The "Good War" in American Memory

Erscheinungsjahr 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4214-0582-7
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press

Buch, Englisch, 320 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 522 g

The “Good War” in American Memory dispels the long-held myth that Americans forged an agreement on why they had to fight in World War II. John Bodnar's sociocultural examination of the vast public debate that took place in the United States over the war's meaning reveals that the idea of the "good war" was highly contested.

Bodnar's comprehensive study of the disagreements that marked the American remembrance of World War II in the six decades following its end draws on an array of sources: fiction and nonfiction, movies, theater, and public monuments. He identifies alternative strands of memory—tragic and brutal versus heroic and virtuous—and reconstructs controversies involving veterans, minorities, and memorials. In building this narrative, Bodnar shows how the idealism of President Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms was lost in the public commemoration of World War II, how the war's memory became intertwined in the larger discussion over American national identity, and how it only came to be known as the "good war" many years after its conclusion.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bodnar, John

Fachgebiete

• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Populärkultur
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Besondere Kriege und Kampagnen
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Freizeitsoziologie, Konsumsoziologie, Alltagssoziologie, Populärkultur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Wartime
2. Soldiers Write the War
3. "No Place for Weaklings"
4. Monuments and Mournings
5. The Split Screen
6. The Outsiders
7. The Victors
Conclusion
Postscript on Iraq
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Bodnar, John
John Bodnar is Chancellor's Professor of History at Indiana University, Bloomington, and author of numerous books, including Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century.

John Bodnar is the Chancellor's Professor of History and the director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Indiana University. He has authored or edited nine other books, including Blue-Collar Hollywood: Liberalism, Democracy, and Working People in American Film, also published by Johns Hopkins.

—D. Colt Denfeld, The Journal of America's Military Past