Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
2,889
result(s) for
"War and society -- United States"
Sort by:
War! What Is It Good For?
African Americans' long campaign for \"the right to fight\" forced Harry Truman to issue his 1948 executive order calling for equality of treatment and opportunity in the armed forces. InWar! What Is It Good For?, Kimberley Phillips examines how blacks' participation in the nation's wars after Truman's order and their protracted struggles for equal citizenship galvanized a vibrant antiwar activism that reshaped their struggles for freedom.Using an array of sources--from newspapers and government documents to literature, music, and film--and tracing the period from World War II to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Phillips considers how federal policies that desegregated the military also maintained racial, gender, and economic inequalities. Since 1945, the nation's need for military labor, blacks' unequal access to employment, and discriminatory draft policies have forced black men into the military at disproportionate rates. While mainstream civil rights leaders considered the integration of the military to be a civil rights success, many black soldiers, veterans, and antiwar activists perceived war as inimical to their struggles for economic and racial justice and sought to reshape the civil rights movement into an antiwar black freedom movement. Since the Vietnam War, Phillips argues, many African Americans have questioned linking militarism and war to their concepts of citizenship, equality, and freedom.
eBook
American dionysia : violence, tragedy, and democratic politics
\"Violence and tragedy riddle democracy- not due to fatal shortcomings or unnecessary failures, but because of its very design and success. To articulate this troubling claim, Steven Johnston explores the cruelty of democratic founding, the brutal use democracies make of citizens and animals during wartime, the ambiguous consequences of legislative action expressive of majority rule, and militant practices of citizenship required to deal with democracy's enemies. Democracy must take responsibility for its success: to rule in denial of violence merely replicates it. Johnston thus calls for the development of a tragic democratic politics and proposes institutional and civic responses to democracy's reign, including the reinvention of tragic festivals and holidays, a new breed of public memorials, and mandatory congressional reparations sessions. Theorizing the violent puzzle of democracy, Johnston addresses classic and contemporary political theory, films, little known monuments, the subversive music of Bruce Springsteen, and the potential of democratic violence by the people themselves\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Humanitarian Violence
When is a war not a war? When it is undertaken in the name of democracy, against the forces of racism, sexism, and religious and political persecution? This is the new world of warfare that Neda Atanasoski observes inHumanitarian Violence, different in name from the old imperialism but not so different in kind. In particular, she considers U.S. militarism-humanitarianmilitarism-during the Vietnam War, the Soviet-Afghan War, and the 1990s wars of secession in the former Yugoslavia.
What this book brings to light-through novels, travel narratives, photojournalism, films, news media, and political rhetoric-is in fact a system of postsocialist imperialism based on humanitarian ethics. In the fiction of the United States as a multicultural haven, which morally underwrites the nation's equally brutal waging of war and making of peace, parts of the world are subject to the violence of U.S. power because they are portrayed to be homogeneous and racially, religiously, and sexually intolerant-and thus permanently in need of reform. The entangled notions of humanity and atrocity that follow from such mediations of war and crisis have refigured conceptions of racial and religious freedom in the post-Cold War era. The resulting cultural narratives, Atanasoski suggests, tend to racialize ideological differences-whereas previous forms of imperialism racialized bodies. In place of the European racial imperialism, U.S. settler colonialism, and pre-civil rights racial constructions that associated racial difference with a devaluing of nonwhite bodies,Humanitarian Violenceidentifies an emerging discourse of race that focuses on ideological and cultural differences and makes postsocialist and Islamic nations the potential targets of U.S. disciplining violence.
eBook
Comics and conflict : patriotism and propaganda from WWII through Operation Iraqi Freedom
Illustration has been an integral part of human history. Particularly before the advent of media such as photography, film, television, and now the Internet, illustrations in all their variety had been the primary visual way to convey history. The comic book, which emerged in its modern form in the 1930s, was another form of visual entertainment that gave readers, especially children, a form of escape. As World War II began, however, comic books became a part of propaganda as well, providing information and education for both children and adults. This book looks at how specific comic books of the war genre have been used to display patriotism, adventure through war stories, and eventually to tell of the horrors of combat--from World War II through the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first decade of the twenty-first century. This book also examines how war- and patriotically-themed comics evolved from soldier-drawn reflections of society, eventually developing along with the broader comic book medium into a mirror of American society during times of conflict. These comic books generally reflected patriotic fervor, but sometimes they advanced a specific cause. As war comic books evolved along with American society, many also served as a form of protest against United States foreign and military policy. During the country's most recent wars, however, patriotism has made a comeback, at the same time that the grim realities of combat are depicted more realistically than ever before. The focus of the book is not only on the development of the comic book medium, but also as a bell-weather of society at the same time. How did they approach the news of the war? Were people in favor or against the fighting? Did the writers of comics promote a perception of combat or did they try to convey the horrors of war? All of these questions were
important to the research, and serve as a focal point for what has been researched only in limited form previously. The conclusions of the book show that comic books are more than mere forms of entertainment. Comic books were also a way of political protest against war, or what the writers felt were wider examples of governmental abuse. In the post 9/11 era, the comic books have returned to their propagandistic/patriotic roots.
eBook
The \Good War\ in American Memory
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.
eBook
The Deaths of Others
Americans are greatly concerned about the number of our troops killed in battle—100,000 dead in World War I; 300,000 in World War II; 33,000 in the Korean War; 58,000 in Vietnam; 4,500 in Iraq; over 1,000 in Afghanistan—and rightly so. But why are we so indifferent, often oblivious, to the far greater number of casualties suffered by those we fight and those we fight for? This book aims to answer this question. Between six and seven million people died in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq alone, the majority of them civilians. And yet Americans devote little attention to these deaths. Other countries, however, do pay attention, and the book argues that if we want to understand why there is so much anti-Americanism around the world, the first place to look is how we conduct war. We understandably strive to protect our own troops, but our rules of engagement with the enemy are another matter. From atomic weapons and carpet bombing in World War II to napalm and daisy cutters in Vietnam and beyond, we have used our weapons intentionally to kill large numbers of civilians and terrorize our adversaries into surrender. Americans, however, are mostly ignorant of these facts, believing that American wars are essentially just, necessary, and “good.” The book investigates the history of casualties caused by American forces in order to explain why America remains so unpopular and why U.S. armed forces operate the way they do.
eBook