Description:
Brings together geographies and methodologies often kept apart by the difficulties of researching such a broad-ranging topic as the war
Shots in the Dark offers cutting-edge scholarship across different subfields in World War II history, revealing new insights into how this crucial conflict was planned, experienced, and fought. Twelve chapters demonstrate the broad scope of wartime innovation and how the war functioned as a global turning point, driving change at all levels of human society, from government institutions to individual identities. Contributors collaborated in a vibrant workshops series sponsored by the North American branch of the Second World War Research Group (SWWRGNA), an organization that emerged to nurture scholarship on the global war and unite scholars fragmented in narrower regional and methodological "stovepipes" to consider the war as a whole. The SWWRGNA and this volume showcase the work of diverse historians across subfields--operational, cultural, gender, social, intelligence, and diplomatic history. This approach exposes the Second World War as a catalyst for overlapping global changes that revolutionized the world after 1945. These scholars reveal continuities and parallels in wartime experiences that would remain invisible in narrowly focused projects. The volume establishes three frameworks for understanding and interpreting changes the war provoked: 1) institutional adaptation, 2) "totalization," or the militarization of civilians, and 3) cultural transformation. Each of the three frameworks is explored from four vantage points. Geographies are deliberately contrasted within each framework to examine the broad scope of that level of war-driven change.Brief description: Katrin Paehler is a professor of history at Illinois State University. She specializes in Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, foreign intelligence, genocide, and mass violence. She is the author of The Third Reich's Intelligence Services: The Career of Walter Schellenberg (Cambridge, 2017) and the coeditor of A Nazi Past: Recasting German Identity in Postwar Europe (Kentucky, 2015). She is currently working on a book on Hildegard Beetz's life and careers.
Review Quotes: The editors are to be congratulated for producing an excellent book which sets wide-ranging and ambitious intellectual goals and assuredly fulfills them. It will be of great value and interest to scholars of the Second World War and Twentieth Century global history.---Andrew Stewart, Visiting Professor, King's College London