The Future Historian's View of the Present War PDF Download

Author: Nicholas Patrick Wiseman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Crimean War, 1853-1856
Languages : en
Pages : 76

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Author: Nicholas Patrick Wiseman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Crimean War, 1853-1856
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Author: Lawrence Freedman
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1610393066
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 503

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Book Description
An award-winning military historian, professor, and political adviser delivers the definitive story of warfare in all its guises and applications, showing what has driven and continues to drive this uniquely human form of political violence. Questions about the future of war are a regular feature of political debate, strategic analysis, and popular fiction. Where should we look for new dangers? What cunning plans might an aggressor have in mind? What are the best forms of defense? How might peace be preserved or conflict resolved? From the French rout at Sedan in 1870 to the relentless contemporary insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, Lawrence Freedman, a world-renowned military thinker, reveals how most claims from the military futurists are wrong. But they remain influential nonetheless. Freedman shows how those who have imagined future war have often had an idealized notion of it as confined, brief, and decisive, and have regularly taken insufficient account of the possibility of long wars-hence the stubborn persistence of the idea of a knockout blow, whether through a dashing land offensive, nuclear first strike, or cyberattack. He also notes the lack of attention paid to civil wars until the West began to intervene in them during the 1990s, and how the boundaries between peace and war, between the military, the civilian, and the criminal are becoming increasingly blurred. Freedman's account of a century and a half of warfare and the (often misconceived) thinking that precedes war is a challenge to hawks and doves alike, and puts current strategic thinking into a bracing historical perspective.

Author: Lawrence Freedman
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1610393066
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 503

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Book Description
An award-winning military historian, professor, and political adviser delivers the definitive story of warfare in all its guises and applications, showing what has driven and continues to drive this uniquely human form of political violence. Questions about the future of war are a regular feature of political debate, strategic analysis, and popular fiction. Where should we look for new dangers? What cunning plans might an aggressor have in mind? What are the best forms of defense? How might peace be preserved or conflict resolved? From the French rout at Sedan in 1870 to the relentless contemporary insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, Lawrence Freedman, a world-renowned military thinker, reveals how most claims from the military futurists are wrong. But they remain influential nonetheless. Freedman shows how those who have imagined future war have often had an idealized notion of it as confined, brief, and decisive, and have regularly taken insufficient account of the possibility of long wars-hence the stubborn persistence of the idea of a knockout blow, whether through a dashing land offensive, nuclear first strike, or cyberattack. He also notes the lack of attention paid to civil wars until the West began to intervene in them during the 1990s, and how the boundaries between peace and war, between the military, the civilian, and the criminal are becoming increasingly blurred. Freedman's account of a century and a half of warfare and the (often misconceived) thinking that precedes war is a challenge to hawks and doves alike, and puts current strategic thinking into a bracing historical perspective.

Author: Nicholas Patrick Wiseman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Crimean War, 1853-1856
Languages : en
Pages : 24

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Author: John Lukacs
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300175132
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
Reflects upon the discipline of history, claiming that the writing and teaching of history in higher education is in decline, and explores ways in which the future of the discipline can thrive.

Author: Williamson Murray
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780817920043
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
Williamson Murray examines the past to shed light on the present and future challenges between war and peace. The author offers a historical perspective to show that armed conflict between organized political groups has been mankind's constant companion and that America must remain prepared to use its military power to deal with an unstable, uncertain, and fractious world. The character of war appears to be changing at an increasingly rapid pace with the scientific advances providing new and more complex weapons, means of production, communications, and sensors, all capable of altering the character of the battle space in an unexpected fashion. Murray warns that our responsibility as a great power demands that we recognize the nature of the world; where force. power, and war remain a driving factor of international relations, in which we live.

Author: David J. Staley
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739117548
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
Perhaps the most important histiographic innovation of the twentieth century was the application of the historical method to wider and more expansive areas of the past. Where historians once defined the study of history strictly in terms of politics and the actions and decisions of Great Men, historians today are just as likely to inquire into a much wider domain of the past, from the lives of families and peasants, to more abstract realms such as the history of mentalities and emotions. Historians have applied their method to a wider variety of subjects; regardless of the topic, historians ask questions, seek evidence, draw inferences from that evidence, create representations, and subject these representations to the scrutiny of other historians. This book severs the historical method from the past altogether by applying that method to a domain outside of the past. The goal of this book is to apply history-as-method to the study of the future, a subject matter domain that most historians have traditionally and vigorously avoided. Historians have traditionally rejected the idea that we can use the study of history to think about the future. The book reexamines this long held belief, and argues that the historical method is an excellent way to think about and represent the future. At the same time, the book asserts that futurists should not view the future as a scientist might--aiming for predictions and certainties--but rather should view the future in the same way that an historian views the past.

Author: Masha Gessen
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 159463453X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 530

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Book Description
WINNER OF THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTION FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS WINNER OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY'S HELEN BERNSTEIN BOOK AWARD NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2017 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, LOS ANGELES TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, BOSTON GLOBE, SEATTLE TIMES, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, NEWSWEEK, PASTE, and POP SUGAR The essential journalist and bestselling biographer of Vladimir Putin reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy. Award-winning journalist Masha Gessen's understanding of the events and forces that have wracked Russia in recent times is unparalleled. In The Future Is History, Gessen follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own--as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers, sexual and social beings. Gessen charts their paths against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all, and against the war it waged on understanding itself, which ensured the unobstructed reemergence of the old Soviet order in the form of today's terrifying and seemingly unstoppable mafia state. Powerful and urgent, The Future Is History is a cautionary tale for our time and for all time.

Author: Jeremy Black
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312238230
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
"Jeremy Black places war in its social and cultural context, from the evolution of specialised troops in the earliest civilisations to the likely future scenarios for war in the space age. He uses a rich array of concepts and counterfactuals to illustrate the limitations of the old military history and to urge careful consideration of a much broader range of issues from which to approach the question of what war will be like in the future. We are shown that, for all the advances in technology, with pinpoint accuracy of weaponry and space-age communications technology, war in the future will not be so clear-cut as we imagine. Warfare has never been, and can never be such a simple matter." "Anyone interested in the history of human conflict or intrigued by the possible causes and outcomes of war in the future will be gripped by this powerful and provocative book by a leading military historian."--BOOK JACKET.