Download or read book Inventing the American Way written by Wendy L. Wall and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-09-03 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the wake of World War II, Americans developed an unusually deep and all-encompassing national unity, as postwar affluence and the Cold War combined to naturally produce a remarkable level of agreement about the nation's core values. Or so the story has long been told. Inventing the "American Way" challenges this vision of inevitable consensus. Americans, as Wendy Wall argues in this innovative book, were united, not so much by identical beliefs, as by a shared conviction that a distinctive "American Way" existed and that the affirmation of such common ground was essential to the future of the nation. Moreover, the roots of consensus politics lie not in the Cold War era, but in the turbulent decade that preceded U.S. entry into World War II. The social and economic chaos of the Depression years alarmed a diverse array of groups, as did the rise of two "alien" ideologies: fascism and communism. In this context, Americans of divergent backgrounds and beliefs seized on the notion of a unifying "American Way" and sought to convince their fellow citizens of its merits. Wall traces the competing efforts of business groups, politicians, leftist intellectuals, interfaith proponents, civil rights activists, and many others over nearly three decades to shape public understandings of the "American Way." Along the way, she explores the politics behind cultural productions ranging from The Adventures of Superman to the Freedom Train that circled the nation in the late 1940s. She highlights the intense debate that erupted over the term "democracy" after World War II, and identifies the origins of phrases such as "free enterprise" and the "Judeo-Christian tradition" that remain central to American political life. By uncovering the culture wars of the mid-twentieth century, this book sheds new light on a period that proved pivotal for American national identity and that remains the unspoken backdrop for debates over multiculturalism, national unity, and public values today.
Download or read book The American Way of War written by Russell Frank Weigley and published by New York : Macmillan. This book was released on 1973 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this authoritative and controversial study, Russel F. Weigley traces the emergence of a characteristic American way of war - in which the object of military strategy has come to mean total destruction of the enemy, first of his armed forces, often of the whole fabric of his society.
Download or read book The American Way of Life written by Lawrence R. Samuel and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-05-25 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Telling the full story of the American Way of Life (or more simply the American Way) in the United States over the course of the last century reveals key insights that add to our understanding of American culture. Lawrence R. Samuel argues that since the term was popularized in the 1930s, the American Way has served as the primary guiding mythology or national ethos of the United States. More than that, however, this work shows that the American Way has represented many things to many people, making the mythology a useful device for anyone wishing to promote a particular agenda that serves his or her interests. A consumerist lifestyle supported by a system based in free enterprise has been the ideological backbone of the American Way, but the term has been attached to everything from farming to baseball to barbecue. There really is no single, identifiable American Way and never has been—it becomes clear after tracing its history—making it a kind of Zelig of belief systems. If our underlying philosophy or set of values is amorphous and nebulous, then so is our national identity and character, Samuel concludes, implying that the meaning of America is elastic and accommodating to many interpretations. This unique thesis sets off this work from other books and helps establish it as a seminal resource within the fields of American history and American studies.
Download or read book The American Way of Strategy written by Michael Lind and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-07-30 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The American Way of Strategy, Lind argues that the goal of U.S. foreign policy has always been the preservation of the American way of life--embodied in civilian government, checks and balances, a commercial economy, and individual freedom. Lind describes how successive American statesmen--from George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton to Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan--have pursued an American way of strategy that minimizes the dangers of empire and anarchy by two means: liberal internationalism and realism. At its best, the American way of strategy is a well-thought-out and practical guide designed to preserve a peaceful and demilitarized world by preventing an international system dominated by imperial and militarist states and its disruption by anarchy. When American leaders have followed this path, they have led our nation from success to success, and when they have deviated from it, the results have been disastrous. Framed in an engaging historical narrative, the book makes an important contribution to contemporary debates. The American Way of Strategy is certain to change the way that Americans understand U.S. foreign policy.
Download or read book Selling the American Way written by Laura A. Belmonte and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1955, the United States Information Agency published a lavishly illustrated booklet called My America. Assembled ostensibly to document "the basic elements of a free dynamic society," the booklet emphasized cultural diversity, political freedom, and social mobility and made no mention of McCarthyism or the Cold War. Though hyperbolic, My America was, as Laura A. Belmonte shows, merely one of hundreds of pamphlets from this era written and distributed in an organized attempt to forge a collective defense of the "American way of life." Selling the American Way examines the context, content, and reception of U.S. propaganda during the early Cold War. Determined to protect democratic capitalism and undercut communism, U.S. information experts defined the national interest not only in geopolitical, economic, and military terms. Through radio shows, films, and publications, they also propagated a carefully constructed cultural narrative of freedom, progress, and abundance as a means of protecting national security. Not simply a one-way look at propaganda as it is produced, the book is a subtle investigation of how U.S. propaganda was received abroad and at home and how criticism of it by Congress and successive presidential administrations contributed to its modification.
Download or read book The American Way of Poverty written by Sasha Abramsky and published by Nation Books. This book was released on 2013-09-10 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abramsky shows how poverty - a massive political scandal - is dramatically changing in the wake of the Great Recession.
Download or read book Truth Torture and the American Way written by Jennfier Harbury and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2005-09-15 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jennifer Harbury's investigation into torture began when her husband disappeared in Guatemala in 1992; she told the story of his torture and murder in Searching for Everardo. For over a decade since, Harbury has used her formidable legal, research, and organizing skills to press for the U.S. government's disclosure of America's involvement in harrowing abuses in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. A draft of this book had just been completed when the first photos from Abu Ghraib were published; tragically, many of Harbury's deepest fears about America's own abuses were graphically confirmed by those horrific images. This urgently needed book offers both well-documented evidence of the CIA's continuous involvement in torture tactics since the 1970s and moving personal testimony from many of the victims. Most important, Harbury provides solid, convincing arguments against the use of torture in any circumstances: not only because it is completely inconsistent with all the basic values Americans hold dear, but also because it has repeatedly proved to be ineffective: Again and again,'information' obtained through these gruesome tactics proves unreliable or false. Worse, the use of torture by U.S. client states, allies, and even by our own operatives, endangers our citizens and especially our troops deployed internationally.
Download or read book The American Way of War written by Eugene Jarecki and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-10-14 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the sobering aftermath of America's invasion of Iraq, Eugene Jarecki, the creator of the award-winning documentary Why We Fight, launches a penetrating and revelatory inquiry into how forces within the American political, economic, and military systems have come to undermine the carefully crafted structure of our republic -- upsetting its balance of powers, vastly strengthening the hand of the president in taking the nation to war, and imperiling the workings of American democracy. This is a story not of simple corruption but of the unexpected origins of a more subtle and, in many ways, more worrisome disfiguring of our political system and society. While in no way absolving George W. Bush and his inner circle of their accountability for misguiding the country into a disastrous war -- in fact, Jarecki sheds new light on the deepest underpinnings of how and why they did so -- he reveals that the forty-third president's predisposition toward war and Congress's acquiescence to his wishes must be understood as part of a longer story. This corrupting of our system was predicted by some of America's leading military and political minds. In his now legendary 1961 farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of "the disastrous rise of misplaced power" that could result from the increasing influence of what he called the "military industrial complex." Nearly two centuries earlier, another general turned president, George Washington, had warned that "overgrown military establishments" were antithetical to republican liberties. Today, with an exploding defense budget, millions of Americans employed in the defense sector, and more than eight hundred U.S. military bases in 130 countries, the worst fears of Washington and Eisenhower have come to pass. Surveying a scorched landscape of America's military adventures and misadventures, Jarecki's groundbreaking account includes interviews with a who's who of leading figures in the Bush administration, Congress, the military, academia, and the defense industry, including Republican presidential nominee John McCain, Colin Powell's former chief of staff Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, and longtime Pentagon reformer Franklin "Chuck" Spinney. Their insights expose the deepest roots of American war making, revealing how the "Arsenal of Democracy" that crucially secured American victory in WWII also unleashed the tangled web of corruption America now faces. From the republic's earliest episodes of war to the use of the atom bomb against Japan to the passage of the 1947 National Security Act to the Cold War's creation of an elaborate system of military-industrial-congressional collusion, American democracy has drifted perilously from the intent of its founders. As Jarecki powerfully argues, only concerted action by the American people can, and must, compel the nation back on course. The American Way of War is a deeply thoughtprovoking study of how America reached a historic crossroads and of how recent excesses of militarism and executive power may provide an opening for the redirection of national priorities.
Download or read book The American Way of Crime written by Frank Browning and published by Putnam Publishing Group. This book was released on 1980 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unconventional history of the United States traces crime in America from the Puritans through Watergate and considers the special-interest groups who have at one time or another defined what is legal and what is not.
Download or read book The American Way written by Talal Abu Shawish and published by Comma Press. This book was released on 2021-09-23 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After four years of Trump, America seems set to return to political normality. But for much of the rest of the world, that normality is a horror story: 75 years of US-led invasions, CIA-sponsored coups, election interference, stay-behind networks, rendition, and weapons testing... all in the name of Pax America, the world’s police. If you are not an ally of the US, in this ‘normality’, your country can find its democratic processes undermined and its economic wellbeing conditioned upon returning to the fold. If you’re not strategically important to the US, you can find yourself its dumping ground. This new anthology re-examines this history with stories that explore the human cost of these interventions on foreign soil, by writers from that soil. From nuclear testing in the Pacific, to human testing of CIA torture tactics, from coups in Latin America, to all-out invasions in the Middle and Far East; the atrocities that follow are often dismissed in history books as inevitable in the ‘fog of war’. By presenting them from indigenous, grassroots perspectives, accompanied by afterwords by the historians that consulted on them, this book attempts to bring some clarity back to that history. Stories are accompanied by afterwords written by historians, providing historical context. Afterwords by: Olmo Golz, Emmanuel Gerard, Felix Julio Alfonso Lopez, David Harper, Ertugrul Kurkcu, Francisco Dominguez, Maurizio Dianese, Julio Barrios Zardetto, Brian Meeks, Victor Figueroa Clark, Raymond Bonner, Daniel Kovalik, Meral Cicek, Ian Shaw, Matteo Capasso, Neil Faulkner, Xuan Phuong, Iyad S. S. Abujaber & Chris Hedges. Translated by: Orsola Casagrande, Mustafa Gundogdu, Sawad Hussain, Jonathan Wright, Basma Ghalayini, Nicholas Glastonbury, Sara Khalili, J. Bret Maney, Adam Feinstein, and Megan McDowell. Part of our History-into-Fiction series.
Download or read book Defending the American Way of Life written by Kevin B. Witherspoon and published by University of Arkansas Press. This book was released on 2018-12-01 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2019 NASSH Book Award, Anthology. The Cold War was fought in every corner of society, including in the sport and entertainment industries. Recognizing the importance of culture in the battle for hearts and minds, the United States, like the Soviet Union, attempted to win the favor of citizens in nonaligned states through the soft power of sport. Athletes became de facto ambassadors of US interests, their wins and losses serving as emblems of broader efforts to shield American culture—both at home and abroad—against communism. In Defending the American Way of Life, leading sport historians present new perspectives on high-profile issues in this era of sport history alongside research drawn from previously untapped archival sources to highlight the ways that sports influenced and were influenced by Cold War politics. Surveying the significance of sports in Cold War America through lenses of race, gender, diplomacy, cultural infiltration, anti-communist hysteria, doping, state intervention, and more, this collection illustrates how this conflict remains relevant to US sporting institutions, organizations, and ideologies today.
Download or read book The New American Way of War written by Ben Buley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-10-25 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the cultural history and future prospects of the so-callednew American way of war. In recent decades, American military culture has become increasingly dominated by a vision ofimmaculate destruction which reached its apogee with the fall of Baghdad in 2003. Operation Iraqi Freedom was hailed as the triumphant validati
Download or read book American Way Those Above and Below written by John Ridley and published by Vertigo. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oscar-winning screenwriter of 12 Years a Slave returns for an all-new chapter in his alternate history of The American Way! In 1962 Jason Fisher was given astonishing powers by the United States government—powers he used to defend the nation as the New American. He and his teammates in the Civil Defense Corps were real-life superheroes. Except that it was all a fraud. A conspiracy. And now, 10 years after the CDC was torn apart by racism, infighting and murder, the Corps’ surviving members find themselves pulled in very different directions. Missy Devereaux—a.k.a. Ole Miss—is transitioning from the First Lady of Mississippi into a candidate for governor and defender of a vanishing and hateful way of life. Amber Eaton—formerly known as Amber Waves—has become a domestic terrorist, using her powers to infiltrate and destroy the country’s centers of power. Somewhere in the middle stands Jason Fisher, who has remained a crime-fighter even as evidence mounts that he is accomplishing nothing besides propping up a system that’s rigged against him as a black man in America. In a nation being torn apart, what does it mean to fight for the American way? A decade after the debut of their groundbreaking WildStorm series The American Way, Academy Award-winning writer John Ridley (12 Years a Slave, American Crime) and artist Georges Jeanty (Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8) revisit their parallel Earth for a look at its gritty 1970s—a time frighteningly like our own—in The American Way: Those Above and Those Below. Collects issues #1-6.
Download or read book The American Way of Eating written by Tracie McMillan and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-02-21 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A journalist traces her 2009 immersion into the national food system to explore how working-class Americans can afford to eat as they should, describing how she worked as a farm laborer, Wal-Mart grocery clerk, and Applebee's expediter while living within the means of each job.
Download or read book The Jesus Way written by Eugene H. Peterson and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2011-09-02 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguing that the way Jesus leads and the way we follow are symbiotic, Peterson begins with a study of how the ways of those who came before Christ revealed and prepared the way of the Lord that became complete in Jesus. He then challenges the ways of the contemporary American church, showing in stark relief how what we have chosen to focus on--consumerism, celebrity, charisma, and so forth--obliterates what is unique in the Jesus way.
Download or read book The American Way of Birth written by Jessica Mitford and published by Plume Books. This book was released on 1993 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the history of childbirth in America and assesses the conventional and alternative methods of childbirth, commenting on the state of American childbirth and health care. By the author of The American Way of Death. Reprint. 50,000 first printing.
Download or read book Technology and the American Way of War Since 1945 written by Thomas G. Mahnken and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-24 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No nation in recent history has placed greater emphasis on the role of technology in planning and waging war than the United States. In World War II the wholesale mobilization of American science and technology culminated in the detonation of the atomic bomb. Competition with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, combined with the U.S. Navy's culture of distributed command and the rapid growth of information technology, spawned the concept of network-centric warfare. And America's post-Cold War conflicts in Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan have highlighted America's edge. From the atom bomb to the spy satellites of the Cold War, the strategic limitations of the Vietnam War, and the technological triumphs of the Gulf war, Thomas G. Mahnken follows the development and integration of new technologies into the military and emphasizes their influence on the organization, mission, and culture of the armed services. In some cases, advancements in technology have forced different branches of the military to develop competing or superior weaponry, but more often than not the armed services have molded technology to suit their own purposes, remaining resilient in the face of technological challenges. Mahnken concludes with an examination of the reemergence of the traditional American way of war, which uses massive force to engage the enemy. Tying together six decades of debate concerning U.S. military affairs, he discusses how the armed forces might exploit the unique opportunities of the information revolution in the future.
