[PDF] Cultures Of War Pearl Harbor Hiroshima 9 11 Iraq eBook

Author : John W. Dower
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 640 pages
File Size : 46,68 MB
Release : 2010-09-17
Category : History
ISBN : 0393080471

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Finalist for the 2010 National Book Award in Nonfiction: The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian returns with a groundbreaking comparative study of the dynamics and pathologies of war in modern times. Over recent decades, John W. Dower, one of America’s preeminent historians, has addressed the roots and consequences of war from multiple perspectives. In War Without Mercy (1986), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, he described and analyzed the brutality that attended World War II in the Pacific, as seen from both the Japanese and the American sides. Embracing Defeat (1999), winner of numerous honors including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, dealt with Japan’s struggle to start over in a shattered land in the immediate aftermath of the Pacific War, when the defeated country was occupied by the U.S.-led Allied powers. Turning to an even larger canvas, Dower now examines the cultures of war revealed by four powerful events—Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, and the invasion of Iraq in the name of a war on terror. The list of issues examined and themes explored is wide-ranging: failures of intelligence and imagination, wars of choice and “strategic imbecilities,” faith-based secular thinking as well as more overtly holy wars, the targeting of noncombatants, and the almost irresistible logic—and allure—of mass destruction. Dower’s new work also sets the U.S. occupations of Japan and Iraq side by side in strikingly original ways. One of the most important books of this decade, Cultures of War offers comparative insights into individual and institutional behavior and pathologies that transcend “cultures” in the more traditional sense, and that ultimately go beyond war-making alone.

Author : John W. Dower
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 645 pages
File Size : 44,41 MB
Release : 2010
Category : Hiroshima-shi (Japan)
ISBN : 0393340686

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WORLD HISTORY: SECOND WORLD WAR. Over recent decades, John W. Dower, one of America's preeminent historians, has addressed the roots and consequences of war from multiple perspectives. In War Without Mercy (1986), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, he described and analyzed the brutality that attended World War II in the Pacific, as seen from both the Japanese and the American sides. Embracing Defeat (1999), winner of numerous honors including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, dealt with Japan's struggle to start over in a shattered land in the immediate aftermath of the Pacific War, when the defeated country was occupied by the U.S.-led Allied powers. Turning to an even larger canvas, Dower now examines the cultures of war revealed by four powerful events--Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, and the invasion of Iraq in the name of a war on terror.

Author : John W. Dower
Publisher : New Press, The
Page : 338 pages
File Size : 50,62 MB
Release : 2014-02-04
Category : History
ISBN : 1595589376

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Historian John W. Dower’s celebrated investigations into modern Japanese history, World War II, and U.S.–Japanese relations have earned him critical accolades and numerous honors, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bancroft Prize. Now Dower returns to the major themes of his groundbreaking work, examining American and Japanese perceptions of key moments in their shared history. Both provocative and probing, Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering delves into a range of subjects, including the complex role of racism on both sides of the Pacific War, the sophistication of Japanese wartime propaganda, the ways in which the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is remembered in Japan, and the story of how the postwar study of Japan in the United States and the West was influenced by Cold War politics. Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering offers urgent insights by one of our greatest interpreters of the past into how citizens of democracy should deal with their history and, as Dower writes, “the need to constantly ask what is not being asked.”

Author : David Dean Barrett
Publisher : Diversion Books
Page : 500 pages
File Size : 50,18 MB
Release : 2020-04-07
Category : History
ISBN : 1635765803

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A WWII history told from US and Japanese perspectives—“an impressively researched chronicle of the months leading up to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima” (Publishers Weekly). During the closing months of World War II, two military giants locked in a death embrace of cultural differences and diplomatic intransigence. While developing history’s deadliest weapon and weighing an invasion that would have dwarfed D-Day, the US called for the “unconditional surrender” of Japan. The Japanese Empire responded with a last-ditch plan termed Ketsu-Go, which called for the suicidal resistance of every able-bodied man and woman in “The Decisive Battle” for the homeland. In 140 Days to Hiroshima, historian David Dean Barrett captures war-room drama on both sides of the conflict. Here are the secret strategy sessions, fierce debates, looming assassinations, and planned invasions that resulted in Armageddon on August 6, 1945. Barrett then examines the next nine chaotic days as the Japanese government struggled to respond to the reality of nuclear war.

Author : John W Dower
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 692 pages
File Size : 43,70 MB
Release : 2000-07-04
Category : History
ISBN : 9780393320275

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This study of modern Japan traces the impact of defeat and reconstruction on every aspect of Japan's national life. It examines the economic resurgence as well as how the nation as a whole reacted to defeat and the end of a suicidal nationalism.

Author : John Dower
Publisher : Pantheon
Page : 411 pages
File Size : 43,4 MB
Release : 2012-03-28
Category : History
ISBN : 0307816141

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WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • AN AMERICAN BOOK AWARD FINALIST • A monumental history that has been hailed by The New York Times as “one of the most original and important books to be written about the war between Japan and the United States.” In this monumental history, Professor John Dower reveals a hidden, explosive dimension of the Pacific War—race—while writing what John Toland has called “a landmark book ... a powerful, moving, and evenhanded history that is sorely needed in both America and Japan.” Drawing on American and Japanese songs, slogans, cartoons, propaganda films, secret reports, and a wealth of other documents of the time, Dower opens up a whole new way of looking at that bitter struggle of four and a half decades ago and its ramifications in our lives today. As Edwin O. Reischauer, former ambassador to Japan, has pointed out, this book offers “a lesson that the postwar generations need most ... with eloquence, crushing detail, and power.”

Author : James H. Lebovic
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 14,74 MB
Release : 2019-03-07
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0190935332

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The United States national-security establishment is vast, yet the United States has failed to meet its initial objectives in almost every one of its major, post-World War II conflicts. Of these troubled efforts, the US wars in Vietnam (1965-73), Iraq (2003-11), and Afghanistan (2001-present) stand out for their endurance, resource investment, human cost, and miscalculated decisions. Because overarching policy goals are distant and open to interpretation, policymakers ground their decisions in the immediate world of short-term objectives, salient tasks, policy constraints, and fixed time schedules. As a consequence, they exaggerate the benefits of their preferred policies, ignore the accompanying costs and requirements, and underappreciate the benefits of alternatives. In Planning to Fail, James H. Lebovic argues that a profound myopia helps explain US decision-making failures. In each of the wars explored in this book, he identifies four stages of intervention. First and foremost, policymakers chose unwisely to go to war. After the fighting began, they inadvisably sought to extend or expand the mission. Next, they pursued the mission, in abbreviated form, to suboptimal effect. Finally, they adapted the mission to exit from the conflict. Lebovic argues that US leaders were effectively planning to fail whatever their hopes and thoughts were at the time the intervention began. Decision-makers struggled less than they should have, even when conditions allowed for good choices. Then, when conditions on the ground left them with only bad choices, they struggled furiously and more than could ever matter. Policymakers allowed these wars to sap available capabilities, push US forces to the breaking point, and exhaust public support. They finally settled for terms of departure that they (or their predecessors) would have rejected at the start of these conflicts. Offering a far-ranging and detailed analysis, this book identifies an unmistakable pattern of failure and highlights lessons we can learn from it.

Author : Scott Martelle
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
Page : 317 pages
File Size : 29,35 MB
Release : 2011-05-12
Category : History
ISBN : 0813550920

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Sixty years ago political divisions in the United States ran even deeper than today's name-calling showdowns between the left and right. Back then, to call someone a communist was to threaten that person's career, family, freedom, and, sometimes, life itself. Hysteria about the "red menace" mushroomed as the Soviet Union tightened its grip on Eastern Europe, Mao Zedong rose to power in China, and the atomic arms race accelerated. Spy scandals fanned the flames, and headlines warned of sleeper cells in the nation's midst--just as it does today with the "War on Terror." In his new book, The Fear Within, Scott Martelle takes dramatic aim at one pivotal moment of that era. On the afternoon of July 20, 1948, FBI agents began rounding up twelve men in New York City, Chicago, and Detroit whom the U.S. government believed posed a grave threat to the nation--the leadership of the Communist Party-USA. After a series of delays, eleven of the twelve "top Reds" went on trial in Manhattan's Foley Square in January 1949. The proceedings captivated the nation, but the trial quickly dissolved into farce. The eleven defendants were charged under the 1940 Smith Act with conspiring to teach the necessity of overthrowing the U.S. government based on their roles as party leaders and their distribution of books and pamphlets. In essence, they were on trial for their libraries and political beliefs, not for overt acts threatening national security. Despite the clear conflict with the First Amendment, the men were convicted and their appeals denied by the U.S. Supreme Court in a decision that gave the green light to federal persecution of Communist Party leaders--a decision the court effectively reversed six years later. But by then, the damage was done. So rancorous was the trial the presiding judge sentenced the defense attorneys to prison terms, too, chilling future defendants' access to qualified counsel. Martelle's story is a compelling look at how American society, both general and political, reacts to stress and, incongruously, clamps down in times of crisis on the very beliefs it holds dear: the freedoms of speech and political belief. At different points in our history, the executive branch, Congress, and the courts have subtly or more drastically eroded a pillar of American society for the politics of the moment. It is not surprising, then, that The Fear Within takes on added resonance in today's environment of suspicion and the decline of civil rights under the U.S. Patriot Act.

Author : Aaron William Moore
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 271 pages
File Size : 15,66 MB
Release : 2018-10-18
Category : History
ISBN : 1108428258

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This comparative account of civilian experiences of aerial bombing in World War II Britain and Japan reveals the universality of total war.

Author : John W. Dower
Publisher : Haymarket Books
Page : 141 pages
File Size : 27,5 MB
Release : 2017-03-20
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1608467260

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“Tells how America, since the end of World War II, has turned away from its ideals and goodness to become a match setting the world on fire” (Seymour Hersh, investigative journalist and national security correspondent). World War II marked the apogee of industrialized “total war.” Great powers savaged one another. Hostilities engulfed the globe. Mobilization extended to virtually every sector of every nation. Air war, including the terror bombing of civilians, emerged as a central strategy of the victorious Anglo-American powers. The devastation was catastrophic almost everywhere, with the notable exception of the United States, which exited the strife unmatched in power and influence. The death toll of fighting forces plus civilians worldwide was staggering. The Violent American Century addresses the US-led transformations in war conduct and strategizing that followed 1945—beginning with brutal localized hostilities, proxy wars, and the nuclear terror of the Cold War, and ending with the asymmetrical conflicts of the present day. The military playbook now meshes brute force with a focus on non-state terrorism, counterinsurgency, clandestine operations, a vast web of overseas American military bases, and—most touted of all—a revolutionary new era of computerized “precision” warfare. In contrast to World War II, postwar death and destruction has been comparatively small. By any other measure, it has been appalling—and shows no sign of abating. The author, recipient of a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, draws heavily on hard data and internal US planning and pronouncements in this concise analysis of war and terror in our time. In doing so, he places US policy and practice firmly within the broader context of global mayhem, havoc, and slaughter since World War II—always with bottom-line attentiveness to the human costs of this legacy of unceasing violence. “Dower delivers a convincing blow to publisher Henry Luce’s benign ‘American Century’ thesis.” —Publishers Weekly