Teaching The American Promise Conolly-Smith, Peter
The History teacher (Long Beach, Calif.),
08/2019, Letnik:
52, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Peter Conolly-Smith, a history professor at Queens College, uses the textbook "The American Promise," since 1998, and now in its seventh edition. He has been using this book for twenty years, and it ...has accompanied him from one school to another, providing the backbone of his post-1865 survey course. The relationship he has developed with this text is complicated. He started out feeling great enthusiasm for the book, and he continues to recommend it to graduate students about to enter the classroom. However, the book also displays certain weaknesses, especially in its more recent editions. These weaknesses include what he later refers to as a "thinning" of the text, as well as an ideological shift that set in with the third edition and became more glaring with each new incarnation thereafter. These, along with changes determined by the academic textbook marketplace, are the subject of the second half of the article.
The 1941 Berlin-based Prussian State Theater production of Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion sheds light on the popularity of Shaw in Third Reich Germany, the playwright's conflicted politics, and the complex ...and often-contradictory forces at work in National Socialist cultural policy. Providing background on Pygmalion's long-standing popularity among German audiences, this essay's analysis of the lavish 1941 production draws on contemporary press coverage as well as on the director's hand-annotated script in order to examine Shaw's complicated relationship with the Third Reich.
Although portrayals of the rape of Asian women in American combat films are associated with the Vietnam War movie, such scenarios first became an established trope of the combat genre in films made ...during and about World War II. While pre-Vietnam War films used rape as a narrative device to justify US foreign and military policy, Vietnam combat films later used it as metaphor for US imperialism. Notwithstanding this difference, the combat film's representation of sexual violence both pre- and post-Vietnam has always thrived on its confirmation of an American hegemony predicated on the subjugation of peoples (and, in particular, women) of colour.
This paper seeks to explore the ways in which "lessons of history," in particular the "Munich analogy," have been misconstrued in justification of United States armed intervention since the beginning ...of the Cold War. While the wisdom of a hawkish foreign policy is indeed one lesson of Munich--certainly as applied to World War II, in hindsight--this paper cautions that Munich, in more recent contexts (most pertinently, as it relates to the 2003 invasion of Iraq) offers not just one, but many, and more complex lessons by far. In this essay, the author first re-visits the events leading up to Munich, then examines ways in which the Munich analogy has been used to justify post-World War II American foreign policy. Recent re-assessments of Munich as well as the policy of appeasement in general--in particular, the work of Jeffrey Record and Stephen Rock--inform these sections of the paper, much as the reportage of the "New York Times" serves as the main source for the essay's final section, which re-visits the events leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the bush administration's effort to justify that invasion at least in part through its invocation of Munich. (Contains 47 notes.)
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