Project Hula

Project Hula

Author: Richard A. Russell

Publisher:

Published: 2003-06-01

Total Pages: 56

ISBN-13: 9781410206527

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"This booklet, based on original materials culled from archives in the United States and in the Russian Federation, treats a little known aspect of lend-lease and of Soviet-American relations at the end of the Second World War. The author, Richard A. Russell, has cultivated singularly productive relations with prominent historians, archivists, and naval officers in Russia. His tireless efforts to obtain access to Russian naval archives and to introduce their materials into the writing of recent American history will revise how historians approach working on the navel aspects of the Soviet-American alliance in World War II and the Cold War at sea."William S. DudleyDirector of Naval HistoryUnited States Navy


Ho'onani: Hula Warrior

Ho'onani: Hula Warrior

Author: Heather Gale

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2019-10-01

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 073526449X

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An empowering celebration of identity, acceptance and Hawaiian culture based on the true story of a young girl in Hawaiʻi who dreams of leading the boys-only hula troupe at her school. Ho'onani feels in-between. She doesn't see herself as wahine (girl) OR kane (boy). She's happy to be in the middle. But not everyone sees it that way. When Ho'onani finds out that there will be a school performance of a traditional kane hula chant, she wants to be part of it. But can a girl really lead the all-male troupe? Ho'onani has to try . . . Based on a true story, Ho'onani: Hula Warrior is a celebration of Hawaiian culture and an empowering story of a girl who learns to lead and learns to accept who she really is--and in doing so, gains the respect of all those around her. Ho'onani's story first appeared in the documentary A Place in the Middle by filmmakers Dean Hamer and Joe Wilson.


Truman and the Bomb

Truman and the Bomb

Author: D. M. Giangreco

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2023-08

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 1640125930

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Many myths have grown up around President Harry S. Truman's decision to use nuclear weapons against Imperial Japan. In destroying these myths, Truman and the Bomb will discomfort both Truman's critics and his supporters, and force historians to reexamine what they think they know about the end of the Pacific War. Myth: Truman didn't know of the atomic bomb's development before he became president. Fact: Truman's knowledge of the bomb is revealed in his own carefully worded letters to a Senate colleague and specifically discussed in the correspondence between the army officers assigned to his Senate investigating committee. Myth: The huge casualty estimates cited by Truman and Secretary of War Henry Stimson were a postwar creation devised to hide their guilt for killing thousands of defenseless civilians. Fact: The flagrantly misrepresented "low" numbers are based on narrow slices of highly qualified--and limited--U.S. Army projections printed in a variety of briefing documents and are not from the actual invasion planning against Japan. Myth: Truman wanted to defeat Japan without any assistance from the Soviet Union and to freeze the USSR out of the postwar settlements. Fact: President Franklin D. Roosevelt and President Truman desperately wanted Stalin's involvement in the bloody endgame of World War II and worked diligently--and successfully--toward that end. Using previously unpublished material, D. M. Giangreco busts these myths and more. An award-winning historian and expert on Truman, Giangreco is perfectly situated to debunk the many deep-rooted falsehoods about the roles played by American, Soviet, and Japanese leaders during the end of the World War II in the Pacific. Truman and the Bomb, a concise yet comprehensive study of Truman's decision to use the atomic bomb, will prove to be a classic for studying presidential politics and influence on atomic warfare and its military and diplomatic components. Making this book particularly valuable for professors and students as well as for military, diplomatic, and presidential historians and history buffs are extensive primary source materials, including the planned U.S. naval and air operations in support of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria. These documents support Giangreco's arguments while enabling the reader to enter the mindsets of Truman and his administration as well as the war's key Allied participants.


The First Atomic Bomb

The First Atomic Bomb

Author: Jim Mangi

Publisher: Frontline Books

Published: 2022-06-20

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 1399009842

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While German and Japanese scientists also labored unsuccessfully to create an atomic bomb, by the summer of 1945, the American-led team was ready to test its first weapon. As the clock ticked down to the detonation time of 05.30 hours on 16 July 1945, the nervous team of technicians and scientists waited ten miles away from ‘Ground Zero’ deep in the New Mexico desert. No one knew how powerful the explosion would be or whether even at such a distance they would be safe from the blast. Even so, some chose to observe the detonation from a point four miles nearer at the control bunker; but then no one was even sure that the bomb would work. What if that is actually what happened? Under schedule pressure from the White House, the scientists assembled the device in part with tape and tissue paper, knowing some components were flawed. These are verifiable facts. It means that, as many of those who gathered in the New Mexico desert feared at the time, the bomb might not have worked during that first test. In The First Atomic Bomb, Jim Mangi explores what might happened in the event that the world’s first atomic bomb had not been ready for use when it was. How would this have affected the end of the war in the Pacific, and indeed the Second World War as a whole? Would Emperor Hirohito’s armed forces have battled on? When might Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, at the controls of his Boeing B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay have then made his historic flight over Hiroshima – and would that city even have remained the target? How would Stalin and the Soviets have reacted to such developments, and how would this have played out in the post-war world?


Where My Spirit Guides Us

Where My Spirit Guides Us

Author: Michael Manheim

Publisher:

Published: 2015-02-19

Total Pages: 50

ISBN-13: 9780692361030

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In this series of photographs, Michael Philip Manheim furthers his journey into the human heart and spirit. For years, he has invited brave souls to be photographed as they set into movement a release of their inner beings. His multi-exposure images reveal sophisticated portraits of a shadow self, inter¬preting the complexity of each Individual. Now this approach has been applied to Where My Spirit Guides Us. The project celebrates the practice of ancient hula. Manheim has been photographing as Kumu Hula Ehulani Stephany guides her hula halau (hula school) into channeling the spirits of their ancestors. The resulting photographs reveal stunning transformations. Manheim says, "I have never worked with a participant who equaled Kumu's transformative powers. For the viewer, it is hard at times to believe that it is truly the same woman from picture to picture." Beyond sharing this powerful experience with a wider audience, the project aims to spotlight Kumu and her halau mission. She avidly works to educate, preserve and promote the ancient art of hula, which she sees as central to the preservation of traditional Hawaiian civilization. Denigrated by colonizing invasions, western-imported disease and modern-day commercialization, these rituals and ritual spaces are in dire need of just such a champion. Her work is not aimed at some greater glory. It is a labor of love. As Kumu writes of their efforts to restore ancient hula as well as Hawaiian heiau (temples): "We're not looking to receive any financial payment for this work, for it comes from deep within the heart and soul of me and all my haumana (students) and other volunteers."


Hell to Pay

Hell to Pay

Author: D. M. Giangreco

Publisher: Naval Institute Press

Published: 2017-10-15

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 1682471667

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Two years before the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped bring a quick end to hostilities in the summer of 1945, U.S. planners began work on Operation Downfall, codename for the Allied invasions of Kyushu and Honshu, in the Japanese home islands. While other books have examined Operation Downfall, D. M. Giangreco offers the most complete and exhaustively researched consideration of the plans and their implications. He explores related issues of the first operational use of the atomic bomb and the Soviet Union’s entry into the war, including the controversy surrounding estimates of potential U.S. casualties. Following years of intense research at numerous archives, Giangreco now paints a convincing and horrific picture of the veritable hell that awaited invader and defender. In the process, he demolishes the myths that Japan was trying to surrender during the summer of 1945 and that U.S. officials later wildly exaggerated casualty figures to justify using the atomic bombs to influence the Soviet Union. As Giangreco writes, “Both sides were rushing headlong toward a disastrous confrontation in the Home Islands in which poison gas and atomic weapons were to be employed as MacArthur’s intelligence chief, Charles Willoughby, succinctly put it, ‘a hard and bitter struggle with no quarter asked or given.’ Hell to Pay examines the invasion of Japan in light of the large body of Japanese and American operational and tactical planning documents the author unearthed in familiar and obscure archives. It includes postwar interrogations and reports that senior Japanese commanders and their staffs were ordered to produce for General MacArthur’s headquarters. This groundbreaking history counters the revisionist interpretations questioning the rationale for the use of the atomic bomb and shows that President Truman’s decision was based on real estimates of the enormous human cost of a conventional invasion. This revised edition of Hell to Pay expands on several areas covered in the previous book and deals with three new topics: U.S.-Soviet cooperation in the war against Imperial Japan; U.S., Soviet, and Japanese plans for the invasion and defense of the northernmost Home Island of Hokkaido; and Operation Blacklist, the three-phase insertion of American occupation forces into Japan. It also contains additional text, relevant archival material, supplemental photos, and new maps, making this the definitive edition of an important historical work.


Warship Builders

Warship Builders

Author: Thomas Heinrich

Publisher: Naval Institute Press

Published: 2020-11-15

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 1682475530

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Warship Builders is the first scholarly study of the U.S. naval shipbuilding industry from the early 1920s to the end of World War II, when American shipyards produced the world's largest fleet that helped defeat the Axis powers in all corners of the globe. A colossal endeavor that absorbed billions and employed virtual armies of skilled workers, naval construction mobilized the nation's leading industrial enterprises in the shipbuilding, engineering, and steel industries to deliver warships whose technical complexity dwarfed that of any other weapons platform. Based on systematic comparisons with British, Japanese, and German naval construction, Thomas Heinrich pinpoints the distinct features of American shipbuilding methods, technology development, and management practices that enabled U.S. yards to vastly outproduce their foreign counterparts. Throughout the book, comparative analyses reveal differences and similarities in American, British, Japanese, and German naval construction. Heinrich shows that U.S. and German shipyards introduced electric arc welding and prefabrication methods to a far greater extent than their British and Japanese counterparts between the wars, laying the groundwork for their impressive production records in World War II. While the American and Japanese navies relied heavily on government-owned navy yards, the British and German navies had most of their combatants built in corporately-owned yards, contradicting the widespread notion that only U.S. industrial mobilization depended on private enterprise. Lastly, the U.S. government's investments into shipbuilding facilities in both private and government-owned shipyards dwarfed the sums British, Japanese, and German counterparts expended. This enabled American builders to deliver a vast fleet that played a pivotal role in global naval combat.