Download or read book War Against War written by Michael Kazin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-01-03 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dramatic account of the Americans who tried to stop their nation from fighting in the First World War—and came close to succeeding. In this “fascinating” (Los Angeles Times) narrative, Michael Kazin brings us into the ranks of one of the largest, most diverse, and most sophisticated peace coalitions in US history. The activists came from a variety of backgrounds: wealthy, middle, and working class; urban and rural; white and black; Christian and Jewish and atheist. They mounted street demonstrations and popular exhibitions, attracted prominent leaders from the labor and suffrage movements, ran peace candidates for local and federal office, met with President Woodrow Wilson to make their case, and founded new organizations that endured beyond the cause. For almost three years, they helped prevent Congress from authorizing a massive increase in the size of the US army—a step advocated by ex-president Theodore Roosevelt. When the Great War’s bitter legacy led to the next world war, the warnings of these peace activists turned into a tragic prophecy—and the beginning of a surveillance state that still endures today. Peopled with unforgettable characters and written with riveting moral urgency, War Against War is a “fine, sorrowful history” (The New York Times) and “a timely reminder of how easily the will of the majority can be thwarted in even the mightiest of democracies” (The New York Times Book Review).

Download or read book American Wars American Peace written by Philip D. Beidler and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-01-25 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a writer, Philip D. Beidler has often drawn on his combat experience in Vietnam and his deep engagement with American popular culture. His essays tap these sources in powerful, truth-telling ways. In American Wars, American Peace, another voice emerges, distinct yet also tied to Beidler’s wartime memories and his love of literature, film, and music. It is the voice of one of the “baby-boom progeny of the ‘Greatest Generation’ who at home and abroad became the foot soldiers” not just in Vietnam but in the Peace Corps, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and beyond. Beidler has experienced enough of history to question “the kinds of peace that one empire after another has tried to impose on the world at whatever immense costs.” As he reflects on terrorism, patriotism, geopolitics, sacrifice, propaganda, and more, Beidler revisits his generation’s “inherited vision of national purpose”--and he asks what happened. These essays are a sobering wake-up call for even the most informed and conscientious citizen.

Download or read book ENDING U S WARS by Honoring Americans Who Work for Peace written by Michael D. Knox and published by Pax. This book was released on 2021 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The U.S. has bombed no less than thirty countries since the end of World War II, killing millions of people, maiming tens of millions more, disrupting and destroying education, healthcare, housing, businesses, infrastructure, the environment, and creating untold numbers of refugees. The US Peace Memorial Foundation honors, and is dedicated to, U.S. citizens/residents who work to end war. ENDING U.S. WARS documents the activities of these role models for peace in hopes of inspiring other Americans. It should unite the peace movement and help it to be more successful at ending wars. Chapters include:THE US PEACE PRIZE. Every year since 2009, the US Peace Memorial Foundation has honored a peace activist with the US Peace Prize. Recipients include Chelsea Manning, Medea Benjamin, Noam Chomsky, Ajamu Baraka, Dennis Kucinich, and Cindy Sheehan. In 2020 the US Peace Prize went to Christine Ahn, "for bold activism to end the Korean War, heal its wounds, and promote women's roles in building peace."THE US PEACE REGISTRY. 189 Americans and 80 organizations who work for peace and are role models for a broad range of peace and antiwar actions and activities. The Registry appears in print for the first time in ENDING U.S. WARS.COMING SOON: THE US PEACE MEMORIAL. The US Peace Memorial Foundation's most ambitious goal is to establish a monument to peace on the National Mall. Currently, plans include an inspiring and creative design that features a peace sign that can only be seen aerially and aims to serve as a reminder to government officials who fly over the Mall. As the US Peace Memorial is currently envisioned, twelve walls, or facets, will contain engraved peace quotes from famous Americans such as Jane Addams, Muhammad Ali, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Ernest Hemingway, Helen Keller, Martin Luther King Jr., and Margaret Mead, in addition to a variety of U.S. presidents who are not widely known for their antiwar statements. One day a peace memorial will stand on the National Mall. Until then, there is this book.

Download or read book The Savage Wars Of Peace written by Max Boot and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2014-03-11 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Anyone who wants to understand why America has permanently entered a new era in international relations must read [this book] . . . Vividly written and thoroughly researched." -- Los Angeles Times America's "small wars," "imperial war," or, as the Pentagon now terms them, "low-intensity conflicts," have played an essential but little-appreciated role in its growth as a world power. Beginning with Jefferson's expedition against the Barbary pirates, Max Boot tells the exciting stories of our sometimes minor but often bloody landings in Samoa, the Philippines, China, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Mexico, Russia, and elsewhere. Along the way he sketches colorful portraits of little-known military heroes such as Stephen Decatur, "Fighting Fred" Funston, and Smedly Butler. This revised and updated edition of Boot's compellingly readable history of the forgotten wars that helped promote America's rise in the lst two centuries includes a wealth of new material, including a chapter on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a new afterword on the lessons of the post-9/11 world.

Download or read book Between War and Peace written by Matthew Moten and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-01-10 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A U.S. Military Academy historian analyzes America's exit strategies in conflicts ranging from the American Revolution to the Gulf War, providing fifteen essays by leading authorities to offer insight into each war's goals, campaigns, and legacies.

Download or read book War on Peace written by Ronan Farrow and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: US foreign policy is undergoing a dire transformation, forever changing America’s place in the world. Institutions of diplomacy and development are bleeding out after deep budget cuts; the diplomats who make America’s deals and protect its citizens around the world are walking out in droves. Offices across the State Department sit empty, while abroad the military-industrial complex has assumed the work once undertaken by peacemakers. We’re becoming a nation that shoots first and asks questions later. In an astonishing journey from the corridors of power in Washington, DC, to some of the most remote and dangerous places on earth—Afghanistan, Somalia, and North Korea among them—acclaimed investigative journalist Ronan Farrow illuminates one of the most consequential and poorly understood changes in American history. His firsthand experience as a former State Department official affords a personal look at some of the last standard bearers of traditional statecraft, including Richard Holbrooke, who made peace in Bosnia and died while trying to do so in Afghanistan. Drawing on recently unearthed documents, and richly informed by rare interviews with whistle-blowers, a warlord, and policymakers—including every living former secretary of state from Henry Kissinger to Hillary Clinton to Rex Tillerson—and now updated with revealing firsthand accounts from inside Donald Trump’s confrontations with diplomats during his impeachment and candid testimonials from officials in Joe Biden’s inner circle, War on Peace makes a powerful case for an endangered profession. Diplomacy, Farrow argues, has declined after decades of political cowardice, shortsightedness, and outright malice—but it may just offer America a way out of a world at war.

Download or read book The United States of War written by David Vine and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2020 L.A. Times Book Prize Finalist, History A provocative examination of how the U.S. military has shaped our entire world, from today’s costly, endless wars to the prominence of violence in everyday American life. The United States has been fighting wars constantly since invading Afghanistan in 2001. This nonstop warfare is far less exceptional than it might seem: the United States has been at war or has invaded other countries almost every year since independence. In The United States of War, David Vine traces this pattern of bloody conflict from Columbus's 1494 arrival in Guantanamo Bay through the 250-year expansion of a global U.S. empire. Drawing on historical and firsthand anthropological research in fourteen countries and territories, The United States of War demonstrates how U.S. leaders across generations have locked the United States in a self-perpetuating system of permanent war by constructing the world’s largest-ever collection of foreign military bases—a global matrix that has made offensive interventionist wars more likely. Beyond exposing the profit-making desires, political interests, racism, and toxic masculinity underlying the country’s relationship to war and empire, The United States of War shows how the long history of U.S. military expansion shapes our daily lives, from today’s multi-trillion–dollar wars to the pervasiveness of violence and militarism in everyday U.S. life. The book concludes by confronting the catastrophic toll of American wars—which have left millions dead, wounded, and displaced—while offering proposals for how we can end the fighting.

Download or read book Peaceful War written by Patrick Mendis and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peaceful War is an epic analysis of the unfolding drama between the clashing forces of the Chinese dream and American destiny. Just as the American experiment evolved, Deng Xiaoping’s China has been using “Hamiltonian means to Jeffersonian ends” and borrowed the idea of the American Dream as a model for China’s rise. The Chinese dream, as reinvented by President Xi Jinping, continues Deng’s experiment into the twenty-first century. With a possible “fiscal cliff” in America and a “social cliff” in China, the author revisits the history of Sino-American relations to explore the prospects for a return to the long-forgotten Beijing-Washington love affair launched in the trade-for-peace era. President Barack Obama’s Asia pivot strategy and the new Silk Road plan of President Xi could eventually create a pacific New World Order of peace and prosperity for all. The question is: will China ultimately evolve into a democratic nation by rewriting the American Dream in Chinese characters, and how might this transpire?

Download or read book What Every Person Should Know About War written by Chris Hedges and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acclaimed New York Times journalist and author Chris Hedges offers a critical -- and fascinating -- lesson in the dangerous realities of our age: a stark look at the effects of war on combatants. Utterly lacking in rhetoric or dogma, this manual relies instead on bare fact, frank description, and a spare question-and-answer format. Hedges allows U.S. military documentation of the brutalizing physical and psychological consequences of combat to speak for itself. Hedges poses dozens of questions that young soldiers might ask about combat, and then answers them by quoting from medical and psychological studies. • What are my chances of being wounded or killed if we go to war? • What does it feel like to get shot? • What do artillery shells do to you? • What is the most painful way to get wounded? • Will I be afraid? • What could happen to me in a nuclear attack? • What does it feel like to kill someone? • Can I withstand torture? • What are the long-term consequences of combat stress? • What will happen to my body after I die? This profound and devastating portrayal of the horrors to which we subject our armed forces stands as a ringing indictment of the glorification of war and the concealment of its barbarity.

Download or read book Between War and Peace written by Matthew Moten and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-01-11 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in paperback, Between War and Peace is “a set of essays devoted to the shadowy ground on which the guns have ceased their roar, but could resume at any moment” ( Kirkus Reviews ). As the United States attempts to extricate itself from two long and costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, nothing could be more vital than a thorough examination of the way America has ended its major conflicts in the past. As it fills an important gap in military history, Between War and Peace is bound to be a pillar of military academy and college curricula. The book presents fifteen essays by leading American historians, each of which deals in fascinating detail with the aims of these wars, their predominant strategies, their final campaigns, the course and causes of termination, and their ramifications for the nation’s future. Taken together, they will be a groundbreaking addition to the canon of military history. A formidable, collaborative effort that illuminates the past in ways that will help us understand our troubled present, Between War and Peace takes readers inside some of American history’s most important turning points.

Download or read book Wars and Peace written by D. Mayers and published by Springer. This book was released on 1998-07-14 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wars and Peace is a history of the way that a range of Americans have tried to conceptualize peace during five national security crises: The Civil War, Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, Cold War. Award-winning author David Mayers examines the intellectual foundations of U.S. foreign policy since 1861 and analyzes the way that Americans, across the political spectrum, have in times of conflict conceptualized the era that would follow hostilities. Mayers looks at this history in terms of a current problem: How should the United States fashion its policy in the post-Cold War world? What is striking about previous attempts to create postwar orders, Mayers reveals, is that they failed in the test to fulfill the hopes of their authors. Yet the cumulative impact of these ideas has been to shape collective imagination in America. Mayers argues that earnest attempts at innovation notwithstanding, U.S. purpose remains unchanged and like that of every nation: to survive, to prosper if possible. As applicable to this day and to this study as to his own, W.E.B. Du Bois published these lines in 1935: 'Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things.' In this volume Mayers gives voice to a range of people who have acted on the political scene - the powerful but also the marginalized, the vanquished, the dissenting - to show how Americans of all persuasions have flavoured the national discourse.

Download or read book Kill for Peace written by Matthew Israel and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2013-07-15 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The book addresses chronologically the most striking reactions of the art world to the rise of military engagement in Vietnam then in Cambodia.” —Guillaume LeBot, Critique d’art The Vietnam War (1964–1975) divided American society like no other war of the twentieth century, and some of the most memorable American art and art-related activism of the last fifty years protested U.S. involvement. At a time when Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art dominated the American art world, individual artists and art collectives played a significant role in antiwar protest and inspired subsequent generations of artists. This significant story of engagement, which has never been covered in a book-length survey before, is the subject of Kill for Peace. Writing for both general and academic audiences, Matthew Israel recounts the major moments in the Vietnam War and the antiwar movement and describes artists’ individual and collective responses to them. He discusses major artists such as Leon Golub, Edward Kienholz, Martha Rosler, Peter Saul, Nancy Spero, and Robert Morris; artists’ groups including the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC) and the Artists Protest Committee (APC); and iconic works of collective protest art such as AWC’s Q. And Babies? A. And Babies and APC’s The Artists Tower of Protest. Israel also formulates a typology of antiwar engagement, identifying and naming artists’ approaches to protest. These approaches range from extra-aesthetic actions—advertisements, strikes, walk-outs, and petitions without a visual aspect—to advance memorials, which were war memorials purposefully created before the war’s end that criticized both the war and the form and content of traditional war memorials. “Accessible and informative.” —Art Libraries Society of North America

Download or read book The Violence of Peace written by Stephen L. Carter and published by Beast Books. This book was released on 2011-01-11 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The man who many considered the peace candidate in the last election was transformed into a war president," writes bestselling author and leading academic Stephen l. Carter in The Violence of Peace, his new book decoding what President Barack Obama's views on war mean for America and its role in military conflict, now and going forward. As America winds down a war in Iraq, ratchets up another in Afghanistan, and continues a global war on terrorism, Carter delves into the implications of the military philosophy Obama has adopted through his first two years in office. Responding to the invitation that Obama himself issued in his Nobel address, Carter uses the tools of the Western tradition of just and unjust war to evaluate Obama's actions and words about military conflict, offering insight into how the president will handle existing and future wars, and into how his judgment will shape America's fate. Carter also explores war as a way to defend others from tyrannical regimes, which Obama has endorsed but not yet tested, and reveals the surprising ways in which some of the tactics Obama has used or authorized are more extreme than those of his predecessor, George W. Bush. "Keeping the nation at peace," Carter writes, "often requires battle," and this book lays bare exactly how America's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are shaping the way Obama views the country's role in conflict and peace, ultimately determining the fate of the nation.

Download or read book Peace Now written by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2001-02-08 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did the protests and support of ordinary American citizens affect their country's participation in the Vietnam War? This engrossing book focuses on four social groups that achieved political prominence in the 1960s and early 1970s--students, African Americans, women, and labor--and investigates the impact of each on American foreign policy during the war. Drawing on oral histories, personal interviews, and a broad range of archival sources, Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones narrates and compares the activities of these groups. He shows that all of them gave the war solid support at its outset and offers a new perspective on this, arguing that these "outsider" social groups were tempted to conform with foreign policy goals as a means to social and political acceptance. But in due course students, African Americans, and then women turned away from temptation and mounted spectacular revolts against the war, with a cumulative effect that sapped the resistance of government policymakers. Organized labor, however, supported the war until almost the end. Jeffreys-Jones shows that this gave President Nixon his opportunity to speak of the "great silent majority" of American citizens who were in favor of the war. Because labor continued to be receptive to overtures from the White House, peace did not come quickly.

Download or read book American Wars written by Paul Buchheit and published by SCB Distributors. This book was released on 2010-04-20 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When many Americans hear that the US may go to war against another nation, they tend to believe there's probably a good reason for it or that no viable alternatives exist or they don't think about it at all. They trust their leaders to represent them and defend their values. They accept their leaders' claims that war is to ensure their safety when others wish to harm them.The parties of war play on Americans' basic values to bring them online. The media reassures them that the reasons for war are altruistic that Americans wish to spread democracy and allow others to adopt their way of life. But is this the case? With 24 compelling illustrations, maps and graphs, this book is intended to serve as a tool for peace advocacy. Well known peace advocates respond to 19 of the most common illusions held by the American public which weaken their opposition to Washington's wars. "The American way of war offers a nonstop supply of illusions--while imposing horrific realities far away and, ultimately, at home too. This book is intent on dispelling key illusions and coming to terms with human realities. Between the covers of American Wars, the result is a compendium of insights and hard-won knowledge of the sort you'll rarely find in the daily paper or the evening news. The writers are myth-busters who challenge the conventional lack of wisdom that drags the United States into one war after another and keeps us lethally mired in a warfare state. This collection provides us with an array of vital perspectives, opening up a crucial topic that usually remains shut down--what American wars are doing to humanity, under false pretenses and with calamitous results, around the world and in our own neighborhoods. The future is at stake. This book helps us to understand the perils and opportunities of the present moment. --NORMAN SOLOMON, author of War Made Easy

Download or read book Waging Peace in Vietnam written by Ron Carver and published by New Village Press. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How American Soldiers Opposed and Resisted the War in Vietnam While mainstream narratives of the Vietnam War all but marginalize anti-war activity of soldiers, opposition and resistance from within the three branches of the military made a real difference to the course of America’s engagement in Vietnam. By 1968, every major peace march in the United States was led by active duty GIs and Vietnam War veterans. By 1970, thousands of active duty soldiers and marines were marching in protest in US cities. Hundreds of soldiers and marines in Vietnam were refusing to fight; tens of thousands were deserting to Canada, France and Sweden. Eventually the US Armed Forces were no longer able to sustain large-scale offensive operations and ceased to be effective. Yet this history is largely unknown and has been glossed over in much of the written and visual remembrances produced in recent years. Waging Peace in Vietnam shows how the GI movement unfolded, from the numerous anti-war coffee houses springing up outside military bases, to the hundreds of GI newspapers giving an independent voice to active soldiers, to the stockade revolts and the strikes and near-mutinies on naval vessels and in the air force. The book presents first-hand accounts, oral histories, and a wealth of underground newspapers, posters, flyers, and photographs documenting the actions of GIs and veterans who took part in the resistance. In addition, the book features fourteen original essays by leading scholars and activists. Notable contributors include Vietnam War scholar and author, Christian Appy, and Mme Nguyen Thi Binh, who played a major role in the Paris Peace Accord. The book originates from the exhibition Waging Peace, which has been shown in Vietnam and the University of Notre Dame, and will be touring the eastern United States in conjunction with book launches in Boston, Amherst, and New York.

Download or read book The Art of War in an Age of Peace written by Michael O'Hanlon and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An informed modern plan for post-2020 American foreign policy that avoids the opposing dangers of retrenchment and overextension Russia and China are both believed to have "grand strategies"--detailed sets of national security goals backed by means, and plans, to pursue them. In the United States, policy makers have tried to articulate similar concepts but have failed to reach a widespread consensus since the Cold War ended. While the United States has been the world's prominent superpower for over a generation, much American thinking has oscillated between the extremes of isolationist agendas versus interventionist and overly assertive ones. Drawing on historical precedents and weighing issues such as Russia's resurgence, China's great rise, North Korea's nuclear machinations, and Middle East turmoil, Michael O'Hanlon presents a well-researched, ethically sound, and politically viable vision for American national security policy. He also proposes complementing the Pentagon's set of "4+1" pre-existing threats with a new "4+1" biological, nuclear, digital, climatic, and internal dangers.