H. Bruce Franklin

Growing up during the Second World War, H. Bruce Franklin believed what he was told: that America's victory would lead to a new era of world peace. Like most Americans, he was soon led to believe in a world-wide Communist conspiracy that menaced the United States, forcing the nation into a disastrous war in Korea. But once he joined the U. S. Air Force and began flying top-secret missions as a navigator and intelligence officer, what he learned was eye-opening. He saw that even as the U. S. preached about peace and freedom, it was engaging in an endless cycle of warfare, bringing devastation and oppression to fledgling democracies across the globe. Now, after fifty years as a renowned cultural historian, Franklin offers a set of hard-learned lessons about modern American history. Crash Course is essential reading for anyone who wonders how America ended up where it is today: with a deeply divided and disillusioned populace, led by a dysfunctional government, and mired in unwinnable wars. It also finds startling parallels between America's foreign military exploits and the equally brutal tactics used on the home front to crush organized labor, antiwar, and civil rights movements. More than just a memoir or a history book, Crash Course gives readers a unique firsthand look at the building of the American empire and the damage it has wrought. Shocking and gripping as any thriller, it exposes the endless deception of the American public, and reveals from inside how and why many millions of Americans have been struggling for decades against our own government in a fight for peace and justice.

Growing up during the Second World War, H. Bruce Franklin believed what he was told: that America’s victory would lead to a new era of world peace. Like most Americans, he was soon led to believe in a world-wide Communist conspiracy that menaced the United States, forcing the nation into a disastrous war in Korea. But once he joined the U. S. Air Force and began flying top-secret missions as a navigator and intelligence officer, what he learned was eye-opening. He saw that even as the U. S. preached about peace and freedom, it was engaging in an endless cycle of warfare, bringing devastation and oppression to fledgling democracies across the globe. Now, after fifty years as a renowned cultural historian, Franklin offers a set of hard-learned lessons about modern American history. Crash Course is essential reading for anyone who wonders how America ended up where it is today: with a deeply divided and disillusioned populace, led by a dysfunctional government, and mired in unwinnable wars. It also finds startling parallels between America’s foreign military exploits and the equally brutal tactics used on the home front to crush organized labor, antiwar, and civil rights movements. More than just a memoir or a history book, Crash Course gives readers a unique firsthand look at the building of the American empire and the damage it has wrought. Shocking and gripping as any thriller, it exposes the endless deception of the American public, and reveals from inside how and why many millions of Americans have been struggling for decades against our own government in a fight for peace and justice.

This is the story of a once abundant fish decimated by corporate interests. In this brilliant portrait of the oceans' unlikely hero, H. Bruce Franklin shows how menhaden have shaped America's natural - and national - history, and why a single company now threatens their crucial ecological mission. The same pudgy little fish that once saved the Pilgrims from starvation and helped power the industrial revolution are today being ground up by the billions and turned into everything from linoleum to lipstick. The massive harvest isn't just devastating one fish, but the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. In Franklin's vibrant prose, the menhaden's decline becomes an adventure story, an exciting exploration of American history, and an inspiring call to action.

In this new and expanded edition of an already classic work, H. Bruce Franklin brings the epic story of the superweapon and the American imagination into the ominous twenty-first century, demonstrating its continuing importance both to comprehending our current predicament and to finding ways to escape from it. Sweeping through two centuries of American culture and military history, Franklin traces the evolution of superweapons from Robert Fulton's eighteenth-century submarine through the strategic bomber, atomic bomb, and ""Star Wars"" to a twenty-first century dominated by ""weapons of mass destruction,"" real and imagined. Interweaving culture, science, technology, and history, he shows how and why the American pursuit of the ultimate defensive weapon - guaranteed to end all war and bring universal triumph to American ideals - has led our nation and the world into an epoch of terror and endless war.

This work is a cultural history of the Vietnam War and its continuing impact upon contemporary American society. The author presents an investigation of how myths about the war evolved and why people depend on them to answer the confusing questions that have become the legacy of the war. Memories change and reconstruct the past, and in this text, the author argues that the American memory of Vietnam has left fact and experience behind so that what remains is myth and denial.

No single event since World War II has marked this country s foreign policy and national image as deeply as did the war in Vietnam. Vietnam and America is a complete history of the war, as documented in essays by leading experts and in original source material. With generous selections from the documentary records, the book dispels distortions and illuminates in depth the many facets of the war, from Vietnam s history before the war, to Washington s insider policy making, to troop perspectives, to the impact back on the home front. In essays introducing each major stage of the war, the editors elucidate the issues, foreign policy choices, and consequences of U. S. involvement. Substantial headnotes put each document in historical perspective. This comprehensive anthology is an invaluable reference for anyone who wants to understand the Vietnam War."

In 1982, John Newman, curator of the Vietnam War Literature Collection at Colorado State University, said of W. D. Ehrhart: "As a poet and editor, Bill Ehrhart is clearly one of the major figures in Vietnam War literature." This autobiographical account of the war, the author's first extended prose work, demonstrates Ehrhart's abilities as a writer of prose as well. Vietnam-Perkasie is grim, comical, disturbing, and accurate. The presentation is novelistic—truly, a "page-turner"—but the events are all real, the atmosphere intensely evocative.

This paperback edition of M. I. A. or Mythmaking in America adds major new material about Ross Perot's role, the 1991-1992 Senate investigation, and illegal operations authorized by Ronald Reagan.