The War in American Culture
The War in American Culture

Author: Lewis A. Erenberg

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2014-12-10

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 0226215105

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The War in American Culture explores the role of World War II in the transformation of American social, cultural, and political life. World War II posed a crisis for American culture: to defeat the enemy, Americans had to unite across the class, racial and ethnic boundaries that had long divided them. Exploring government censorship of war photography, the revision of immigration laws, Hollywood moviemaking, swing music, and popular magazines, these essays reveal the creation of a new national identity that was pluralistic, but also controlled and sanitized. Concentrating on the home front and the impact of the war on the lives of ordinary Americans, the contributors give us a rich portrayal of family life, sexuality, cultural images, and working-class life in addition to detailed consideration of African Americans, Latinos, and women who lived through the unsettling and rapidly altered circumstances of wartime America.

The Columbia History of Post-World War II America
The Columbia History of Post-World War II America

Author: Mark Christopher Carnes

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 533

ISBN-13: 0231121261

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Beginning with an analysis of cultural themes and ending with a discussion of evolving and expanding political and corporate institutions, The Columbia History of Post-World War II America addresses changes in America's response to the outside world; the merging of psychological states and social patterns in memorial culture, scandal culture, and consumer culture; the intersection of social practices and governmental policies; the effect of technological change on society and politics; and the intersection of changing belief systems and technological development, among other issues. Many had feared that Orwellian institutions would crush the individual in the postwar era, but a major theme of this book is the persistence of individuality and diversity. Trends toward institutional bigness and standardization have coexisted with and sometimes have given rise to a countervailing pattern of individualized expression and consumption. Today Americans are exposed to more kinds of images and music, choose from an infinite variety of products, and have a wide range of options in terms of social and sexual arrangements. In short, they enjoy more ways to express their individuality despite the ascendancy of immense global corporations, and this volume imaginatively explores every facet of this unique American experience.

The American Culture of War
The American Culture of War

Author: Adrian R. Lewis

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-10-24

Total Pages: 585

ISBN-13: 1136454322

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The American Culture of War presents a sweeping, critical examination of every major American war of the late 20th century: World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the First and Second Persian Gulf Wars, through to Operation Enduring Freedom. Lewis deftly traces the evolution of US military strategy, offering an original and provocative look at the motives people and governments used to wage war, the debates among military personnel, the flawed political policies that guided military strategy, and the civilian perceptions that characterized each conflict. Now in its second edition, The American Culture of War has been completely revised and updated. New features include: Completely revised and updated chapters structured to facilitate students’ ability to compare conflicts New chapters on Operation Iraqi Freedom and the current conflict in Afghanistan New conclusion discussing the American culture of war and the future of warfare Over fifty maps, photographs, and images to help students visualize material Expanded companion website with additional pedagogical material for both students and researchers. The American Culture of War is a unique and invaluable survey of over seventy years of American military history, perfect for any student of America’s modern wars. For additional information and classroom resources please visit The American Culture of War companion website at www.routledge.com/cw/lewis.

V was for Victory
V was for Victory

Author: John Morton Blum

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 1976

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9780156936286

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A noted historian examines the impact of culture and politics on the wartime attitudes and experiences of Americans and their expectations concerning the postwar world.

Projections of War
Projections of War

Author: Thomas Patrick Doherty

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 9780231116350

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Topics include: the influence of Leni Riefenstahl; negro soldiers; depicting Vietnam in films. Films examined include: Sergeant York, Air force, Saving Private Ryan, The thin red line.

Looking for the Good War
Looking for the Good War

Author: Elizabeth D. Samet

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2021-11-30

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0374716129

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“A remarkable book, from its title and subtitle to its last words . . . A stirring indictment of American sentimentality about war.” —Robert G. Kaiser, The Washington Post In Looking for the Good War, Elizabeth D. Samet reexamines the literature, art, and culture that emerged after World War II, bringing her expertise as a professor of English at West Point to bear on the complexity of the postwar period in national life. She exposes the confusion about American identity that was expressed during and immediately after the war, and the deep national ambivalence toward war, violence, and veterans—all of which were suppressed in subsequent decades by a dangerously sentimental attitude toward the United States’ “exceptional” history and destiny. Samet finds the war's ambivalent legacy in some of its most heavily mythologized figures: the war correspondent epitomized by Ernie Pyle, the character of the erstwhile G.I. turned either cop or criminal in the pulp fiction and feature films of the late 1940s, the disaffected Civil War veteran who looms so large on the screen in the Cold War Western, and the resurgent military hero of the post-Vietnam period. Taken together, these figures reveal key elements of postwar attitudes toward violence, liberty, and nation—attitudes that have shaped domestic and foreign policy and that respond in various ways to various assumptions about national identity and purpose established or affirmed by World War II. As the United States reassesses its roles in Afghanistan and the Middle East, the time has come to rethink our national mythology: the way that World War II shaped our sense of national destiny, our beliefs about the use of American military force throughout the world, and our inability to accept the realities of the twenty-first century’s decades of devastating conflict.

Not Like Us
Not Like Us

Author: Richard Pells

Publisher: Hachette UK

Published: 2008-08-04

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0786723963

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Debunking the myth of the "Americanization" of Europe, a noted historian presents an authoritative and engrossing cultural history of how America tried to remake Europe in its own image, and how the Europeans successfully retained their identity in the face of American mass culture. Pells provides a new paradigm for understanding the survival of local and national cultures in a global setting.

Tomorrow, the World
Tomorrow, the World

Author: Stephen Wertheim

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2020-10-27

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 067424866X

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A new history explains how and why, as it prepared to enter World War II, the United States decided to lead the postwar world. For most of its history, the United States avoided making political and military commitments that would entangle it in European-style power politics. Then, suddenly, it conceived a new role for itself as the world’s armed superpower—and never looked back. In Tomorrow, the World, Stephen Wertheim traces America’s transformation to the crucible of World War II, especially in the months prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. As the Nazis conquered France, the architects of the nation’s new foreign policy came to believe that the United States ought to achieve primacy in international affairs forevermore. Scholars have struggled to explain the decision to pursue global supremacy. Some deny that American elites made a willing choice, casting the United States as a reluctant power that sloughed off “isolationism” only after all potential competitors lay in ruins. Others contend that the United States had always coveted global dominance and realized its ambition at the first opportunity. Both views are wrong. As late as 1940, the small coterie of officials and experts who composed the U.S. foreign policy class either wanted British preeminence in global affairs to continue or hoped that no power would dominate. The war, however, swept away their assumptions, leading them to conclude that the United States should extend its form of law and order across the globe and back it at gunpoint. Wertheim argues that no one favored “isolationism”—a term introduced by advocates of armed supremacy in order to turn their own cause into the definition of a new “internationalism.” We now live, Wertheim warns, in the world that these men created. A sophisticated and impassioned narrative that questions the wisdom of U.S. supremacy, Tomorrow, the World reveals the intellectual path that brought us to today’s global entanglements and endless wars.

Bodies of Memory
Bodies of Memory

Author: Yoshikuni Igarashi

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2012-01-09

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1400842980

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Japan and the United States became close political allies so quickly after the end of World War II, that it seemed as though the two countries had easily forgotten the war they had fought. Here Yoshikuni Igarashi offers a provocative look at how Japanese postwar society struggled to understand its war loss and the resulting national trauma, even as forces within the society sought to suppress these memories. Igarashi argues that Japan's nationhood survived the war's destruction in part through a popular culture that expressed memories of loss and devastation more readily than political discourse ever could. He shows how the desire to represent the past motivated Japan's cultural productions in the first twenty-five years of the postwar period. Japanese war experiences were often described through narrative devices that downplayed the war's disruptive effects on Japan's history. Rather than treat these narratives as obstacles to historical inquiry, Igarashi reads them along with counter-narratives that attempted to register the original impact of the war. He traces the tensions between remembering and forgetting by focusing on the body as the central site for Japan's production of the past. This approach leads to fascinating discussions of such diverse topics as the use of the atomic bomb, hygiene policies under the U.S. occupation, the monstrous body of Godzilla, the first Western professional wrestling matches in Japan, the transformation of Tokyo and the athletic body for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, and the writer Yukio Mishima's dramatic suicide, while providing a fresh critical perspective on the war legacy of Japan.

The Invention of Miracles
The Invention of Miracles

Author: Katie Booth

Publisher: Scribe Publications

Published: 2021-03-30

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 1925938743

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A revelatory revisionist biography of Alexander Graham Bell — renowned inventor of the telephone and powerful enemy of the deaf community. When Alexander Graham Bell first unveiled his telephone to the world, it was considered miraculous. But few people know that it was inspired by another supposed miracle: his work teaching the deaf to speak. The son of one deaf woman and husband to another, he was motivated by a desire to empower deaf people by integrating them into the hearing world, but he ended up becoming their most powerful enemy, waging a war against sign language and deaf culture that still rages today. The Invention of Miracles tells the dual stories of Bell’s remarkable, world-changing invention and his dangerous ethnocide of deaf culture and language. It also charts the rise of deaf activism and tells the triumphant tale of a community reclaiming a once-forbidden language. Katie Booth has researched this story for over a decade, poring over Bell’s papers, Library of Congress archives, and the records of deaf schools around America. Witnessing the damaging impact of Bell’s legacy on her deaf family set her on a path that upturned everything she thought she knew about language, power, deafness, and technology.