Shots in the Dark

Brings together geographies and methodologies often kept apart by the difficulties of researching such a broad-ranging topic as the war
Shots in the Dark offers cutting-edge scholarship across different subfields in World War II history, revealing new insights into how this crucial conflict was planned, experienced, and fought. Twelve chapters demonstrate the broad scope of wartime innovation and how the war functioned as a global turning point, driving change at all levels of human society, from government institutions to individual identities.
Contributors collaborated in a vibrant workshops series sponsored by the North American branch of the Second World War Research Group (SWWRGNA), an organization that emerged to nurture scholarship on the global war and unite scholars fragmented in narrower regional and methodological "stovepipes" to consider the war as a whole. The SWWRGNA and this volume showcase the work of diverse historians across subfields-operational, cultural, gender, social, intelligence, and diplomatic history. This approach exposes the Second World War as a catalyst for overlapping global changes that revolutionized the world after 1945. These scholars reveal continuities and parallels in wartime experiences that would remain invisible in narrowly focused projects.
The volume establishes three frameworks for understanding and interpreting changes the war provoked: 1) institutional adaptation, 2) "totalization," or the militarization of civilians, and 3) cultural transformation. Each of the three frameworks is explored from four vantage points. Geographies are deliberately contrasted within each framework to examine the broad scope of that level of war-driven change.

Jadwiga Biskupska (Edited By)
Jadwiga Biskupska is an associate professor of military history at Sam Houston State University and co-director of the Second World War Research Group North America. She is the author of Survivors: Warsaw under Nazi Occupation (Cambridge 2022), which won the 2022 Heldt Prize of the Association for Women in Slavic Studies.
Sara B. Castro (Edited By)
Sara Bush Castro is an associate professor of history at the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, CO, where she teaches global and East Asian history. She is the former president of the Society of Intelligence Historians (SIH) and the author of Mission to Mao: US Intelligence and the Chinese Communists in World War II (Georgetown 2024).