Includes bibliographical references and index.

Pt. 1. Strategy : failures, shocks , and mythologies -- 1. The fall France, 1940 / Martin S. Alexander -- 2. Mobilization for total war in Germany 1939-1941 / Richard Overy -- 3. Hiroshima : a strategy of shock / Lawrence Freedman and Saki Dockrill -- 4. Ideology, calculation, and improvisation : spheres of influence and Soviet foreign policy 1939-1945 / Geoffrey Roberts -- 5. The Third Reich reflected : German civil administration in the occupied Soviet Union, 1941-4 / Jonathan Steinberg -- Pt. 2. Soldiers : ideology, race , and gender -- 6. This is the army : imagining a democratic military in World War II / Benjamin L. Alpers -- 7. 'You cannot hate the bastard who is trying to kill you...' : combat and ideology in the British army in the war against Germany, 1939-45 / David French -- 8. "Ordinary men" or "ideological soldiers" : police battalion 310 in Russia, 1942 / Edward B. Westermann -- 9. Race, language, and war in two cultures : World War II in Asia / John Dower -- 10. Women in combat : the World War II experience in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and the Soviet Union / D'Ann Campbell --

Pt. 3. Home fronts : people, places, and politics -- 11. Nazism, modern war and rural society in Wurttemberg, 1939-45 / Jill Stephenson -- 12. Partisanes and gender politics in Vichy France / Paula Schwartz -- 13. War and social history : Britain and the home front during the Second World War / Jose Harris -- 14. The politics of sacrifice on the American home front in World War II / Mark H. Leff -- 15. Female desires : the meaning of World War II / Marilyn Lake -- Pt. 4. Memories : victims, heroes and controversies -- 16. Victims of genocide and national memory : Belgium, France and the Netherlands 1945-1965 / Pieter Lagrou -- 17. Making histories : experiencing the Blitz in London's museums in the 1990s / Lucy Noakes -- 18. Saving Private Ryan and postwar memory in America / John Bodnar -- 19. For transformative knowledge and postnationalist public spheres : the Smithsonian Enola Gay controversy / Lisa Yoneyama.

Donation ; 2010/11.