A groundbreaking look at how the interrogation rooms of the Korean War set the stage for a new kind of battle—not over land but over human subjects
Traditional histories of the Korean War have long focused on violations of the thirty-eighth parallel, the line drawn by American and Soviet officials in 1945 dividing the Korean peninsula. But The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War presents an entirely new narrative, shifting the perspective from the boundaries of the battlefield to inside the interrogation room. Upending conventional notions of what we think of as geographies of military conflict, Monica Kim demonstrates how the Korean War evolved from a fight over territory to one over human interiority and the individual human subject, forging the template for the US wars of intervention that would predominate during the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond.
Kim looks at how, during the armistice negotiations, the United States and their allies proposed a new kind of interrogation room: one in which POWs could exercise their “free will” and choose which country they would go to after the ceasefire. The global controversy that erupted exposed how interrogation rooms had become a flashpoint for the struggles between the ambitions of empire and the demands for decolonization, as the aim of interrogation was to produce subjects who attested to a nation’s right to govern. The complex web of interrogators and prisoners—Japanese-American interrogators, Indian military personnel, Korean POWs and interrogators, and American POWs—that Kim uncovers contradicts the simple story in US popular memory of “brainwashing” during the Korean War.
Bringing together a vast range of sources that track two generations of people moving between three continents, The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War delves into an essential yet overlooked aspect of modern warfare in the twentieth century.

Acclaimed historian Margaret MacMillan explores here the many ways in which history affects us all. She shows how a deeper engagement with history, both as individuals and in the sphere of public debate, can help us understand ourselves and the world better. But she also warns that history can be misused and lead to misunderstanding. History is used to justify religious movements and political campaigns alike. Dictators may suppress history because it undermines their ideas, agendas, or claims to absolute authority. Nationalists may tell false, one-sided, or misleading stories about the past. Political leaders might mobilize their people by telling lies. It is imperative that we have an understanding of the past and avoid these and other common traps in thinking to which many fall prey. This brilliantly reasoned work, alive with incident and figures both great and infamous, will compel us to examine history anew—and skillfully illuminates why it is important to treat the past with care.

Now in paperback, War Without Mercy has been hailed by the New York Times as "one of the most original and important books to be written about the war between Japan and the United States." In this monumental history, Professor John Dower reveals a hidden, explosive dimension of the Pacific War -- race -- while writing what John Toland has called "a landmark book...a powerful, moving, and even-handed history that is sorely needed in both America and Japan." Drawing on American and Japanese songs, slogans, cartoons, propaganda films, secret reports, and a wealth of other documents of the time, Dower opens up a whole new way of looking at that bitter struggle of four and a half decades ago and its ramifications in our lives today. As Edwin O. Reischauer, former ambassador to Japan, has pointed out, this book offers "a lesson that the postwar generations need most...with eloquence, crushing detail, and power."

2017 film directed by Joe Wright

The First World War is one of history’s greatest tragedies. In this remarkable and intimate account, author G. J. Meyer draws on exhaustive research to bring to life the story of how the Great War reduced Europe’s mightiest empires to rubble, killed twenty million people, and cracked the foundations of the world we live in today.
The First World War is one of history’s greatest tragedies. In this remarkable and intimate account, author G. J. Meyer draws on exhaustive research to bring to life the story of how the Great War reduced Europe’s mightiest empires to rubble, killed twenty million people, and cracked the foundations of the world we live in today.
From the Hardcover edition.

The Opium War of 1839-42, the first military conflict to take place between China and the West, is a subject of enduring interest. Mao Haijian, one of the most distinguished and well-known historians working in China, presents the culmination of more than ten years of research in a revisionist reading of the conflict and its main Chinese protagonists. Mao examines the Qing participants in terms of the moral standards and intellectual norms of their own time, demonstrating that actions which have struck later observers as ridiculous can be understood as reasonable within these individuals' own context. This English-language translation of Mao's work offers a comprehensive response to the question of why the Qing Empire was so badly defeated by the British in the first Opium War - an answer that is distinctive and original within both Chinese and Western historiography, and supported by a wealth of hitherto unknown detail.