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In this hard-hitting, thoroughly researched, and crisply argued book, award-winning historian Robert P. Newman offers a fresh perspective on the dispute over President Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan in World War II. Newman's argument centers on the controversy that erupted around the National Air and Space Museum's (NASM) exhibit of Enola Gay in 1995. Newman explores the tremendous challenges that NASM faced when trying to construct a narrative that would satisfy American veterans and the Japanese, as well as accurately reflect the current historical research on both the period and the bomb. His full-scale investigation of the historical dispute results in a compelling story of how and why our views about the bombing of Japan have evolved since its occurrence. Enola Gay and the Court of History is compulsory reading for all those interested in the history of the Pacific war, the morality of war, and the failed NASM exhibition. The book offers the final word on the debate over Truman's decision to drop the bomb.
What would a divinely ordained social order look like? Pre&–Vatican II Catholics, from archbishops and theologians to Catholic union workers and laborers on U.S. farms, argued repeatedly about this in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Debating God&’s Economy is a history of American Catholic economic debates taking place during the generation preceding Vatican II. At that time, American society was rife with sociopolitical debates over the relative merits and dangers of Marxism, capitalism, and socialism; labor unions, class consciousness, and economic power were the watchwords of the day. This was a time of immense social change, and, especially in the light of the monu...
America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam rethinks the motivations behind one of the most ruinous foreign-policy decisions of the postwar era: America’s commitment to preserve an independent South Vietnam under the premiership of Ngo Dinh Diem. The so-called Diem experiment is usually ascribed to U.S. anticommunism and an absence of other candidates for South Vietnam’s highest office. Challenging those explanations, Seth Jacobs utilizes religion and race as categories of analysis to argue that the alliance with Diem cannot be understood apart from America’s mid-century religious revival and policymakers’ perceptions of Asians. Jacobs contends that Diem’s Catholicism and the extent to whic...
At the end of World War II, conservatism was a negligible element in U.S. politics, but by 1980 it had risen to a dominant position. Patrick Allitt helps explain the remarkable growth of the contemporary conservative movement in the light of Catholic history in the United States. Allitt focuses on the role of individual Catholics against a backdrop of volatile cultural change, showing how such figures as William F. Buckley, Jr., Garry Wills, John T. Noonan, Jr., Michael Novak, John Lukacs, Thomas Molnar, Russell Kirk, Clare Boothe Luce, Ellen Wilson, Charles Rice, and James McFadden forged a potent anti-liberal intellectual tradition. Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in Ameri...
Pisani shows how the U. S. added a Cold War Corollary to the principle of self-determination: massive foreign aid and nonmilitary covert operations to reshape war-torn Europe in the image of the U. S. She tells, for the first time, the story of the top CIA operatives who were instrumental in developing the non-military covert intervention policies of the early Cold War years and the Office of Policy Coordination that carried them out.
List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments 1: The Context of the World War II Mothers' Movement 2: Elizabeth Dilling and the Genesis of a Movement 3: The Fifth Column 4: The National Legion of Mothers of America 5: Cathrine Curtis and the Women's National Committee to Keep the U.S. Out of War 6: Dilling and the Crusade against Lend-Lease 7: Lyrl Clark Van Hyning and We the Mothers Mobilize for America 8: The Mothers' Movement in the Midwest: Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Detroit9: The Mothers' Movement in the East: Philadelphia and New York 10: Agnes Waters: The Lone Wolf of Dissent 11: The Mass Sedition Trial12: The Postwar Mothers' Movement 13: The Significance of the Mothers' Movement Epilogue: "Can We All Get Along?" Notes Bibliographical Essay Index Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
The evangelical embrace of conservatism is a familiar feature of the contemporary political landscape. What’s less well-known, however, is that the connection predates the Reagan revolution, going all the way back to the Depression and World War II. Evangelical businessmen at the time were quite active in opposing the New Deal—on both theological and economic grounds—and in doing so claimed a place alongside other conservatives in the public sphere. Like previous generations of devout laymen, they self-consciously merged their religious and business lives, financing and organizing evangelical causes with the kind of visionary pragmatism that they practiced in the boardroom. In God’s ...
Presidential hopefuls frequently claim they are qualified because their job experience is the same as a great president. However they ignore the failed presidents who shared the same pathway. This book evaluates all the presidents systematically to determine how prior professional experience influences presidential performance.
Although the unification of Italy in 1870 initially defined the nation's geographic boundaries, Italians faced the new challenge of determining their nation's social, political, and cultural identity as they entered the twentieth century. In Remaking Italy in the Twentieth Century, noted scholar Roy P. Domenico examines the struggle between Liberals, Fascists, Marxists, and Catholics to recast the nation according to their visions. As he focuses on Italy's political course, Domenico deftly highlights the economic, social, and cultural changes that accompanied the shifts in governmental power. In describing those who shaped modern Italy, Domenico reveals how an agricultural society—divided by region, language, and culture—was transformed into a modern state, still faced with regional tension, ethnic division, and the problems inherent in post-modern society. Straightforward and succinct, Remaking Italy in the Twentieth Century will be of great value to all interested in Italian history and culture.
For decades, a great number of Americans saw Alger Hiss as an innocent victim of McCarthyism--a distinguished diplomat railroaded by an ambitious Richard Nixon. And even as the case against Hiss grew over time, his dignified demeanor helped create an aura of innocence that outshone the facts in many minds. Now G. Edward White deftly draws together the countless details of Hiss's life--from his upper middle-class childhood in Baltimore and his brilliant success at Harvard to his later career as a self-made martyr to McCarthyism--to paint a fascinating portrait of a man whose life was devoted to perpetuating a lie. White catalogs the evidence that proved Hiss's guilt, from Whittaker Chambers's...