The Greater Second World War: Global Perspectives

The Greater Second World War challenges the traditional temporal and geographic frameworks of World War II, expanding the timeline to include a series of regional conflicts and revolutions that began in 1931 and continued into the mid-1950s. These conflicts bookended a "central paroxysm" defined by the intervention of the United States into every theater of the war, rendering it genuinely global. The essays within this volume bring top-level accounts of US, European, and Axis strategic maneuvering into conversation with social histories of "bottom-up" agency in ways that destabilize conventional narratives.

Working with novel and overlapping scales of time and space and attuned to ongoing and lively debates about the place of the nation-state in global history after 1945, the scholars featured in The Greater Second World War seek to not only describe the war's beginnings in Asia and Africa--rather than in Europe--but also trace its ends to the shatter zones of the Soviet frontier, the struggles for sovereignty in contested spaces, and the long-reaches of US imperialism well into the late twentieth century. Together, their contributions reveal how the cascading imperial and economic crises of the mid-twentieth century triggered a series of discrete local and regional struggles that took on the character of a singular, unified "world war" after the entry of the United States into every theater and almost every corner of the world.

Contributors: Marco Maria Aterrano, Th. W. Bottelier, Pablo del Hierro, Alexandre Fortes, Kelly A. Hammond, Ashley Jackson, Naina Manjrekar, David Motadel, Tejasvi Nagaraja, Martin Thomas

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1501780654
• ISBN13: 9781501780653
• Release Date: April 2025
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Length: 408 Pages
• Weight: 1.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.0" x 9.0"