Military History Newsletter December 2019

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Welcome to the first issue of the WarScholar newsletter.  The Marines in Iraq and Spitfires over Europe this week. I interviewed Ed Darak about his book on the Marines fight in Anbar in 2006-2007. Listen here. I also interviewed Andrew Critchell about his history of ten Spitfires fighting the German Luftwaffe in WII. Read it here.

And in our book list below we give you everything you could ask for in military history. Tactics, war movies, logistics, ancient, WWII, Samurai clans, Crusaders, Napoleonic artillery and more. Enjoy! Click here for a list of relevant books being published between January and June 2020.

AFGHANISTAN, IRAQ, AND SYRIA – MODERN WARFARE

This is Minuteman

Night Letters

ANCIENT WARFARE

Brill’s Companion to Sieges in the Ancient Mediterranean

The Persian War in Herodotus and Other Ancient Voices

Ancient Egyptian Warfare

ASIAN AND AFRICAN PRE-MODERN WARFARE

The Remarkable History of the Yagyu Clan – William De Lange

GENERAL MILITARY HISTORY

Delivering Victory

MECHANIZED WARFARE, ARTILLERY, AND TANK STUDIES – MODERN

German Military Vehicles in the Spanish Civil War

MEDIEVAL AND DARK AGES WARFARE

Recalcitrant Crusaders?

Britain in the Age of Arthur

MILITARY AVIATION

The Messerschmitt Bf 109 E – David Johnston

MODERN MILITARY STUDIES

The Culture of Military Organizations

MODERN WARFARE/20TH-21ST CENTURY

Insurgency and War in Nigeria

Laying the Past to Rest

No Barrier Can Contain It

NAPOLEONIC WARS/19TH CENTURY WARFARE

The French Artillery of the Napoleonic War

NATIVE AMERICAN WARS

Seeking Conflict in Mesoamerica

NAVAL SHIP STUDIES

US Landing Craft of World War II, Vol 1

RENAISSANCE WARFARE

Warfare and Politics

TERRORISM AND WAR

Terrorist Decision-Making

UNITED STATES CIVIL WAR

The Second American Revolution

Caught in the Maelstrom

The Visible Confederacy

Living by Inches

WAR AND CULTURE

The Great War in Hollywood Memory, 1918-1939

WAR ART, LITERATURE, AND MOVIES

Nightmares in the Dream Sanctuary

Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America

WORLD WAR I

Rumors of the Great War

Ireland and the Great War

Little Italy in the Great War

WORLD WAR II

Courage and Fear

Blind Bombing

For more military history…

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Amazon war history book – “Slavery and Utopia” (University of Texas Press, 2018) – Fernando Santos-Granero – WarScholar written interview 3

https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/santos-granero-slavery-and-utopia

For many readers, the Amazon has been a place that brings up images of wild beauty, teeming wildlife, and violent death. It is a place considered pristine and uncivilized. Today the Amazon is seen as a vital environmental asset, the destruction of which is considered a harbinger of a fast approaching environmental disaster brought on by the unchecked growth of civilization.

But the Amazon’s struggle for survival is not a new one. Many indigenous peoples live in the Amazon and they have all had to deal with the encroachment of civilization. But these peoples didn’t simply succumb to the crush of development and exploitation. Some of them fought back and fought back successfully.

Fernando Santos-Granero has written about one such Amazonian leader and I spoke with him about his book Slavery and Utopia and the struggles of one man and his followers to save his people’s place in the Amazon.

How did you become interested in studying and writing on the subject of your book?

I became interested in the figure of Ashaninka Chief José Carlos Amaringo Chico by sheer chance. In 2008, Łukasz Krokoszyński, a young colleague, told me about a book published by Mieczysław B. Lepecki, a Polish Army officer, recounting his experiences during a 1928 reconnaissance trip to the Upper Ucayali River in Peruvian Amazonia.

What led Łukasz to bring this particular book to my attention was Lepecki’s mention of an encounter with an Ashaninka chief who claimed to be “son of the Sun.” His followers, according to Lepecki, called him Tasorentsi, the Ashaninka term for a category of gods, good spirits and divine emissaries that may be translated as “all-powerful blower world transformer.” Lepecki described Tasorentsi as a great chief and paramount leader of a violent uprising that in 1915 had swept the Upper Ucayali and Lower Urubamba, killing many rubber extractors and forcing the survivors to abandon the region.

Knowing of my interest in the struggles of the indigenous peoples of the Selva Central region against white people’s encroachment, Łukasz assumed that Lepecki’s reference would be of interest to me. I responded that I had never heard of an indigenous uprising on the Upper Ucayali at that date. And added that Lepecki was probably merging accounts of the well-recorded 1912-14 Ashaninka revolt in the neighboring Pichis, Perené and Pangoa river basins with older narratives about Juan Santos Atahualpa, head of an eighteenth-century millenarian and anticolonial uprising against the Spanish, who also styled himself “son of the Sun.” However, since I was not prepared to dismiss the story entirely, I embarked on a search for independent evidence confirming Lepecki’s information. An examination of the national and regional newspapers of the time confirmed not only that the uprising had taken place but also that Chief Tasorentsi had played a key role in its planning and execution.

What aspect of this subject does your book focus on?

At the beginning, I intended to focus my study on the 1915 Upper Ucayali uprising. The revolt coincided with the collapse of the rubber boom –the rapid economic prosperity derived from the extraction of natural rubber throughout Amazonia– and I was interested to determine whether it had been an isolated incident or an expression of a much wider indigenous discontent. However, as the information started piling up, and I realized that Chief Tasorentsi had played a crucial role in most of the social and political events that affected Ashaninka people during the first half of the twentieth century, I gradually changed the focus of my study to reconstructing the life and political trajectory of this extraordinary man.

What are the major themes of this book?

The reconstruction of Chief Tasorentsi’s political trajectory serves as a backdrop to examine three broader topics. Firstly, the tensions and conflicts between the indigenous peoples of the Selva Central region and the local representatives of the national society –rubber extractors, river traders, merchant houses, shippers and local authorities– during a chaotic and violent period Peruvian Amazon history. In second place, the strategies developed by indigenous leaders to liberate their peoples from white-mestizo oppressors, many of whom were involved in the enslavement and traffic of indigenous people; strategies that oscillated between armed confrontation and millenarian action going through calls for retreat and isolationism. Finally, the debates that the conflicts between white and indigenous peoples generated at the regional and national level opposing those who defended indigenous rights to their lands and lifeways to those who proposed their cultural assimilation and/or extermination.

What resource materials did you use for your research?

The book combines a vast array of materials: archival documents from national and regional repositories with oral histories recorded from knowledgeable indigenous elders; journalistic articles and editorials with field materials collected by Ashaninka specialists in the 1960s, 70s and 80s; Adventist and Catholic missionary literature with ethnographic works; articles produced by scientists and explorers with travelogues published by globetrotters and adventurers; dictionaries of indigenous languages with old maps, sky charts and atlases; and musical recordings and scores with photographs, early films and other visual materials. It is thus a work of historical anthropology; a hybrid book combining the conventions of anthropology and history.

What part of the research process was most enjoyable for you?

I especially enjoyed the archival work. In comparison to Andean indigenous peoples, native Amazonian peoples have received very little attention from colonial or post-colonial authorities. As a result, there are not many archival documents dealing with their history. When I began my research, I did not expect to find much in the way of written documents. I was thus quite surprised when I began to find documents that dealt directly with Chief Tasorentsi and his actions throughout the years. Even more enjoyable, however, was the process of slowly putting together the puzzle of Chief Tasorentsi’s life based on such disparate kinds of information.

What did you discover in your research that most surprised you?

My greatest discovery was the resourcefulness and versatility of indigenous leaders such as Chief Tasorentsi, who had the capacity to change and constantly re-invent himself in response to the challenges posed by changing social and political conditions, but also to deep philosophical-moral doubts and reflection. The lives of such leaders were not black or white, but rather made up of multiple shades of gray. This was clearly the case of Chief Tasorentsi, who, from being a debt-peon and quasi-slave in his youth, went on to being a slave raider and trader; inspirer of an Ashaninka movement against white-mestizo rubber extractors and slave traffickers; paramount chief of a multiethnic, anticolonial, and anti-slavery uprising; enthusiastic preacher of an indigenized version of Seventh-Day Adventist doctrine; and charismatic people-gatherer whose world-transforming message and personal influence extended well beyond Peru’s frontiers.

Was there anything you discovered that moved you?

What moved me the most was the discovery of a song composed by Chief Tasorentsi as a means of transmitting his millenarian message. Colleague Jeremy Narby recorded the song in the 1980s from an Ashaninka friend who had learned it from Tasorentsi as a boy, and generously provided me with a copy. When I first heard the song, I was enthralled. I felt as if Chief Tasorentsi was trying to communicate with me across time. Narby had transcribed the lyrics but had not translate it. With the help of ethnomusicologists, linguists and anthropologists I finally managed to translate the song. Its message –that the creator god is coming to this earth to take his children to the waters of youth, where they will enjoy immortal life– expressed in evocative and melodious words the core of Ashaninka traditional religious beliefs.

What was the most difficult issue to research?

The most difficult part of my research was to find information on Chief Tasorentsi’s youth and old age. In those two periods, Chief Tasorentsi led a life away from the public spotlight. For this reason, there are few written documents for those years. It was thanks to interviews with Ashaninka elders related to Chief Tasorentsi and, more especially, with his youngest son that I was able to fill in those gaps. Oral histories thus became a crucial complement to archival materials.

What do you hope the book will do for readers?

With regard to non-indigenous readers, I hope that the book will allow them to get a glimpse of the richness of native Amazonian cultural practices and history, but also to realize the enormous odds that indigenous peoples have had to overcome in order to survive. It is my hope that greater knowledge of indigenous peoples’ past struggles will sensitize readers to support their present-day fight for their rights to life, land, and political autonomy. With regard to Ashaninka readers, I hope this book will recover a part of their history that has been largely forgotten; a history of courage against mighty odds in which not only leaders, but common men and women played a crucial part.

Did you have any difficulties in finishing the book and publishing it and if so, how did you overcome those?

No. Before I started to write the book, I signed a book contract with the University of Texas Press.

Do you have any online accounts where people can find more of your work? 

Readers can find more about my work at: https://stri.si.edu/scientist/fernando-santos-granero

Author Biography

Fernando Santos-Granero

Social Anthropologist

Smithsonian Institute

Author of Slavery and Utopia: The Wars and Dreams of an Amazonian World Transformer, University of Texas Press, 2018.

https://stri.si.edu/scientist/fernando-santos-granero

 

16th century Spanish New World history book – “A Most Splendid Company” (University of New Mexico Press, 2019) – Richard Flint interview

Richard Flint is a historian who has been writing on the 16th century Coronado Expedition for many years. His latest book deals with the global context of the expedition and we spoke about it.

0:59 – Richard talks about how he got into studying and writing on the Coronado Expedition.

4:16 – Richard talks about how this book differs from their previous books on the Coronado expedition.

12:15 – Richard addresses how military focused the expedition was.

14:40 – Richard talks about the armor used on the expedition.

19:00 – Richard describes the evidence that the expedition was not looking for gold but rather was looking for trade routes.

21:03 – Richard talks about what the motives of the native Mexican warriors on the expedition were.

25:45 – Richard talks about how they did the research to determine the roster of the expedition.

51:47 – Richard talks about non-Spanish documents that would be helpful for this research.

57:00 – Richard talks about a document he found about a slave sold four times in one day.

1:08:01 – They have a website coronado.unm.edu for more information.

Links of Interest

https://unmpress.com/books/most-splendid-company/9780826360229

https://coronado.unm.edu/

For more “Military History Inside Out” please follow me on Facebook at warscholar, on twitter at Warscholar, on youtube at warscholar1945 and on Instagram @crisalvarezswarscholar

Guests: Richard Flint

Host: Cris Alvarez

Tags: military, history, military history, conflict, war, interview, non-fiction book, conquistadors, spain, mexico, coronado, antonio de mendoza, armor, men-at-arms, helmets, chainmail, slaves, archives, book merchants, italy, china, trade route, glyphs, priests, expedition