商品簡介
Waging War provides a wide-ranging examination of war in human history, from the beginning of the species until the current rise of the so-called Islamic State. Although comprehensive, covering many societies throughout time, it is written through several teachable lenses. It does not attempt to tell all stories from all places, nor does it try to narrate "important" conflicts. Instead it describes the emergence of military innovations and systems, examining how they were created and then how they moved or affected other societies. It therefore provides students with a similar set of questions to use in different historical contexts, unifying the classroom experience and also linking it to the world history emphasis on the connections between societies and cultures. It is short enough to be used in a one-semester version of world military history, but it can also provide the framework for a longer two-semester course. Readable and engaging, the thematic approach avoids the "one damn thing after another" feel that all too often plagues textbooks and renders them boring or incomprehensible. At the same time, the innovations that it examines are central to most historical narratives, including, among many others, the development of social complexity, the rise of the state, the role of the steppe horseman, the spread of gunpowder, the rise of the west, the bureaucratization of military institutions, the industrial revolution and the rise of firepower, strategic bombing and nuclear weapons, and the creation of "people's war." Liberally provided with maps and photos, with suggested additional readings in each chapter, and buttressed by a restrained, if still substantial citation framework, students can use the book to pursue topics in greater detail. There are few works in this field at all, and those that are typically attempt comprehensiveness at the expense of accessibility.
作者簡介
Wayne E. Lee is Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, and currently the chair of the Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense. He is the author of Barbarians and Brothers: Anglo-American Warfare, 1500-1865 (Oxford 2011) and Crowds and Soldiers in Revolutionary North Carolina: The Culture of Violence in Riot and War (Florida, 2001). He has edited two other volumes on world military history and written numerous articles or chapters on various aspects of early modern warfare. Lee has also worked as an archaeologist on numerous projects in Greece, Albania, and Virginia. He has published extensively in that field, most recently as a primary author and co-editor for an interdisciplinary volume called Light and Shadow: Isolation and Interaction in the Shala Valley of Northern Albania (Cotsen Institute, 2013), winner of the 2014 Society of American Archaeology's book of the year award. Dr. Lee served in the U.S. Army from 1987 to 1992.
