Author : Waldo E. Martin
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 174 pages
File Size : 18,13 MB
Release : 2009-06-30
Category : History
ISBN : 0674040686
In this exploration of the 20th-century civil rights and black power eras, Martin uses cultural politics as a lens through which to understand the African-American freedom struggle. In freedom songs, in the exuberance of an Aretha Franklin concert, in Faith Ringgold's exploration of race and sexuality, the personal and social became the political.
Author : Jörg Echternkamp
Publisher : Berghahn Books
Page : 570 pages
File Size : 16,32 MB
Release : 2020-03-20
Category : History
ISBN : 1789205581
Contemporary historians have transformed our understanding of the German military in World War II, debunking the “clean Wehrmacht” myth that held most soldiers innocent of wartime atrocities. Considerably less attention has been paid to those soldiers at the end of hostilities. In Postwar Soldiers, Jörg Echternkamp analyzes three themes in the early history of West Germany: interpretations of the war during its conclusion and the occupation period; military veteran communities’ self-perceptions; and the public rehabilitation of the image of the German soldier. As Echternkamp shows, public controversies around these topics helped to drive the social processes that legitimized the democratic postwar order.
Author : Tony Judt
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 1000 pages
File Size : 38,43 MB
Release : 2006-09-05
Category : History
ISBN : 9780143037750
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize • Winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award • One of the New York Times' Ten Best Books of the Year “Impressive . . . Mr. Judt writes with enormous authority.” —The Wall Street Journal “Magisterial . . . It is, without a doubt, the most comprehensive, authoritative, and yes, readable postwar history.” —The Boston Globe Almost a decade in the making, this much-anticipated grand history of postwar Europe from one of the world's most esteemed historians and intellectuals is a singular achievement. Postwar is the first modern history that covers all of Europe, both east and west, drawing on research in six languages to sweep readers through thirty-four nations and sixty years of political and cultural change-all in one integrated, enthralling narrative. Both intellectually ambitious and compelling to read, thrilling in its scope and delightful in its small details, Postwar is a rare joy. Judt's book, Ill Fares the Land, republished in 2021 featuring a new preface by bestselling author of Between the World and Me and The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Author : John A. Ruddiman
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
Page : 350 pages
File Size : 44,44 MB
Release : 2014-12-15
Category : History
ISBN : 0813936187
Young Continental soldiers carried a heavy burden in the American Revolution. Their experiences of coming of age during the upheavals of war provide a novel perspective on the Revolutionary era, eliciting questions of gender, family life, economic goals, and politics. "Going for a soldier" forced young men to confront profound uncertainty, and even coercion, but also offered them novel opportunities. Although the war imposed obligations on youths, military service promised young men in their teens and early twenties alternate paths forward in life. Continental soldiers’ own youthful expectations about respectable manhood and their goals of economic competence and marriage not only ordered their experience of military service; they also shaped the fighting capacities of George Washington’s army and the course of the war. Becoming Men of Some Consequence examines how young soldiers and officers joined the army, their experiences in the ranks, their relationships with civilians, their choices about quitting long-term military service, and their attempts to rejoin the flow of civilian life after the war. The book recovers young soldiers’ perspectives and stories from military records, wartime letters and journals, and postwar memoirs and pension applications, revealing how revolutionary political ideology intertwined with rational calculations and youthful ambitions. Its focus on soldiers as young men offers a new understanding of the Revolutionary War, showing how these soldiers’ generational struggle for their own independence was a profound force within America’s struggle for its independence.
Author : Jason W. Warren
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 324 pages
File Size : 32,54 MB
Release : 2016-10-18
Category : History
ISBN : 1479875570
While traditionally, Americans view expensive military structure as a poor investment and a threat to liberty, they also require the employment of armed forces as a guarantee of that very freedom. Beginning with the wars of the English colonies, Americans typically increased their military capabilities at the beginning of conflicts only to decrease them at the apparent conclusion of hostilities. In [this book], a stellar team of military historians argue that the United States sometimes managed effective drawdowns, sowing the seeds of future victory. Yet at other times, the drawing down of military capabilities undermined our readiness and flexibility, leading to more costly wars and perhaps defeat. The political choice to reduce military capabilities is influenced by Anglo-American pecuniary deicions and traditional fears of government oppression, and it has been haphazard throughout American history. These two factors form the basic American "liberty dilemma," the vexed relationship between the nation and its military apparatuses from the founding of the first colonies through to present times. With the termination of large-scale operations in Iraq and the winnowing of forces in Afghanistan, the United states military once again faces a significant drawdown in standing force structure and capabilities. The political and military debate around how best to affect this force reduction lacks a proper historical perspective. This volume aspires to inform this dialogue. Not a traditional military history, Drawdown analyzes cultural attitudes, political decisions, and institutions surrounding the maintenance of armed forces. -- Back cover.
Author : Luise White
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 179 pages
File Size : 11,43 MB
Release : 2021-02-08
Category : History
ISBN : 1478021284
In Fighting and Writing Luise White brings the force of her historical insight to bear on the many war memoirs published by white soldiers who fought for Rhodesia during the 1964–1979 Zimbabwean liberation struggle. In the memoirs of white soldiers fighting to defend white minority rule in Africa long after other countries were independent, White finds a robust and contentious conversation about race, difference, and the war itself. These are writings by men who were ambivalent conscripts, generally aware of the futility of their fight—not brutal pawns flawlessly executing the orders and parroting the rhetoric of a racist regime. Moreover, most of these men insisted that the most important aspects of fighting a guerrilla war—tracking and hunting, knowledge of the land and of the ways of African society—were learned from black playmates in idealized rural childhoods. In these memoirs, African guerrillas never lost their association with the wild, even as white soldiers boasted of bringing Africans into the intimate spaces of regiment and regime.
Author : Susan L. Carruthers
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 397 pages
File Size : 49,14 MB
Release : 2016-11-14
Category : History
ISBN : 0674972929
Waged for a just cause and culminating in total victory, World War II was America’s “good war.” Yet for millions of GIs overseas, the war did not end with Germany and Japan’s surrender. The Good Occupation chronicles America’s transition from wartime combatant to postwar occupier, by exploring the intimate thoughts and feelings of the ordinary servicemen and women who participated—often reluctantly—in the difficult project of rebuilding nations they had so recently worked to destroy. When the war ended, most of the seven million Americans in uniform longed to return to civilian life. Yet many remained on active duty, becoming the “after-army” tasked with bringing order and justice to societies ravaged by war. Susan Carruthers shows how American soldiers struggled to deal with unprecedented catastrophe among millions of displaced refugees and concentration camp survivors while negotiating the inevitable tensions that arose between victors and the defeated enemy. Drawing on thousands of unpublished letters, diaries, and memoirs, she reveals the stories service personnel told themselves and their loved ones back home in order to make sense of their disorienting and challenging postwar mission. The picture Carruthers paints is not the one most Americans recognize today. A venture undertaken by soldiers with little appetite for the task has crystallized, in the retelling, into the “good occupation” of national mythology: emblematic of the United States’ role as a bearer of democracy, progress, and prosperity. In real time, however, “winning the peace” proved a perilous business, fraught with temptation and hazard.
Author : Steven Rosales
Publisher : University of Arizona Press
Page : 321 pages
File Size : 31,37 MB
Release : 2017-04-18
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0816532443
"This book explores the catalysts that motivated Mexican American youth to enlist from World War II through the Vietnam War"--Provided by publisher.
Author : Robert A. Doughty
Publisher :
Page : 68 pages
File Size : 14,67 MB
Release : 1979
Category : Military art and science
ISBN :
This paper focuses on the formulation of doctrine since World War II. In no comparable period in history have the dimensions of the battlefield been so altered by rapid technological changes. The need for the tactical doctrines of the Army to remain correspondingly abreast of these changes is thus more pressing than ever before. Future conflicts are not likely to develop in the leisurely fashions of the past where tactical doctrines could be refined on the battlefield itself. It is, therefore, imperative that we apprehend future problems with as much accuracy as possible. One means of doing so is to pay particular attention to the business of how the Army's doctrine has developed historically, with a view to improving methods of future development.
Author : Robert F. Jefferson
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 34,5 MB
Release : 2008
Category :
ISBN : 9781421428383
This fascinating history shows how African-American military men and women seized their dignity through barracks culture and community politics during and after World War II.Drawing on oral testimony, unpublished correspondence, archival records, memoirs, and diaries, Robert F. Jefferson explores the curious contradiction of war-effort idealism and entrenched discrimination through the experiences of the 93rd Infantry Division. Led by white officers and presumably unable to fight-and with the army taking great pains to regulate contact between black soldiers and local women-the division was largely relegated to support roles during the advance on the Philippines, seeing action only later in the war when U.S. officials found it unavoidable. Jefferson discusses racial policy within the War Department, examines the lives and morale of black GIs and their families, documents the debate over the deployment of black troops, and focuses on how the soldiers' wartime experiences reshaped their perspectives on race and citizenship in America. He finds in these men and their families incredible resilience in the face of racism at war and at home and shows how their hopes for the future provided a blueprint for America's postwar civil rights struggles.Integrating social history and civil rights movement studies, Fighting for Hope examines the ways in which political meaning and identity were reflected in the aspirations of these black GIs and their role in transforming the face of America.
