The past is never dead. It's not even past
In this history of popular religion and spirituality, Matthew Hedstrom argues that books and book culture were integral for the rise of liberal religion in the twentieth century. After World War I, a modernizing book business and an emerging religious liberalism expanded the spiritual horizons of many middle-class Americans.
Today, I will be offering a short meditation on cultural memory and the Vietnam War using two case studies that first appeared as blockbuster novels published during the war, and then adapted into popular films, which premiered after the war had ended.
Most Americans, including policy makers, and Vietnam Veterans have expressed their lack of knowledge of Vietnam's history and culture before US's involvement in Vietnam to fight a war over ideology.
The theory that dominance in society is based on a hegemonic culture was initially posited by Antonio Gramsci based on a Marxist analysis of economic and social class.
Unlike their working-class counterparts, who were seen as unwanted labor competition and incapable of sharing American democratic values, Chinese intellectuals were seen as members of China’s leadership class and culturally compatible. Educating them in the United States was a friendly, inexpensive, yet effective means of extending American influence over China.
Madeline Hsu recommends more to read on Asian American immigration and the myth of the model majority.
In the late nineteenth century, white Southerners imposed a system of constraints on African Americans, denying blacks their Constitutional rights, and, indeed, their human rights. This system—often violently enforced—was called “Jim Crow,” named after a minstrel song that stereotyped blacks. It included the disfranchisement of black men, the forcible segregation of blacks from whites in public spaces, and forms of state-sanctioned terrorism such as lynching, which included hanging, mutilating, and burning victims alive.
By Tatjana Lichtenstein and Jonathan Parker This first section of this post is by Tatjana Lichtenstein Wedged between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Empire, Eastern Europe was the site of unprecedented human and material destruction in the years between 1938 and 1948. As the staging ground for Hitler’s vision for a new racial order in […]
During World War II, thousands of German “Propaganda Company” (PK) photographers took at least three and a half million pictures of every front on which the Germans were fighting. Hundreds of these photographs were published in mass circulation illustrated magazines and newspapers and seen by millions of readers. These images helped in significant ways to shape the way that Germans and Europeans saw the war between 1939 and 1945 and also to affect the visual memory of World War II up to the present day.
Grave of the Fireflies (1988) is an uncompromising critique of Japanese society in the waning months of World War II, and a major milestone in the development of one of the world's foremost animation studios.