General Douglas MacArthur has been hailed as the greatest soldier in American history. While not everyone would agree with that assessment, there is no question that MacArthur played a prominent role in the emergence of the United States as a world power in the twentieth century. A distinguished combat soldier during World War I and an innovative educator at West Point in the 1920s, MacArthur became the army's chief of staff during the Great Depression. He went abroad in the 1930s to prepare the Philippines for war. His stand against the Japanese following Pearl Harbor made him a national hero, and his subsequent campaign against Japanese forces in the Southwest Pacific only added to his reputation. The Korean War gave MacArthur a final opportunity to display his military skills. MacArthur and the American Century assembles for the first time a nuanced and full scrutiny of MacArthur's entire career. Essays by such experts as Stanley L. Falk and D. Clayton James accompany materials by Dwight D. Eisenhower and MacArthur himself, providing analysis and evaluation of the immense impact this dramatic figure had on war, peace, and the American imagination.
Unless you know the history, you cannot see the future. In late 1950, the US-led invasion of North Korea failed and for the next three years the United States bombed the North’s cities, towns and villages relentlessly. Pyongyang has been determined to develop a credible nuclear deterrent ever since. The Korean War was the first of America’s unsuccessful military interventions post-World War II and its first modern conflict with China. It established the pattern for the next sixty years and marked the true beginning of the American century. With compassion for the people of the North and South, and understanding for the soldiers caught between the bitter winter and an implacable enemy, Michael Pembroke tells the absorbing story of Korea. It is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand why the Korean peninsula has become the nuclear flashpoint it is today.
The new edition of this classic text for courses on recent U.S. history covers the story of contemporary America from World War II into the second decade of the twenty-first century with new coverage of the Obama presidency and the 2012 elections. Written by three highly respected scholars, the book seamlessly blends political, social, cultural, intellectual, and economic themes into an authoritative and readable account of our increasingly complex national story. The seventh edition retains its affordability and conciseness while continuing to add the most recent scholarship. Each chapter contains a special feature section devoted to cultural topics including the arts and architecture, sports and recreation, technology and education. Enhancing the students' learning experience is the addition of web links to each of these features to provide complementary visual study tools. An American Century instructor site provides instructors who adopt the book with high interest features--illustrations, photos, maps, quizzes, an elaboration of key themes in the book, PowerPoint presentations, and lecture launchers on topics including the "Military-Industrial Complex" Speech by Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Tet Offensive, and the prospects for a Second American Century. In addition, students have free access to a multimedia primary source archive of materials carefully selected to support the themes of each chapter.
No nation was more deeply affected by America’s rise to world power than Japan. President Franklin Roosevelt’s uncompromising policy of unconditional surrender led to the catastrophic finale of the Asia-Pacific War and the most intrusive international reconstruction of another nation in modern history. Japan in the American Century examines how Japan, with its deeply conservative heritage, responded to the imposition of a new liberal order. The price Japan paid to end the occupation was a cold war alliance with the United States that ensured America’s dominance in the region. Still traumatized by its wartime experience, Japan developed a grand strategy of dependence on U.S. security guarantees so that the nation could concentrate on economic growth. Yet from the start, despite American expectations, Japan reworked the American reforms to fit its own circumstances and cultural preferences, fashioning distinctively Japanese variations on capitalism, democracy, and social institutions. Today, with the postwar world order in retreat, Japan is undergoing a sea change in its foreign policy, returning to an activist, independent role in global politics not seen since 1945. Distilling a lifetime of work on Japan and the United States, Kenneth Pyle offers a thoughtful history of the two nations’ relationship at a time when the character of that alliance is changing. Japan has begun to pull free from the constraints established after World War II, with repercussions for its relations with the United States and its role in Asian geopolitics.
This book offers new international perspectives on captivity in wartime during the twentieth century. It explores how global institutions and practices with regard to captives mattered, how they evolved and most importantly, how they influenced the treatment of captives. From the beginning of the twentieth century, international organisations, neutral nations and other actors with no direct involvement in the respective wars often had to fill in to support civilian as well as military captives and to supervise their treatment. This edited volume puts these actors, rather than the captives themselves, at the centre in order to assess comparatively their contributions to wartime captivity. Taking a global approach, it shows that transnational bodies - whether non-governmental organisations, neutral states or individuals - played an essential role in dealing with captives in wartime. Chapters cover both the largest wars, such as the two World Wars, but also lesser-known conflicts, to highlight how captives were placed at the centre of transnational negotiations.
Set amid the flow of the great events, trends, facts and fads of the 20th century, An American Century is a non-fiction, historical novel that tells the story of an American family and the history of the United States of America in our time. It recounts the lives of three generations of the Bleucher family: Oscar and Lilly, Paul and Josephine, and Jack and Kathy, as well as others. Follow their exploits during the Progressive Era, from the Klondike Gold Rush to the San Francisco Earthquake, to life on a Blackfeet Indian reservation, through the Great War and the Red Scare, the Roaring Twenties and Prohibition, the Crash and the Great Depression, and World War II. Readers will also relive the Fabulous Fifties, the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Swinging Sixties, the Vietnam War and Resistance, the Age of Reagan, and the Gulf War and Globalization, until the climax on September 11, 2001. An American Century features scenes with such historical figures as Henry Luce, Lucky Luciano, Allen Dulles, John F. Kennedy, Clare Boothe Luce, Ronald Reagan, Arthur Schlesinger and John Kennedy Jr., and offers a fact-based but ultimately little-known theory of the Kennedy assassination, the mystery of the century.Blending the art of modern storytelling with historically accurate details, it is a novel of love and war and peace, ambition and pride and loss, courage and despair and hope, as well as the tender moments that are important in every life. Fans of literature set in history will love An American Century, the epic saga of a good family and the chronicle of a great empire, illuminating one hundred years of Americana. About the Author: John W. Kirshon is a journalist, writer and editor with more than 30 years of experience at The New York Times, the Associated Press, and CBS News. He was the executive editor of Chronicle of the 20th Century and the editor-in-chief of Chronicle of America, both bestselling, illustrated history books. He grew up in Larchmont and Mamaroneck in Westchester County, New York, and was motivated to write An American Century in order to place the story of a representative family within the context of contemporary history, and enlighten those who seek a more confidential knowledge of the social history of the United States in the 20th century, answering the question: How did we get from where we were then to where we are now?He lives in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, and is inspired to write by the current events of daily journalism and long-term trends of history. Publisher's website: http: //www.sbpra.com/JohnWKirsho
In his last years as president of the United States, an embattled George Washington yearned for a time when his nation would have "the strength of a Giant and there will be none who can make us afraid." At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States seemed poised to achieve a position of world power beyond what even Washington could have imagined. In The American Century and Beyond: U.S. Foreign Relations, 1893-2014, the second volume of a new split paperback edition of the award-winning From Colony to Superpower, George C. Herring recounts the rise of the United States from the dawn of what came to be known as the American Century. This fast-paced narrative tells a story of stunning successes and tragic failures, illuminating the central importance of foreign relations to the existence and survival of the nation. Herring shows how policymakers defined American interests broadly to include territorial expansion, access to growing markets, and the spread of the "American way of life." He recounts the United States' domination of the Caribbean and Pacific, its decisive involvement in two world wars, and the eventual victory in the half-century Cold War that left it, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world's lone superpower. But the unipolar moment turned out to be stunningly brief. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq and the emergence of nations such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China have left the United States in a position that is uncertain at best. A new chapter brings Herring's sweeping narrative up through the Global War on Terror to the present.
Spirit Power explores the manifestation of the American Century in Korean history with a focus on religious culture. It looks back on the encounter with American missionary power from the late nineteenth century, and the long political struggles against the country’s indigenous popular religious heritage during the colonial and postcolonial eras. The book brings an anthropology of religion into the field of Cold War history. In particular, it investigates how Korea’s shamanism has assimilated symbolic properties of American power into its realm of ritual efficacy in the form of the spirit of General Douglas MacArthur. The book considers this process in dialog with the work of Yim Suk-jay, a prominent Korean anthropologist who saw that a radically cosmopolitan and democratic world vision is embedded in Korea’s enduring shamanism tradition.
