You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The debate over scientists' social responsibility is a topic of great controversy today. Peter J. Kuznick here traces the origin of that debate to the 1930s and places it in a context that forces a reevaluation of the relationship between science and politics in twentieth-century America. Kuznick reveals how an influential segment of the American scientific community during the Depression era underwent a profound transformation in its social values and political beliefs, replacing a once-pervasive conservatism and antipathy to political involvement with a new ethic of social reform.
This anthology of essays questions many widespread assumptions about the culture of postwar America. Illuminating the origins and development of the many threads that constituted American culture during the Cold War, the contributors challenge the existence of a monolithic culture during the 1950s and thereafter. They demonstrate instead that there was more to American society than conformity, political conservatism, consumerism, and middle-class values. By examining popular culture, politics, economics, gender relations, and civil rights, the contributors contend that, while there was little fundamentally new about American culture in the Cold War era, the Cold War shaped and distorted virt...
Companion to the documentary series of the same name.
On April 12, 1945, Franklin Roosevelt died and Harry Truman took his place in the White House. Historians have been arguing ever since about the implications of this transition for American foreign policy in general and relations with the Soviet Union in particular. Was there essential continuity in policy or did Truman's arrival in the Oval Office prompt a sharp reversal away from the approach of his illustrious predecessor? This study explores this controversial issue and in the process casts important light on the outbreak of the Cold War. From Roosevelt to Truman investigates Truman's foreign policy background and examines the legacy that FDR bequeathed to him. After Potsdam and the American use of the atomic bomb, both of which occurred under Truman's presidency, the US floundered between collaboration and confrontation with the Soviets, which represents a turning point in the transformation of American foreign policy. This work reveals that the real departure in American policy came only after the Truman administration had exhausted the legitimate possibilities of the Rooseveltian approach of collaboration with the Soviet Union.
In this powerful and evocative memoir, Oscar-winning director and screenwriter, Oliver Stone, takes us right to the heart of what it's like to make movies on the edge. In Chasing The Light he writes about his rarefied New York childhood, volunteering for combat, and his struggles and triumphs making such films as Platoon, Midnight Express, and Scarface. Before the international success of Platoon in 1986, Oliver Stone had been wounded as an infantryman in Vietnam, and spent years writing unproduced scripts while taking miscellaneous jobs and driving taxis in New York, finally venturing westward to Los Angeles and a new life. Stone, now 73, recounts those formative years with vivid details of...
Discover America’s secrets in this second of two volumes of the young readers’ edition of The Untold History of the United States, from Academy Award–winning director Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, adapted by Eric Singer. There is history as we know it. And there is history we should have known. Complete with poignant photos and little-known but vitally important stories, this second of two volumes traces how people around the world responded to the United States’s rise as a superpower from the end of World War II through an increasingly tense Cold War and, eventually, to the brink of nuclear annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis. This is not the kind of history taught in sch...
In its diversity of perspectives, The Unfinished Atomic Bomb: Shadows and Reflections is testament to the ways in which contemplations of the A-bomb are endlessly shifting, rarely fixed on the same point or perspective. The compilation of this book is significant in this regard, offering Japanese, American, Australian, and European perspectives. In doing so, the essays here represent a complex series of interpretations of the bombing of Hiroshima, and its implications both for history, and for the present day. From Kuznick’s extensive biographical account of the Hiroshima bomb pilot, Paul Tibbets, and contentious questions about the moral and strategic efficacy of dropping the A-bomb and h...
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE, THE JHALAK PRIZE, THE CWA GOLD DAGGER FOR NON-FICTION AND THE BREAD AND ROSES AWARD Saturday, 23rd November 2013. It was just another day in America. And as befits an unremarkable day, ten children and teens were killed by gunfire. Far from being considered newsworthy, these everyday fatalities are simply a banal fact. The youngest was nine; the oldest nineteen. None made the news. There was no outrage at their passing. It was simply a day like any other day. Gary Younge picked it at random, searched for the families of these children and here, tells their stories. Another Day in the Death of America explores the way these children lived and lost their short lives, offering a searing portrait of the vulnerability of youth in contemporary America.
Suetonius' The Twelve Caesars became a classic of classical times: a virtuoso literary portrait gallery, remarkable not only for its frank dissections of Rome's great emperors, but also because the twelve men were the embodiment - both good and bad - of Rome's greatest century. In view of the country's rise to superpower status, the twentieth century has been called 'the American Century', and award-winning biographer Nigel Hamilton now gives us the lives of the twelve men who presided over America's imperial fortunes - the good, the bad and the truly awful. Not since the days of the Roman emperors has there been such a succession of rulers holding the fate of the world in their hands. How d...
American Exception seeks to explain the breakdown of US democracy. In particular, how we can understand the uncanny continuity of American foreign policy, the breakdown of the rule of law, and the extreme concentration of wealth and power into an overworld of the corporate rich. To trace the evolution of the American state, the author takes a deep politics approach, shedding light on those political practices that are typically repressed in “mainstream” discourse. In its long history before World War II, the US had a deep political system—a system of governance in which decision-making and enforcement were carried out within—and outside of—public institutions. It was a system that ...