Remaking the Conquering Heroes

Remaking the Conquering Heroes PDF Author: J. Willoughby
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9781349386253
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
Remaking the Conquering Heroes shows that American policymakers and Army officers had to confront and take control over a lawless US military in the aftermath of World War II. Money laundering, theft, racial antagonism between black and white GIs, unregulated sex, and high rates of venereal disease threatened to undermine American authority in occupied Germany as much as Soviet-American conflict. Willoughby argues that it was the creative, if disorganized, reaction of American officials in Germany that helped create both a foreign policy framework and more inclusive, familial military establishment capable of consolidating and extending US power during the Cold War.

Remaking the Conquering Heroes

Remaking the Conquering Heroes PDF Author: J. Willoughby
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9781349386253
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 187

Get Book Here

Book Description
Remaking the Conquering Heroes shows that American policymakers and Army officers had to confront and take control over a lawless US military in the aftermath of World War II. Money laundering, theft, racial antagonism between black and white GIs, unregulated sex, and high rates of venereal disease threatened to undermine American authority in occupied Germany as much as Soviet-American conflict. Willoughby argues that it was the creative, if disorganized, reaction of American officials in Germany that helped create both a foreign policy framework and more inclusive, familial military establishment capable of consolidating and extending US power during the Cold War.

Contagions of Empire

Contagions of Empire PDF Author: Khary Oronde Polk
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469655519
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
From 1898 onward, the expansion of American militarism and empire abroad increasingly relied on black labor, even as policy remained inflected both by scientific racism and by fears of contagion. Black men and women were mobilized for service in the Spanish-Cuban-American War under the War Department's belief that southern blacks carried an immunity against tropical diseases. Later, in World Wars I and II, black troops were stigmatized as members of a contagious "venereal race" and were subjected to experimental medical treatments meant to curtail their sexual desires. By turns feared as contagious and at other times valued for their immunity, black men and women played an important part in the U.S. military's conscription of racial, gender, and sexual difference, even as they exercised their embattled agency at home and abroad. By following the scientific, medical, and cultural history of African American enlistment through the archive of American militarism, this book traces the black subjects and agents of empire as they came into contact with a world globalized by warfare.

Base Nation

Base Nation PDF Author: David Vine
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
ISBN: 1627791701
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
From Italy to the Indian Ocean, from Japan to Honduras, a far-reaching examination of the perils of American military bases overseas American military bases encircle the globe. More than two decades after the end of the Cold War, the U.S. still stations its troops at nearly a thousand locations in foreign lands. These bases are usually taken for granted or overlooked entirely, a little-noticed part of the Pentagon's vast operations. But in an eye-opening account, Base Nation shows that the worldwide network of bases brings with it a panoply of ills—and actually makes the nation less safe in the long run. As David Vine demonstrates, the overseas bases raise geopolitical tensions and provoke widespread antipathy towards the United States. They also undermine American democratic ideals, pushing the U.S. into partnerships with dictators and perpetuating a system of second-class citizenship in territories like Guam. They breed sexual violence, destroy the environment, and damage local economies. And their financial cost is staggering: though the Pentagon underplays the numbers, Vine's accounting proves that the bill approaches $100 billion per year. For many decades, the need for overseas bases has been a quasi-religious dictum of U.S. foreign policy. But in recent years, a bipartisan coalition has finally started to question this conventional wisdom. With the U.S. withdrawing from Afghanistan and ending thirteen years of war, there is no better time to re-examine the tenets of our military strategy. Base Nation is an essential contribution to that debate.

The Good Occupation

The Good Occupation PDF Author: Susan L. Carruthers
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674972929
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
Waged for a just cause and culminating in total victory, World War II was America’s “good war.” Yet for millions of GIs overseas, the war did not end with Germany and Japan’s surrender. The Good Occupation chronicles America’s transition from wartime combatant to postwar occupier, by exploring the intimate thoughts and feelings of the ordinary servicemen and women who participated—often reluctantly—in the difficult project of rebuilding nations they had so recently worked to destroy. When the war ended, most of the seven million Americans in uniform longed to return to civilian life. Yet many remained on active duty, becoming the “after-army” tasked with bringing order and justice to societies ravaged by war. Susan Carruthers shows how American soldiers struggled to deal with unprecedented catastrophe among millions of displaced refugees and concentration camp survivors while negotiating the inevitable tensions that arose between victors and the defeated enemy. Drawing on thousands of unpublished letters, diaries, and memoirs, she reveals the stories service personnel told themselves and their loved ones back home in order to make sense of their disorienting and challenging postwar mission. The picture Carruthers paints is not the one most Americans recognize today. A venture undertaken by soldiers with little appetite for the task has crystallized, in the retelling, into the “good occupation” of national mythology: emblematic of the United States’ role as a bearer of democracy, progress, and prosperity. In real time, however, “winning the peace” proved a perilous business, fraught with temptation and hazard.

In the Children’s Best Interests

In the Children’s Best Interests PDF Author: Lynne Taylor
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487521944
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 479

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Book Description
Among the hundreds of thousands of displaced persons in Germany at the end of World War II, approximately 40,000 were unaccompanied children. These children, of every age and nationality, were without parents or legal guardians and many were without clear identities. This situation posed serious practical, legal, ethical, and political problems for the agencies responsible for their care. In the Children's Best Interests, by Lynne Taylor, is the first work to delve deeply into the records of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and the International Refugee Organization (IRO) and reveal the heated battles that erupted amongst the various entities (military, governments, and NGOs) responsible for their care and disposition. The bitter debates focused on such issues as whether a child could be adopted, what to do with illegitimate and abandoned children, and who could assume the role of guardian. The inconclusive nationality of these children meant they became pawns in the battle between East and West during the Cold War. Taylor's exploration and insight into the debates around national identity and the privilege of citizenship challenges our understanding of nationality in the postwar period.

Race after Hitler

Race after Hitler PDF Author: Heide Fehrenbach
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691188106
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
When American victors entered Germany in the spring of 1945, they came armed not only with a commitment to democracy but also to Jim Crow practices. Race after Hitler tells the story of how troubled race relations among American occupation soldiers, and black-white mixing within Germany, unexpectedly shaped German notions of race after 1945. Biracial occupation children became objects of intense scrutiny and politicking by postwar Germans into the 1960s, resulting in a shift away from official antisemitism to a focus on color and blackness. Beginning with black GIs' unexpected feelings of liberation in postfascist Germany, Fehrenbach investigates reactions to their relations with white German women and to the few thousand babies born of these unions. Drawing on social welfare and other official reports, scientific studies, and media portrayals from both sides of the Atlantic, Fehrenbach reconstructs social policy debates regarding black occupation children, such as whether they should be integrated into German society or adopted to African American or other families abroad. Ultimately, a consciously liberal discourse of race emerged in response to the children among Germans who prided themselves on--and were lauded by the black American press for--rejecting the hateful practices of National Socialism and the segregationist United States. Fehrenbach charts her story against a longer history of German racism extending from nineteenth-century colonialism through National Socialism to contemporary debates about multiculturalism. An important and provocative work, Race after Hitler explores how racial ideologies are altered through transnational contact accompanying war and regime change, even and especially in the most intimate areas of sex and reproduction.

Gendering Migration

Gendering Migration PDF Author: Wendy Webster
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351934333
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
Gendering Migration demonstrates the significance of studying migration through the lens of gender and ethnicity and the contribution this perspective makes to migration histories. Through a consideration of the impact of migration on men and masculine identities as well as women and feminine identities, it extends our understanding of questions of gender and migration, focusing on the history of migration to Britain after the Second World War. The volume draws on oral narratives as well as documentary and archival research to demonstrate the important role played by gender and ethnicity, both in ideas and images of migrants and in migrants' own experiences. The contributors consider a range of migrant and refugee groups who came to Britain in the twentieth century: Caribbean, East-African Asian, German, Greek, Irish, Kurdish, Pakistani, Polish and Spanish. The fresh interpretations offered here make this an important new book for scholars and students of migration, ethnicity, gender and modern British history.

An Army in Crisis

An Army in Crisis PDF Author: Alexander Vazansky
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496217411
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Following the decision to maintain 250,000 U.S. troops in Germany after the Allied victory in 1945, the U.S. Army had, for the most part, been a model of what a peacetime occupying army stationed in an ally’s country should be. The army had initially benefited from the positive results of U.S. foreign policy toward West Germany and the deference of the Federal Republic toward it, establishing cordial and even friendly relations with German society. By 1968, however, the disciplined military of the Allies had been replaced with rundown barracks and shabby-looking GIs, and U.S. bases in Germany had become a symbol of the army’s greatest crisis, a crisis that threatened the army’s very existence. In An Army in Crisis Alexander Vazansky analyzes the social crisis that developed among the U.S. Army forces stationed in Germany between 1968 and 1975. This crisis was the result of shifting deployment patterns across the world during the Vietnam War; changing social and political realities of life in postwar Germany and Europe; and racial tensions, drug use, dissent, and insubordination within the U.S. Army itself, influenced by the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the youth movement in the States. With particular attention to 1968, An Army in Crisis examines the changing relationships between American and German soldiers, from German deference to familiarity and fraternization, and the effects that a prolonged military presence in Germany had on American military personnel, their dependents, and the lives of Germans. Vazansky presents an innovative study of opposition and resistance within the ranks, affected by the Vietnam War and the limitations of personal freedom among the military during this era.

New Music, New Allies

New Music, New Allies PDF Author: Amy C. Beal
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520932814
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
New Music, New Allies documents how American experimental music and its practitioners came to prominence in the West German cultural landscape between the end of the Second World War in 1945 and the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990. Beginning with the reeducation programs implemented by American military officers during the postwar occupation of West Germany and continuing through the cultural policies of the Cold War era, this broad history chronicles German views on American music, American composers’ pursuit of professional opportunities abroad, and the unprecedented dissemination and support their music enjoyed through West German state-subsidized radio stations, new music festivals, and international exchange programs. Framing the biographies of prominent American composer-performers within the aesthetic and ideological contexts of the second half of the twentieth century, Amy C. Beal follows the international careers of John Cage, Henry Cowell, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, David Tudor, Frederic Rzewski, Christian Wolff, Steve Reich, Pauline Oliveros, Conlon Nancarrow, and many others to Donaueschingen, Darmstadt, Cologne, Bremen, Berlin, and Munich.

Unofficial Ambassadors

Unofficial Ambassadors PDF Author: Donna Alvah
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814707548
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 530

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Book Description
As thousands of wives and children joined American servicemen stationed at overseas bases in the years following World War II, the military family represented a friendlier, more humane side of the United States' campaign for dominance in the Cold War. Wives in particular were encouraged to use their feminine influence to forge ties with residents of occupied and host nations. In this untold story of Cold War diplomacy, Donna Alvah describes how these “unofficial ambassadors” spread the United States’ perception of itself and its image of world order in the communities where husbands and fathers were stationed, cultivating relationships with both local people and other military families in private homes, churches, schools, women's clubs, shops, and other places. Unofficial Ambassadors reminds us that, in addition to soldiers and world leaders, ordinary people make vital contributions to a nation's military engagements. Alvah broadens the scope of the history of the Cold War by analyzing how ideas about gender, family, race, and culture shaped the U.S. military presence abroad.