Thomas Laqueur

In June 2001, John Dower, a historian of Japan, wrote a comment piece in the New York Times about the blockbuster movie Pearl Harbor. The problem with it, he thought, was not its predictable romantic digressions or historical errors but its moral obtuseness. Like earlier films on the subject, it was ‘a paean to patriotic ardour and an imagined American innocence … sanitised to an...

In formal Japanese, I’m told, the word ‘trauma’ is written as a compound of two Chinese characters: one meaning ‘external’ and the other ‘injury’. Trauma is thus a hurt on the outside, as in ancient Greek – a wound. We still use the word in this way when we speak of ‘trauma surgeons’ or ‘trauma wards’, but this is not the...

Stonewall Jackson, the deeply neurotic but irresistibly romantic, swashbuckling Confederate commander, thought that the great and swift destruction of life and property seen in the American Civil War was the essence of war generally. But this war was not swift. It was long and gruelling: 425 men, on average, died every day for 1458 days. And like the First World War, the Civil War got bloodier and more destructive as it ground inconclusively on. Five of its six costliest battles, with casualties in the tens of thousands on each side, took place after April 1863, roughly the war’s midpoint. It ended, as the Second World War ended, in an epic struggle for the enemy’s capital. A century and a half later one can still see the miles of ramparts at Petersburg and Richmond; the crater blasted by Union miners in an attempt to breach Confederate defences is still there. Casualties of this final battle were more than 60,000.