Author: Marshall Poe

A critical challenge for militaries is preparing for future, not past, wars. History shows that success often depends on accurately interpreting and harnessing technological and societal changes. In the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), this transformation process has been ongoing, with Brigadier General Eran Ortal as a key advocate for a new paradigm. Many ideas developed by Ortal and his colleagues have recently shaped the IDF's force-building programs. 

The Battle Before the War: The Inside Story of the IDF's Transformation (Dado Center, 2023) compiles a decade of critical intellectual work produced during active service, uniquely combining theoretical discussions on military innovation with insider insights into IDF deliberations. It offers an essential perspective for understanding the IDF's internal debates and current development. Moreover, the book serves as a mirror to the ongoing conflicts between Israel and Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, providing valuable context for understanding the military strategies and challenges in these contemporary engagements.

Eran Ortal is an Israeli brigadier-general (Res) and renowned military theorist who has made significant contributions to strategic thinking in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Ortal's military career spans over three decades, during which he served in various critical roles, including combat intelligence and operational planning. His academic background in history, political science, and security studies complements his practical military experience. Ortal is perhaps best known for his tenure as the commander of The Dado Center for Interdisciplinary Military Studies, where he fostered innovative military thought and strategy. He is also the founder and editor of "Bein Ha-ktavim" (Between the Poles), an influential journal published by the Dado Center. Since retiring from the IDF in 2023, Ortal has continued to shape military and technological strategy through his work with prestigious think tanks and as an educator at Reichman University. His unique blend of military experience, academic rigor, and strategic insight makes him a valuable voice in discussions on modern warfare and defense strategy.

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A “wonderful…highly comprehensive” (John Barton, author of A History of the Bible) global history of the world’s best-known and most influential book For Christians, the Bible is a book inspired by God. Its eternal words are transmitted across the world by fallible human hands. Following Jesus’s departing instruction to go out into the world, the Bible has been a book in motion from its very beginnings, and every community it has encountered has read, heard, and seen the Bible through its own language and culture. 

In The Bible: A Global History (Basic Books, 2024), Bruce Gordon tells the astounding story of the Bible’s journey around the globe and across more than two thousand years, showing how it has shaped and been shaped by changing beliefs and believers’ radically different needs. The Bible has been a tool for violence and oppression, and it has expressed hopes for liberation. God speaks with one voice, but the people who receive it are scattered and divided—found in desert monasteries and Chinese house churches, in Byzantine cathedrals and Guatemalan villages. Breathtakingly global in scope, The Bible tells the story of this sacred book through the stories of its many and diverse human encounters, revealing not a static text but a living, dynamic cultural force.

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Joséphine Bonaparte, future Empress of France; Térézia Tallien, the most beautiful woman in Europe; and Juliette Récamier, muse of intellectuals, had nothing left to lose. After surviving incarceration and forced incestuous marriage during the worst violence of the French Revolution of 1789, they dared sartorial revolt. Together, Joséphine and Térézia shed the underwear cages and massive, rigid garments that women had been obliged to wear for centuries. They slipped into light, mobile dresses, cropped their hair short, wrapped themselves in shawls, and championed the handbag. Juliette made the new style stand for individual liberty.

The erotic audacity of these fashion revolutionaries conquered Europe, starting with Napoleon. Everywhere a fashion magazine could reach, women imitated the news coming from Paris. It was the fastest and most total change in clothing history. Two centuries ahead of its time, it was rolled back after only a decade by misogynist rumors of obscene extravagance.

As Dr. Anne Higonnet shows in Liberty, Equality, Fashion: The Women Who Styled the French Revolution (Norton, 2024), new evidence allows the real fashion revolution to be told. This is a story for our time: of a revolution that demanded universal human rights, of self-creation, of women empowering each other, and of transcendent glamor.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Who controls what is taught in American universities – professors or politicians? The answer is far from clear but suddenly urgent. Unprecedented efforts are now underway to restrict what ideas can be promoted and discussed in university classrooms. Professors at public universities have long assumed that their freedom to teach is unassailable and that there were firm constitutional protections shielding them from political interventions. Those assumptions might always have been more hopeful than sound. A battle over the control of the university classroom is now brewing, and the courts will be called upon to establish clearer guidelines as to what – if any – limits legislatures might have in dictating what is taught in public universities. 

In You Can't Teach That!: The Battle over University Classrooms (Polity Press, 2024), Keith Whittington argues that the First Amendment imposes meaningful limits on how government officials can restrict the ideas discussed on university campuses. In clear and accessible prose, he illuminates the legal status of academic freedom in the United States and shows how existing constitutional doctrine can be deployed to protect unbridled free inquiry.

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Nazi Germany, Annexed Poland and Colonial Rule: Resettlement, Germanization and Population Policies in Comparative Perspective (Bloomsbury, 2023) examines Nazi Germany's expansion, population management and establishment of a racially stratified society within the Reichsgaue (Reich Districts) of Wartheland and Danzig-West Prussia in annexed Poland (1939-1945) through a colonial lens. The topic of the Holocaust has thus far dominated the scholarly debate on the relevance of colonialism for our understanding of the Nazi regime. However, as opposed to solely concentrating on violence to investigate whether the Holocaust can be located within wider colonial frameworks, Rachel O'Sullivan utilizes a broader approach by investigating other aspects, such as discourses and fantasies related to expansion, settlement, 'civilising missions' and Germanisation, which were also intrinsic to Nazi Germany's rule in Poland.

The resettlement of the ethnic Germans-individuals of German descent who lived in Eastern Europe until the outbreak of the Second World War-forms a main focal point for this study's analysis and investigation of colonial comparisons. The ethnic German resettlement in the Reichsgaue laid the foundations for the establishment and enforcement of German society and culture, while simultaneously intensifying the efforts to control Poles and remove Jews. Through this case study, O'Sullivan explores Nazi Germany's dual usage of inclusionary policies, which attempted to culturally and linguistically integrate ethnic Germans and certain Poles into German society, and the contrasting exclusionary policies, which sought to rid annexed Poland of 'undesirable' population groups through segregation, deportation and murder. The book compares these policies - and the tactics used to implement them - to colonial and settler colonial methods of assimilation, subjugation and violence.

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Over the past decades, under the cover of "innovation," technology companies have successfully resisted regulation and have even begun to seize power from governments themselves. Facial recognition firms track citizens for police surveillance. Cryptocurrency has wiped out the personal savings of millions and threatens the stability of the global financial system. Spyware companies sell digital intelligence tools to anyone who can afford them. This new reality--where unregulated technology has become a forceful instrument for autocrats around the world--is terrible news for democracies and citizens.

In The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley (Princeton UP, 2024), Marietje Schaake offers a behind-the-scenes account of how technology companies crept into nearly every corner of our lives and our governments. She takes us beyond the headlines to high-stakes meetings with human rights defenders, business leaders, computer scientists, and politicians to show how technologies--from social media to artificial intelligence--have gone from being heralded as utopian to undermining the pillars of our democracies. To reverse this existential power imbalance, Schaake outlines game-changing solutions to empower elected officials and citizens alike. Democratic leaders can--and must--resist the influence of corporate lobbying and reinvent themselves as dynamic, flexible guardians of our digital world.

Drawing on her experiences in the halls of the European Parliament and among Silicon Valley insiders, Schaake offers a frightening look at our modern tech-obsessed world--and a clear-eyed view of how democracies can build a better future before it is too late.

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The Shawnee leader Tecumseh came to prominence in a war against the United States waged from 1811 to 1815. In 1805, Tecumseh's younger brother Lalawethika (soon to be known as "the Prophet") had a vision for an Indian revitalization movement that would restore Native culture and resist American expansion. Tecumseh organized the growing support for this movement, which came from Indigenous peoples across the Old Northwest and parts of the Great Plains, into a loose but powerful military alliance.

In late 1811, while Tecumseh was away on a recruiting mission in the South, General William Henry Harrison led an army to the center of Native resistance at Prophetstown in present-day Indiana. In the early morning hours of November 7, in what came to be known as the Battle of Tippecanoe, Harrison's men fought off an Indian attack, which marked the beginning of Tecumseh's War. Seven months later, when the United States declared war on Britain, thus initiating the War of 1812, the British and Tecumseh forged an alliance against the United States. Initially, the Anglo-Indian alliance enjoyed considerable success at Detroit, Chicago, Mackinac, and elsewhere, exposing much of the Old Northwest to border warfare, but the tide turned in 1813 when Harrison invaded Canada. On October 5 the American army defeated a much smaller Anglo-Indian force in the climactic Battle of the Thames. Tecumseh was killed in this battle, and although his confederacy disintegrated, British support ensured that the Indian war would continue for another two years with the Sauk chief Black Hawk now providing the inspiration and leadership. Tecumseh's War ended only in late 1815 after the British made peace with the United States and abandoned their native allies.

Tecumseh's War: The Epic Conflict for the Heart of America (Westholme, 2023) is the first complete story of this major conflict. Distinguished historian Donald R. Hickey detaches it from the War of 1812, moving Tecumseh's confederation to center stage to tell the sweeping and engrossing story of this last great Indian War--the last time that Indigenous Peoples had a powerful European ally to oppose United States expansion and thus the lastchance they had of shaping the future of the continent.

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Is there such a thing as a timeless classic? More than a decade ago, Dr. Rochelle Gurstein set out to explore and establish a solid foundation for the classic in the history of taste. To her surprise, that history instead revealed repeated episodes of soaring and falling reputations, rediscoveries of long-forgotten artists, and radical shifts in the canon, all of which went so completely against common knowledge that it was hard to believe it was true.

Where does the idea of the timeless classic come from? And how has it become so fiercely contested? By recovering disputes about works of art from the eighteenth century to the close of the twentieth, in Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art (Yale University Press, 2024) Dr. Gurstein takes us into unfamiliar aesthetic and moral terrain, providing a richly imagined historical alternative to accounts offered by both cultural theorists advancing attacks on the politics of taste and those who continue to cling to the ideal of universal values embodied in the classic. As Gurstein brings to life the competing responses of generations of artists, art lovers, and critics to specific works of art, she makes us see the same object vividly and directly through their eyes and feel, in all its enlarging intensity, what they felt.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Adoption has always been viewed as a beloved institution for building families, as well as a mutually agreeable common ground in the otherwise partisan abortion debate. Little attention, however, has been paid to the lives of mothers who relinquish their infants for private adoption. Through the lens of reproductive justice, Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood reveals adoption to be a path of constrained choice for women who face immense barriers to access abortion, or to parent their children safely.

With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, adoption increasingly functions as an institution that perpetuates reproductive injustice by separating families and policing parenthood under the guise of feel-good family building for middle-upper-class white people. Based on hundreds of in-depth interviews, Relinquished centers and amplifies the voices of relinquishing mothers, and fills an important gap in the national conversation about reproductive politics and justice. 

Shui-yin Sharon Yam is Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies, and Affiliate Faculty of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the co-author of Doing Gender Justice: Queering Reproduction, Kin, and Care. 

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