Chapter 1, “Warsaw Besieged: September 1939,” describes the September 1939 siege of Warsaw during Case White (the September Campaign or Polish Defensive War) by the German Wehrmacht and Nazi SS personnel and the city’s eventual capitulation. The first of four chapters on how Nazi Germany dismantled the Polish state and nation for long-term occupation by targeting the Warsaw intelligentsia, the description of the siege frames the project. The military invasion revealed German brutality and weak Polish military performance, and provoked a Polish government evacuation crisis. The evacuation created chaos, ruptured Poles’ faith in their government, and triggered the creation of a Polish government-in-exile in western Europe far from occupied Warsaw. The people of Warsaw, led by Mayor Stefan Starzyński, coordinated military-civilian cooperative defense efforts, setting the tone for elite behavior during the coming occupation. This chapter argues that the siege-time cooperation was the foundational experience of the capital’s intelligentsia, and framed responses to the persecutions of the coming occupation.

Chapter 3 begins the analysis of the IRGC’s history of the Iran-Iraq War. It examines how the IRGC authors explain the war’s outbreak and the lead-up to the Iraqi invasion. Like other historians of the conflict within and outside Iran, the IRGC authors strive to tease out the variety of causes that led to the war and, in particular, to understand the role of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution in the war’s onset. These connections between the war and the revolution constitute both a prime concern for the Revolutionary Guards and a main theme of the present book. According to the Guards, the success of the revolution was the most important catalyst for the Iraqi invasion. Further, Iraq made the strategic decision to strike while the revolution was still hot—to attack the Islamic Republic in the midst of its revolutionary transition, when the new regime’s power was tenuous and its readiness for war diminished.

Chapter 4 continues the examination of how the IRGC analyzes the war’s early stages, and turns to Iran’s response to the Iraqi invasion. That response, according to the Guards, was characterized by a combination of willingness and inability. Just as Iran’s Islamic Revolution provided the underlying catalyst and opportunity for the Iran-Iraq War, it also had a definitive impact on the war’s early stages. Though many Iranians scrambled to repulse the attack on their territory, their nation, and their Islamic Revolution, they generally proved unable to do so. That dynamic exposes another of the connections between the Iran-Iraq War and the Iranian Revolution. One of the central arguments the IRGC authors make in their publications is that Iran’s ability to prosecute the war depended in large part on whether the revolutionary conditions in the country helped or hindered that effort. In this initial stage of the fighting, the disorder left in the revolution’s wake debilitated the Islamic Republic, rendering it unable to prevent Iraq’s occupation of parts of its territory.

Chapter 6 examines the Iran-Iraq War’s second critical reversal, Iran’s shift from defense to offense following the liberation of Khorramshahr. Decades later, the Islamic Republic’s decision to continue the war and invade Iraq following the liberation of most of its territory remains a point of contention and misunderstanding. While for most outside analysts the decision exemplifies the aggression, irrationality, and ideological zeal that make the Islamic Republic so dangerous, for the IRGC the invasion was an act not of aggression but of defense. According to the IRGC authors, Iran’s decision to pursue the war’s original aggressors into their own territory was made carefully and rationally and only after the invasion was deemed necessary to restoring Iran’s national security. Dreams of marching straight through Iraq and onward to Jerusalem, though useful rhetorically to rally the troops, played no role in the decision-making process. For too long, however, such rhetoric has been taken literally. Instead of relying on the hyperbole of slogans and battle cries, this chapter utilizes the internal accounts included in the IRGC sources to rewrite the story of how and why Iran decided to invade Iraq.

Scott’s lifelong passion for trees is the subject of this chapter. Trees in Scotland’s folklore and mythology, as individual living species, and collectively in the environments that once were the nation’s great forests, are shown to be of paramount importance to his literary and personal writing. Articles for the Quarterly Review and other periodicals, letters to correspondents, including poet Joanna Baillie, and his unpublished personal planting journal Sylva Abbotsfordiensis are explored for their record of Scott’s nationally acknowledged expertise in silviculture, his planting programmes at Abbotsford and his experiments with growing conditions. Using a deep-time framework and recent scientific discovery, the chapter looks back to the first tree species to colonize Scotland after the last great glaciation. Scott’s planting of native species and advocacy of their value to the nation is revealed as a form of environmental reconstitution. Tensions between the aesthetics of planting and agrarian economics are investigated.

Chapter 6 analyses the ecological mechanisms, and implications, of intraspecific trait variability (ITV) and some key approaches to take ITV properly into account in modern trait-based analyses. The different sources of ITV, genetic variation, epigenetic effects and phenotypic plasticity, are discussed and put in the context of species evolution, adaptation to environmental conditions, species distribution potential (including invasive species) and the effects of species on multiple ecosystem properties and trophic interactions. Different tools are provided to quantify how strong ITV affect ecological patterns. A comparison of within- vs between-species trait variability in a community is discussed. Tools showing how strong the effect of changes in species composition (turnover) compared to ITV along environmental gradients are provided. Finally, methods considering ITV to quantify trait differences between species, via trait overlap in trait probability distributions, are discussed in the light of modern tools measuring functional diversity across different scales

This chapter explores Trump’s language around immigration to determine how he manages to terrorize immigrants while arguing that immigrants should be the source of America’s terror. Drawing on conceptual metaphor theory and over 300 speeches and 6,000 tweets, the authors find that Trump’s primary metaphor represents America as a fortress that is under attack, its cities and towns overrun by polluting invaders. Trump characterizes Mexico as the enemy that sent unauthorized immigrants to wreak havoc, and represents himself as the only hero who can save the nation. Along the way, the chapter explores Trump’s misleading extension of MS-13, the notorious gang, to all Latino gangs and even all young Latinos, and Trump’s extension of the phrase “criminal alien” (immigrants who commit felonious crimes) to all unauthorized immigrants. The authors draw parallels to related conceptual metaphors to be found in the history of Western ethnic nationalism, including Nazi Germany.

How and when did Australia begin? One version of the country’s origins – a version taught to generations of school children and set down in literature and art, memorials and anniversaries – would have it that Australian history commenced at the end of the eighteenth century. By the end of the twentieth century it was no longer possible to maintain the fiction of Australia as terra nullius, a land that until its settlement in 1788 lacked human habitation, law, government or history. The growing recognition of this vastly extended Australian history spoke to late-twentieth-century sensibility. It revealed social organisation, ecological practices, languages, art forms and spiritual beliefs of great antiquity and richness. The second version of Australian history, the one that begins not at 1788 in the Western calendar but 50,000 years or more before the present, is at once more controversial, more rapidly changing and more compelling.

This chapter covers events in Europe from the summer of 1944 to the end of the war. Four invasions carried out on mainland Europe penetrate the outer defensive perimeter of the Third Reich: (1) the landing in Normandy in June, followed by the pursuit of the enemy to the western borders of the Reich; (2) the August 1944 invasion of southern France; (3) the offensive in Belarus in late June, Operation BAGRATION, followed by the retreat of the shattered Wehrmacht across the Baltic region and eastern Poland; (4) south of the Carpathian Mountains the Red Army advance across Hungary. The surrounded Nazi regime refuses to consider surrender and embarks on a policy of Total War. The December 1944 attempt by the Wehrmacht to mount counter-attacks, most famously the Ardennes offensive (the Battle of the Bulge). The Allies, meanwhile hold high-level conferences at Tehran and Yalta to discuss future strategy and post-war arrangements. The final defeat of Germany in five concentric campaigns: (1) western Poland and northeastern Germany; (2) the Rhineland; (3) western Germany and Bavaria; (4) Austria; and (5) the final battle for Berlin. The suicide of Hitler and the German surrender.

The first 30 years of conflict between the State of Israel and its Arab neighbours was focused chiefly on Egypt, Jordan and Syria. But Egypt made peace with Israel in 1978 and Jordan in 1994, after a long period of de facto peace between the two countries; and although there has been no peace between Israel and Syria, and Israel still occupies a large part of the Syrian Golan, the area itself was generally quiet from 1974 to 2006 (when this history ends) and beyond. Instead, after the 1973 War, there was increased conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank, and vastly escalated conflict between Israel and its northern neighbour Lebanon. These conflicts were not unconnected, but this chapter looks in particular at the case of Lebanon.

The chapter identifies warnings within the EU foreign policy system related to the Russian annexation of Crimea and the destabilisation of Eastern Ukraine in 2014 and examines the reasons for the differentiated impact among EU decision-makers. The Ukraine case was a strategic surprise to the overwhelming majority of EU policy-makers and posed significant diagnostic problems, but senior ministers within the system were warning their peers on the basis of previous cases, historical analogies, expert knowledge and recent indications of changed Russian intent. However, the persuasiveness of the few and late warnings suffered, first of all, from distraction by external crises coupled with limited bandwidth in the EU, shortages in relevant and reliable intelligence, high resistance against divergent policy predispositions of the warning and, finally, significant suspicions of national biases against key warning sources. The supranational part of the system was almost completely blindsided to geopolitical risk, while the newly established EEAS was partly unable and partly unwilling to persuade the Commission. It is fair to say that the system as a whole acted as an impediment to having a holistic discussion of warning as part of foreign policy discourse.