For a war that's not much talked about these days, the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War was pivotal not just for its antagonists but for the entire world. It launched victorious Japan, the first Asian power to defeat a European one in the modern era, on its destructive path toward imperial expansion, which eventually morphed into World War II. For the Russian Empire, soundly trounced in battle after battle, defeat marked the end of its military aspirations in the Far East and helped trigger the 1905 Revolution, which led to the 1917 Revolution and all that followed. Journalism scholars Michael S. Sweeney and Natascha Toft Roelsgaard argue that it also triggered another key historical development in helping to shape the rise of modern forms of propaganda and censorship, particularly as practised in wartime. In their superbly researched study Journalism and the Russo-Japanese War, they argue that Japan's then-unprecedented treatment of western war correspondents helped establish a template which has persisted around the world to greater or lesser degrees to this day. Sweeney and Roelsgaard offer a fascinating, engaging and erudite study of this process, shining an enthralling and thought-provoking light on an often-forgotten conflict, the reporters who covered it, and the impact that war had on shaping the journalism we know today.