101 Things You Didn't Know about Lincoln: Loves and Losses! Political Power Plays! White House Hauntings!
Author: Brian Thornton
One hundred fifty years after his death, Abraham Lincoln remains one of America's most fascinating, brilliant, and visionary leaders. He's idolized as a hero, a legend, and even a secular saint. But what about the real man behind the stone monument?
In this engaging, intelligent book, you'll learn about more than just his savvy political skills and Civil War power plays. 101 Things You Didn't Know about Lincoln reveals other little known details of his personal and professional life, including:
Filled with these and other offbeat facts, 101 Things You Didn't Know about Lincoln is sure to fascinate, whether you're a newcomer to Lincoln legend and lore, or a hardcore history buff!
Brian Thornton earned his B.A. in History from Gonzaga University and his M.A. in History, with a concentration in 19thcentury American History, from Eastern Washington University. He has taught History at every level, from 6th grade through college. He currently lives and teaches in Seattle, WA.
Book about: OpenGL Shading Language or Access 2000 For Windows
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II
Author: John W Dower
John Dower, distinguished historian of modern Japan, casts his eye on the immediate aftermath of World War II. Drawing on a vast range of Japanese sources, this new study illuminates how shattering defeat followed by over six years of American military occupation affected every level of Japanese society in ways that neither the victor nor the vanquished could anticipate. The great achievement of Embracing Defeat lies in its vivid portrayal of the countless ways in which the Japanese met the challenge of "starting over" - from top-level manipulations concerning the fate of Emperor Hirohito to the hopes, fears, and activities of ordinary men and women in every walk of life. This is a fascinating portrait of an extraordinary moment in history, when new values warred with old and early ideals of demilitarization and radical reform were soon challenged by the United States's decision to incorporate Japan into the Cold War Pax Americana.
Wall Street Journal - Jacob Heilbrunn
Embracing Defeat arrives at an opportune moment...an extraordinarily illuminating book. Mr. Dower has deftly mixed history form the 'bottom up' and 'top down' to produce what is surely the most significant work to date on the postwar era in Japan. He writes with panache and with a keen eye for the absurdities of the Japanese-American encounter. Among other thinkers, his analysis of cartoons, a genre taken very seriously in Japan, is fascinating.
Far Eastern Economic Review - Roger Buckley
Half a century later, this frenetic, contradictory occupation era has at last found its English-language historian....[A] graphic, multifaceted account of an extraordinary period in American-Japanese relations. This huge work is going to be the gold standard against which future scholarship will be tested.
Publishers Weekly
The writing of history doesn't get much better than this. MIT professor Dower (author of the NBCC Award-winning War Without Mercy) offers a dazzling political and social history of how postwar Japan evolved with stunning speed into a unique hybrid of Western innovation and Japanese tradition. The American occupation of Japan (1945-1952) saw the once fiercely militarist island nation transformed into a democracy constitutionally prohibited from deploying military forces abroad. The occupation was fraught with irony as Americans, motivated by what they saw as their Christian duty to uplift a barbarian race, attempted to impose democracy through autocratic military rule. Dower manages to convey the full extent of both American self-righteousness and visionary idealism. The first years of occupation saw the extension of rights to women, organized labor and other previously excluded groups. Later, the exigencies of the emergent Cold War led to American-backed "anti-Red" purges, pro-business policies and the partial reconstruction of the Japanese military. Dower demonstrates an impressive mastery of voluminous sources, both American and Japanese, and he deftly situates the political story within a rich cultural context. His digressions into Japanese culture--high and low, elite and popular--are revealing and extremely well written. The book is most remarkable, however, for the way Dower judiciously explores the complex moral and political issues raised by America's effort to rebuild and refashion a defeated adversary--and Japan's ambivalent response to that embrace. Illustrations. (Mar.)
Library Journal
Dower's magisterial narrative eloquently tells the story of the postwar occupation of Japan by departing from the usual practice of making the story part of General MacArthur's biography and instead focusing on the citizens. With historical sweep and cultural nuance, and using numerous personal stories of survival, loss, and rededication, he follows the astonishing social transformation of a people. (LJ 4/1/99) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
Booknews
Following his National Book Critics Award winning War Without Mercy on the Pacific theater, Dower (history, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) examines the immediate aftermath of World War II. He draws on a wide range of Japanese sources to illuminate how the shattering defeat and six years of US military occupation affected every level of society in ways no one anticipated. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknew.com)
Far Eastern Economic Review - Roger Buckley
Half a century later, this frenetic, contradictory occupation era has at last found its English-language historian....[A] graphic, multifaceted account of an extraordinary period in American-Japanese relations. This huge work is going to be the gold standard against which future scholarship will be tested.
NY Times Book Review - J.A.A. Stockwin
...[M]agisterial and beautifully written....The occupation of Japan was full of ambiguities, inconsistencies, bad policy-making, bureaucratic bungling and arrogance....There is much to deplore, no doubt, about its legacy, but also much to applaud. John W. Dower both deplores and applauds in this richly nuanced book, which is such a pleasure to read.
The Boston Globe - Akira Iriye
Masterly…a penetrating analysis of Japan in the aftermath of defeat.
The Washington Post - T R. Reid
Richly detailed and provocative…A marvelous piece of reporting and analysis.
Kirkus Reviews
An NBCC award winner and expert in the modern history of Japan, Dower (Massachusetts Inst. of Technology; Japan in War and Peace, 1994; War Without Mercy, 1986) absorbingly explains how American forces imposed a revolution from above in six years of occupation that transformed imperial Japan into a democracy. As WWII ended, Japan had lost three million dead, with many more wounded, starving, homeless, and demoralized. Dower has drawn effectively on Japanese academic, archival, and popular sources to capture the atmosphere of flux and uncertainty that followed surrender, including suicidal despair, gratitude toward generous GIs, black-market entrepreneurship, prostitution, and the unleashing of creative energy. The most important change, of course, occurred in politics. In a root-and-branch attempt to destroy Japan's militaristic culture, the Americans created a constitution that limited the emperor to a symbolic head of state, renounced war as an instrument of settling international disputes, and established such reforms as sexual equality, greater freedom of speech and press, an end to the Shinto state religion, and a free labor movement. Written in six days, the constitution set the stage for unprecedented Japanese freedom, equality, and prosperity. For all their idealism, however, the American forces also acted with little knowledge of Japanese history, censored criticism of the occupation, and treated the losers with condescension. In the Far East counterpart to the Nuremberg trials, American prosecutors excluded testimony about Emperor Hirohito's responsibility for war crimes and fed the nation's sense of its victimization without forcing a realization of itsculpability for atrocities committed against other Asians. In the greatest irony, by promoting such bureaucratic structures as the Ministry of Trade and Industry, MacArthur merely replaced his own mandarinate with a Japanese version. A turning point in Japanese history, illuminated through diligent research and piercing insight. (80 b&w photos).
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