J. Agnew – A Companion to Post 1945 America

Автор: J. Agnew
Название книги: A Companion to Post 1945 America
Формат: PDF
Жанр: История
Страницы: 603
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

A Companion to Post-1945 America is an original collection of 34 essays by key scholars on the history and historiography of Post-1945 America.
Covers society and culture, people and movements, politics and foreign policy
Surveys and evaluates the best scholarship on every important era and topic
Includes book review section on essential readings

The title of this Blackwell Companion – Post-1945 America – says a good deal about
the difficulties that beset anyone looking to encapsulate the past half-century of
American history. The period is still unnamed and unplaced in the broad genealogy
of the American past. At least, that is the impression one takes from the titles of many
of the surveys that have thus far been published: The Unfinished Journey, Moving On,
Grand Expectations, and, simplest of all, More (Chafe, 1998; Moss, 1994; Patterson,
1996; Collins, 2000). If the period is still “busy being born,” perhaps that is because
no one yet dares to write its epitaph. We know, or think we know, when the period
began, which is to say on or around the dropping of the first atomic bomb on August
6, 1945. But we are not so certain when, or even whether, it has ended.
Some historians might point to the mid-1970s as an appropriate milestone or
tombstone for the “postwar era”; Watergate, the oil crisis, and the defeat in Vietnam
all marking the end of what Henry Luce had heralded in 1941 as the American
Century. Others would no doubt choose 1989 or 1991 – the years of communism’s
collapse – to designate the end of the twentieth century, if not the end of history
itself. Still others would identify September 11, 2001 as the point at which “everything
changed.” But even the most recent divisions leave the awkward remainder of
our current moment. It is as if, having outlived our own historical obituary, we find
ourselves belated and not much else: post-Cold War, yes, but postcolonial, postindustrial,
and postmodern as well. Our title, then, is more than a convenient placeholder,
for “Post-1945” captures the compound sense of our last half-century as a
sequence of aftermaths: a series of almost compulsive reckonings with a world made
before 1945. On the one hand, we are awash in books, films, and memorials on the
Good War and the Greatest Generation; on the other, we behold a concerted effort
to dismantle the so-called “safety nets” woven by that same generation – from Social
Security to Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaties.
The ambivalence with which we look back upon the odyssey of the past fifty years
is likewise visible in the titles of the historical surveys that have appeared in the
interim: A Troubled Journey, A Troubled Feast, Affluence and Anxiety, Present Tense,
to name just a few (Siegel, 1984; Leuchtenburg, 1973; Degler, 1968; Schaller et al.,
1992). To be sure, these phrases bespeak something more than the mixed judgment
of the historians who use them; they also evoke the conflicting emotions that Americans
of the time experienced toward their new, global hegemony. A source of pride
at one moment could in the blink of an eye feel like a hostage relationship. Vietnam instances of that hostage-anxiety, while the strident Ramboism of foreign policy and
popular culture in the Reagan–Bush years supplied the most conspicuous campaigns
to redeem, if not erase, these humiliations. In one way or another, Americans were
struggling to come to terms with what Tom Engelhardt (1995) has called the “end
of victory culture.”
Yet one could argue that Ramboism turned the knife in these wounds far more
than it healed them. As a result, Americans in search of historical consolation in the
1990s found themselves looking past Vietnam, past Korea, to the unambiguously
successful sacrifices of World War II. Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998)
was the quintessential expression of this fin-de-siècle nostalgia, for its pitch-perfect
reproduction of every formula of the classic combat film barely concealed the fact
that its narrative energies were drawn almost entirely from the post-Vietnam missingin-
action story. Irony thus shadowed even this effort to push our nostalgia for victory
culture to a politically “safer” place before 1945. How could one “save” Private Ryan,
after all, without rescuing the same post-1945 triumphalist rationale that had so confidently
and complacently dispatched eighteen-year-olds to Vietnam in the first place?
How could one save Private Ryan, in other words, without also forgetting a good
deal of postwar history – not just the Vietnam War, but also Korea and the red scare
era of the 1940s and 1950s.
It is hardly a surprise, then, that scholars have stepped into the half-century gap
between the beginning and end of victory culture in order to write history in place
of nostalgia. Nostalgia-buffs steep the object of their desire in a warm, sepia bath of
wistful, or camp, affection. (On pervasive nostalgia for the postwar period, see, for
example, Lambrose, 1988.) Historians, in contrast, are more apt to wrestle with their
subject, and never more so than in the narratives of post-1945 America, where many
so often find their own autobiographies – their own memories – intersecting the
chronicle of headlined events. For this very reason, traditionalists have dismissed
“contemporary history” as mere journalism, the “first draft” for a more rigorously
researched and sober-sided history. Yet given the enormous variety of documents
available over the past fifty years – from opinion polls and television scripts to e-mail
and Oval office tapes – and given the gradual declassification of many critical documents,
it seems pointless to wait for yet more dust to settle when the true challenge
is to make historical sense of the blooming, buzzing confusion of evidence. Road
maps are in order, if only to be able to glimpse our destination.
So the “unfinished journey” is an especially appropriate description for a volume
that, like this one, focuses on the historiography of the postwar even more than on
its history. Even if we grant that the key events of the postwar era have already
unfolded, we can hardly say the same thing for the key historical works that will ultimately
characterize – and name – the period. Still, if there is anything we have discovered
in the process of editing this volume, it is that the work historians have
produced on the post-1945 period has been far more impressive than the traditionalists
would have predicted. The “first draft,” if that is what it is, looks pretty good.
And pretty comprehensive as well. In the 1970s, when the two of us were in graduate
school, it would have been impossible to come up with a comprehensive exam
reading list of books on the post-1945 period, at least one written by professional
historians. Except perhaps for diplomatic history, where debates over the origins of the Cold War were already raging, there was simply no historiography to assign. A
quarter-century later, the problem has been reversed: it is now virtually impossible
for a single person to master the full historical literature on the era. A glance at the
bibliographies to the essays in this volume will quickly confirm this claim. Surely no
other period in US history has produced such an explosion of scholarship as this one
has over the past two decades alone. Surely no other field has emerged so rapidly.
To take stock of this burgeoning historical literature, even as it continues to roll
off the presses, is the daunting task that our authors have undertaken here. Necessarily,
then, their essays and this volume must be offered as provisional and unfinished
– a work in progress. While we might all wish for a more suitably meditative
distance on the period, we have reason enough to take stock, in Lionel Trilling’s
phrase, in “the middle of the journey.” At the very least, those who will be writing
and reading the histories of the next two decades will need to assess in what ways
and how well the terrain has already been charted. And though we do not claim this
volume to be the definitive Michelin Guide to the historiography of the postwar era,
we do see it as, well, a useful companion – a kind of “Lonely Planet” for the more
adventurous traveler.
In keeping with that spirit of adventure, we have made this volume a wide-ranging
exploration. We have included essays extending across economic, social, political,
cultural, intellectual, and diplomatic history. Moreover, the essays themselves are
panoramic. There are gaps, to be sure. Some reflect the uneven development of the
historical literature; others simply could not fit into a volume even as long as this
one. And in a few cases – political economy, science and technology, the United States
and Africa, Native Americans, and the welfare state – the essays could not be completed
in enough time to be included here. Historiography, like history, has its deadlines,
and we did not want to delay publication of a volume that already offered both
broad and timely coverage of the era.
Given the evolving state of the historical scholarship, it is not surprising that the
maps offered in the thirty-four chapters that make up this guide differ greatly in cartographic
strategy, not to mention the level of detail. The essays on political history
– the Cold War, the Vietnam War, McCarthyism, the New Left, and civil rights, for
example – address subfields rich in bibliography and steeped in controversy. In those
cases, the essays resemble the more traditional historiographical review one is likely
to find, say, on the Civil War or Reconstruction periods. In other essays – music and
leisure and tourism, for example – the literature may be large without having coalesced
around particular debates. Those authors provide something more like a bibliographic
essay, surveying and cataloguing what has been written thus far. And in
yet other essays – environmentalism and the visual arts, for instance – the authors are
reporting on areas where the historical literature is only now emerging. The authors
of such essays are more likely to devote their attention to the key events and themes
of the period, effectively offering their own preliminary sketch of what the field or
subfield is shaping up to be.