BookShared
  • MEMBER AREA    
  • Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness

    (By Elizabeth D. Samet)

    Book Cover Watermark PDF Icon Read Ebook
    ×
    Size 24 MB (24,083 KB)
    Format PDF
    Downloaded 626 times
    Last checked 11 Hour ago!
    Author Elizabeth D. Samet
    “Book Descriptions: 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.”

    Google Drive Logo DRIVE
    Book 1

    Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad

    ★★★★★

    Matthew F. Delmont

    Book 1

    The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America

    ★★★★★

    Greg Grandin

    Book 1

    Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America

    ★★★★★

    Pekka Hämäläinen

    Book 1

    Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic

    ★★★★★

    Simon Winchester

    Book 1

    Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism

    ★★★★★

    Jeffrey Toobin

    Book 1

    Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and A Legacy of Rage

    ★★★★★

    Jeff Guinn

    Book 1

    The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America

    ★★★★★

    Noah Feldman

    Book 1

    The Bad Popes

    ★★★★★

    E.R. Chamberlin

    Book 1

    A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

    ★★★★★

    Stacy Schiff

    Book 1

    After the Apocalypse: America's Role in a World Transformed (American Empire Project)

    ★★★★★

    Andrew J. Bacevich

    Book 1

    Of Blood and Sweat: Black Lives and the Making of White Power and Wealth

    ★★★★★

    Clyde W. Ford

    Book 1

    Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire

    ★★★★★

    Caroline Elkins

    Book 1

    The Greatest Nobodies of History: Minor Characters from Major Moments

    ★★★★★

    Adrian Bliss

    Book 1

    Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past

    ★★★★★

    Kevin M. Kruse