David Kieran and Edwin Martini's cultural history of war seems particularly timely. While historian Michael Sherry recently remarked that “war constituted modern American history as much as race, class, gender, religion, capitalism – you name it,” the reality is that war constitutes American history in the present as much as in the past.Footnote ¹ Though war is “thought to fracture time itself,” as Mary Dudziak has written, “giving ‘wartime’ causal properties affecting government power and domestic life,” war is pervasive and not temporally bounded.Footnote ² In the United States, wartime is normal time, and states of exception are in fact the status quo.Footnote ³

The editors are conscious of their historical moment. “If you have grown up in the twenty-first century, you have grown up at war,” they write (1). The United States has not formally declared war since 1942, and yet it now seems redundant, if not incorrect, to speak of the world after 1945 as the “postwar” period or the Soviet–American wars between 1945 and 1989 as “Cold War.” As a host of recent scholarship on American empire has shown, building upon the work of scholars like Cynthia Enloe, militarism is as much a part of war as battles themselves, and the fact that the victims of America's violence tend disproportionately to come from outside the contiguous United States does not negate the fact of war itself.Footnote ⁴ American wars may seem increasingly distant to some observers, fought “over there” by professional soldiers – indeed, one high-profile political commentator claimed after the 2018 midterm elections that, unlike 2008 “amidst a collapsing economy and a loathed war,” today “America isn't at war” – but this is largely an illusion.Footnote ⁵ The weight of the carceral state, brought to bear on black Americans at home as it had similarly worked to police America's colonial subjects overseas; the deployment of tanks and soldiers in American cities to quell legitimate protest; the incarceration of migrants and refugees at the American border; and the constitutional crises that have accompanied the rise to power of Donald Trump – in many ways a wartime President himself – make clear that war, if it was ever really absent from American life, has long since come home.Footnote ⁶ It is therefore a good thing indeed, to quote Marilyn B. Young, for historians of the United States to be “preoccupied with war.”Footnote ⁷

At War is divided into sixteen thematic chapters, each of which provides an accessible introduction to some aspect of the study of war and American politics, including novel contributions on bodies in war (John M. Kinder) and war's impact on the environment (Richard P. Tucker). Other chapters deal with race, law, communication, memory, and popular culture. Although the book's main focus is the period since 1898, Stefan Aune's chapter on American empire provides an important discussion of settler colonialism and continental expansion as central to American foreign-relations history. Many of the contributors to this volume will be familiar to historians of war and the US as leading scholars in their fields: Nick Witham's chapter on antiwar activism, Jennifer Mittlestadt's chapter on military demographics, and Kara Dixon Vuic's chapter on gender synthesize the debates in each of these areas while advancing arguments that these scholars have made in their own work on the history of protest, the military welfare state, and women and/in war respectively.

The volume is ideally suited to teaching; questions posed at the end of each chapter serve as a useful basis for classroom discussion. Bonnie M. Miller's chapter on war in visual culture is particularly noteworthy for its use of images which illustrate the book's broader themes and serve as a useful entry point for thinking about war and society, the state, and the media. The book's seventeenth chapter is a timeline of major events in US foreign-relations history and, through its inclusion of such “events” as the Great Depression, the military–industrial complex, and the integration of the armed forces, challenges the arbitrary temporal boundaries of “wartime” that historians in the past have sometimes drawn. Though readers might be surprised by the absence of some traditional staples of of US foreign-relations teaching, such as the Monroe Doctrine (1823), Open Door Notes (1899), and the Roosevelt Corollary (1902), the inclusion of events that are more often overlooked in diplomatic histories of the United States, like the Battle of Wounded Knee (1890), as well as the concepts that underlie these histories, such as jingoism (1898), are welcome, and will enhance students’ understanding of the span of the politics of war across American history both before 1898 and after 1945.

If the book is to be faulted, its main drawback is that its wide scope necessarily leads to cursory treatment of some important issues. To give one example, Christopher Hamner's chapter on combat provides an insightful overview of the evolution of military technology and the challenges for the historian attempting to recount battlefield experiences when many of war's participants die without leaving behind written records, but gives short shrift to the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet this shortcoming does not detract from the volume's overall usefulness as an introduction to the study of war in US politics and culture, and end-of-chapter bibliographies point the reader to avenues for further study. At War is a valuable addition to the field and an asset to students and teachers alike.