in War | No Comments »

Isegoria: That Onion piece is from 2003, so The Simpsons beat it by three years.
James James: “The Simpsons” made the same joke in 2000: President Lisa Simpson: As you know, we’ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump. How bad is it, Secretary Van Houten? Milhouse: [shows a chart] We’re broke. Lisa: The country is broke? How can that be? Milhouse: Well, remember when the last administration decided to invest in our nation’s children? Big mistake.
Bob Sykes: Combined with the replication crisis, it appears that “Science!” Has died and been buried. Vox Day’s anti-science diatribes are beginning to sound like the centrist, moderate position. 46 years of my life…
Bruce: State education fills the niche of a state church. Patronage for bossy verbal loyalists. Like a state church, it may fulfil higher functions as well.
Phileas Frogg: “Many Americans imagine public education operates on a shoestring budget. Private education, in contrast, looks so pricey it’s implausible government does much to make it affordable. Both perceptions are wildly at odds with the facts.” I can confirm this by direct personal experience. Calculating the cost per student for the local public school district for which I serve as a board member, you get $30,000/student annually. The local Catholic school I taught at managed to spend...
Wanweilin: Bounded freedom, it’s called liberty.
Jim: Phileas Frogg: “No, just start at Wikipedia, move onto google, try archive or project Gutenberg, and finally, just buy a book from Amazon on the cheap.” In other words, what, if anything, is “the marrow of college”?
Phileas Frogg: A guy standing there lecturing, even a highly entertaining and captivating lecturer, is competing with the internet, both from an information efficiency and entertainment standpoint. He’s screwed. Best I can tell it looks like auditing rates have dropped by around 40% since 2005, and I can imagine they were higher even before that if we go further back. Add in the fact that college education has been, “democratized,R 21; and universalized, and it’s no wonder fewer...
McChuck: It’s hard enough to figure out what classes are even being offered by the average university. Learning who teaches them, along with where and when the classes are held, is generally a secret more closely held than most military plans.
Phileas Frogg: Raw ability vs Signals about ability Some disassociation is inevitable as per Goodhart’s Law, but total alienation is practically impossible (despite some of our best efforts).
Bob Sykes: Which degree you get is far more predictive of future income than mere levels of degrees. Degree field is also an indirect measure of IQ. It requires substantially more native intelligence to earn a mathematics or physics degree at any level than to get a Ph. D. In the humanities or social sciences.
Felix: “I don’t think our public schools have been working hard to assimilate everyone into our shared culture in a long, long time.” The key word is “our”. Schools, world-wide, certainly teach a shared culture. Out in the sticks there may be a few unenlightened, deplorables of the lower orders who have issues with that shared culture. But, pfft.
Gaikokumaniakku: “In 2003, the United States Department of Education gave about 18,000 randomly selected Americans the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL).” Of course, these must have been 18,000 randomly selected white Americans, to make a reasonable comparison with the historically white population of the majority of America, right? … right? The ghost of William Shockley is hovering silently over me and shaking his head from side to side in a manner I can only interpret as ominous.
Phileas Frogg: Every educational concern or observation in the modern world comes down to this: “Unless and until we finally accept that people are no more equal in their educability and intelligence than they are in their ability to sprint 100m, dunk a basketball or stand 7 feet tall, we will continue to waste limited time, energy, and resources on solving a problem without a solution: men are not equal.” God needs all sorts. And yet, every class of person projects their narrow measure of...
Jim: The labor market pays you for what you know now… The “labor market” is a centrally planned, authoritarianly organized corporate economy, a free market for employers as against employees, not a free market for employees as against employers. Fortunately, the Singularity is poised to render mutational load a thing of the past.
Isegoria: Caplan’s response would be that almost no one uses any of those skills, and those skills don’t generalize or transfer, at least not for most people most of the time.
Gaikokumaniakku: Geometry can be taught in many ways. Knowledge of proofs might be more useful than knowing the volume of a sphere. A bigger problem is that school is intended to reinforce the social order. If schools taught students how to resist cops and lawyers, government would find maintaining power to be more difficult. Another angle is skills versus facts. I probably don’t need to know the year in which Shakespeare wrote (a fact) but I certainly do benefit from understanding how Shakespeare...
Isegoria: Excellent example, Bob. I’m reminded, oddly enough, of how Musk calculated that on a good day he made a hundred command decisions as he walked the floor of his Tesla factory: “At least twenty percent are going to be wrong, and we’re going to alter them later,” he said. “But if I don’t make decisions, we die.”
Bob Sykes: I once had a family doctor who commented that doctors knew when to to add new prescriptions but not when to stop old ones.
Isegoria: Bryan Caplan is definitely allergic to shared culture. On the other hand, I don’t think our public schools have been working hard to assimilate everyone into our shared culture in a long, long time. I was just reading Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, and that is one of his main points: The main vehicle for nineteenth-century socialization was the reading textbook used in elementary school, the variants of which were modeled on the overwhelmingly most popular series, the McGuffey Readers. They...

Isegoria

Comprehensive Bibliography of Military History

Leave a Reply

Search

Recent Comments

Categories