Author: Kimberly J. Lamay Licursi
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803290853
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291
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Book Description
State war histories: an atom of interest in an ocean of apathy -- War memoirs: they pour from the presses daily -- War stories: fiction cannot ignore the greatest adventure in a man's life -- War films: shootin' and kissin'
Author: Bart Ziino
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317573706
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 314
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Book Description
Remembering the First World War brings together a group of international scholars to understand how and why the past quarter of a century has witnessed such an extraordinary increase in global popular and academic interest in the First World War, both as an event and in the ways it is remembered. The book discusses this phenomenon across three key areas. The first section looks at family history, genealogy and the First World War, seeking to understand the power of family history in shaping and reshaping remembrance of the War at the smallest levels, as well as popular media and the continuing role of the state and its agencies. The second part discusses practices of remembering and the more public forms of representation and negotiation through film, literature, museums, monuments and heritage sites, focusing on agency in representing and remembering war. The third section covers the return of the War and the increasing determination among individuals to acknowledge and participate in public rituals of remembrance with their own contemporary politics. What, for instance, does it mean to wear a poppy on armistice/remembrance day? How do symbols like this operate today? These chapters will investigate these aspects through a series of case studies. Placing remembrance of the First World War in its longer historical and broader transnational context and including illustrations and an afterword by Professor David Reynolds, this is the ideal book for all those interested in the history of the Great War and its aftermath.
Author: Thomas H. Conner
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813176336
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 375
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Book Description
"No soldier could ask for a sweeter resting place than on the field of glory where he fell. The land he died to save vies with the one which gave him birth in paying tribute to his memory, and the kindly hands which so often come to spread flowers upon his earthly coverlet express in their gentle task a personal affection."—General John J. Pershing To remember and honor the memory of the American soldiers who fought and died in foreign wars during the past hundred years, the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) was established. Since the agency was founded in 1923, its sole purpose has been to commemorate the soldiers' service and the causes for which their lives were given. The twenty-five overseas cemeteries honoring 139,000 combat dead and the memorials honoring the 60,314 fallen soldiers with no known graves are among the most beautiful and meticulously maintained shrines in the world. In the first comprehensive study of the ABMC, Thomas H. Conner traces how the agency came to be created by Congress in the aftermath of World War I, how the cemeteries and monuments the agency built were designed and their locations chosen, and how the commemorative sites have become important "outposts of remembrance" on foreign soil. War and Remembrance powerfully demonstrates that these monuments—living sites that embody the role Americans played in the defense of freedom far from their own shores—assist in understanding the interconnections of memory and history and serve as an inspiration to later generations.
Author: Douglas Brinkley
Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
ISBN: 9780060851583
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
In May 2004, the sixtieth anniversary year of D-Day, the nation paid tribute to its World War II heroes with the dedication of a memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. This beautifully illustrated keepsake offers a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the memorial and its place in American history. Exclusive photographs show the memorial in all stages of development, accompanied by text exploring the symbolism of each part -- the Rainbow Pool, the Wall of Remembrance, the Field of Stars, the Freedom Wall, and the Pillars of the States and Territories. George H. W. Bush, former senator Bob Dole, Yogi Berra, and other veterans share their personal stories, and leading military historians contribute essays on the war efforts at home and abroad. Like the memorial it commemorates, this book pays tribute to the "greatest generation" -- the everyday Americans who rose up to defend our freedom.
Author: C. Frederick Schwan
Publisher: B N R Press
ISBN:
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 1026
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Book Description
Author: Elizabeth Mullener
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807127780
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
Henry Lasoski, an officer in the Polish army, was there on the first day of World War II, thrusting his bayonet awkwardly into a German soldier hours after Hitler’s army invaded his homeland in 1939. And Jacques Smith was there on the last, a member of the honor guard aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay when the Japanese signed the documents of surrender in 1945. From start to finish, this chronicle of fifty-three personal testimonies illuminates the Second World War in a way no mere accumulation of facts can. In a journalistic tour de force, Elizabeth Mullener over the course of twelve years found eyewitnesses to virtually every major event of World War II, and she found them all in one American city—New Orleans. Some are natives of the city and some are not, a testament to the upheaval of war and its power to scatter people around the globe. The people she writes about are not grand heroes or prime movers. They are young men shaking in their foxholes, young women stitching up wounded soldiers, and children facing a world gone topsy-turvy. And they saw it all. They witnessed the London Blitz and the siege of Stalingrad; the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Bataan Death March; the battle of Iwo Jima and the Nuremberg trials; the Normandy invasion and parties at the USO. Their memories are powerful. Harold Eck recalls sharks grazing his legs as he treaded water for four days after the USS Indianapolis sank in the Pacific Ocean. Anthony DeLucca saw bodies stacked like cordwood at Buchenwald. Christine Strevinsky slid a knife through the neck of a Nazi commandant at the age of nine. Frank Rosato played “The Missouri Waltz” for Harry Truman at Potsdam. All poignantly related through Mullener’s graceful and compelling prose, the episodes in War Stories provide an unusually intimate history of World War II and a direct, visceral connection to the central event of the twentieth century.
Author: J. M. Winter
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300110685
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340
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Book Description
This is a masterful volume on remembrance and war in the twentieth century. Jay Winter locates the fascination with the subject of memory within a long-term trajectory that focuses on the Great War. Images, languages, and practices that appeared during and after the two world wars focused on the need to acknowledge the victims of war and shaped the ways in which future conflicts were imagined and remembered. At the core of the “memory boom” is an array of collective meditations on war and the victims of war, Winter says. The book begins by tracing the origins of contemporary interest in memory, then describes practices of remembrance that have linked history and memory, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century. The author also considers “theaters of memory”—film, television, museums, and war crimes trials in which the past is seen through public representations of memories. The book concludes with reflections on the significance of these practices for the cultural history of the twentieth century as a whole.
Author: Michael Dolski
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 1621902188
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
D-Day, the Allied invasion of northwestern France in June 1944, has remained in the forefront of American memories of the Second World War to this day. Depictions in books, news stories, documentaries, museums, monuments, memorial celebrations, speeches, games, and Hollywood spectaculars have overwhelmingly romanticized the assault as an event in which citizen-soldiers—the everyday heroes of democracy—engaged evil foes in a decisive clash fought for liberty, national redemption, and world salvation. In D-Day Remembered, Michael R. Dolski explores the evolution of American D-Day tales over the course of the past seven decades. He shows the ways in which that particular episode came to overshadow so many others in portraying the twentieth century’s most devastating cataclysm as “the Good War.” With depth and insight, he analyzes how depictions in various media, such as the popular histories of Stephen Ambrose and films like The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan, have time and again reaffirmed cherished American notions of democracy, fair play, moral order, and the militant, yet non-militaristic, use of power for divinely sanctioned purposes. Only during the Vietnam era, when Americans had to confront an especially stark challenge to their pietistic sense of nationhood, did memories of D-Day momentarily fade. They soon reemerged, however, as the country sought to move beyond the lamentable conflict in Southeast Asia. Even as portrayals of D-Day have gone from sanitized early versions to more realistic acknowledgments of tactical mistakes and the horrific costs of the battle, the overarching story continues to be, for many, a powerful reminder of moral rectitude, military skill, and world mission. While the time to historicize this morality tale more fully and honestly has long since come, Dolski observes, the lingering positive connotations of D-Day indicate that the story is not yet finished.
Author: Kimberly J. Lamay Licursi
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496205693
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
Poised to become a significant player in the new world order, the United States truly came of age during and after World War I. Yet many Americans think of the Great War simply as a precursor to World War II. Americans, including veterans, hastened to put experiences and memories of the war years behind them, reflecting a general apathy about the war that had developed during the 1920s and 1930s and never abated. In Remembering World War I in America Kimberly J. Lamay Licursi explores the American public’s collective memory and common perception of World War I by analyzing the extent to which it was expressed through the production of cultural artifacts related to the war. Through the analysis of four vectors of memory—war histories, memoirs, fiction, and film—Lamay Licursi shows that no consistent image or message about the war ever arose that resonated with a significant segment of the American population. Not many war histories materialized, war memoirs did not capture the public’s attention, and war novels and films presented a fictional war that either bore little resemblance to the doughboys’ experience or offered discordant views about what the war meant. In the end Americans emerged from the interwar years with limited pockets of public memory about the war that never found compromise in a dominant myth.
Author: Richard Rubin
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547843690
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 549
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Book Description
“Before the Greatest Generation, there was the Forgotten Generation of World War I . . . wonderfully engaging” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). “Richard Rubin has done something that will never be possible for anyone to do again. His interviews with the last American World War I veterans—who have all since died—bring to vivid life a cataclysm that changed our world forever but that remains curiously forgotten here.” —Adam Hochschild, author of To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914–1918 In 2003, eighty-five years after the end of World War I, Richard Rubin set out to see if he could still find and talk to someone who had actually served in the American Expeditionary Forces during that colossal conflict. Ultimately he found dozens, aged 101 to 113, from Cape Cod to Carson City, who shared with him at the last possible moment their stories of America’s Great War. Nineteenth-century men and women living in the twenty-first century, they were self-reliant, humble, and stoic, never complaining, but still marveling at the immensity of the war they helped win, and the complexity of the world they helped create. Though America has largely forgotten their war, you will never forget them, or their stories. A decade in the making, The Last of the Doughboys is the most sweeping look at America’s First World War in a generation, a glorious reminder of the tremendously important role America played in the “war to end all wars,” as well as a moving meditation on character, grace, aging, and memory. “An outstanding and fascinating book. By tracking down the last surviving veterans of the First World War and interviewing them with sympathy and skill, Richard Rubin has produced a first-rate work of reporting.” —Ian Frazier, author of Travels in Siberia “I cannot remember a book about that huge and terrible war that I have enjoyed reading more in many years.” —Michael Korda, The Daily Beast
