The past is never dead. It's not even past
In what amounted to the last act of World War II, US forces dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and another on Nagasaki three days later. Ever since, controversy has swirled around the decision to drop those bombs and annihilate those two cities. But exactly who made that decision, and how did it come about?
The Pacific is in vogue. After years of attracting little but scholarly attention, the Pacific Theater of the Second World War has captured the popular imagination in a string of books, feature films and an Emmy-award winning television series, aptly called “The Pacific” and written in part by University of Texas and Plan II graduate Robert Schenkkan.
Relations between Mexico and the United States appear so disappointing these days that we may find it difficult to remember them differently. Mexico-U.S. relations, however, have seen better times and recalling them could serve as a model for what is possible.
Additional Reading on WWII Drawn in part from NSP Courses
In late 1546, auditor-president Pedro de la Gasca landed in the New World charged with retaking the entire continent for the crown, from Nicaragua to Chile. After having beheaded the viceroy, Gonzalo Pizarro had declared himself ruler of larger Peru with a fleet controlling the South Sea, from Callao to Panama. Curiously, La Gasca came […]
Inga Saffron’s Caviar presents a well-rounded history with deep insight into the lives of various parties involved in caviar production, trade, and regulation. The book beautifully details the volatile caviar industry, painting a picture of a world where the sturgeon no longer jumps freely in the waters of the Volga River—or anywhere, for that matter. […]
When I visited Rosy Galván Yamanaka’s home in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, she had a bowl of Mexican-style udon prepared for me. I sat down in her dining room and listened as she told me stories of her grandfather, José Ángel Yamanaka, a Japanese migrant who arrived in Mexico at the beginning of the twentieth century. […]
It’s a three-hour, ultra-big-screen, deeply-researched box office mega-hit about… J. Robert Oppenheimer, project manager. Leslie Groves, the manager’s manager. Kitty Oppenheimer, the manager’s kids’ manager. Lewis Strauss, the wanna-be manager. Harry Truman, the buck-stops-here manager. James Byrnes, President Truman’s manager. The scientists of the Manhattan Project were thoroughly unmanageable. The bomb? It was everybody’s fault, […]
From the editors: William Inboden is the William J. Power, Jr. executive director of the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin. A former State Department official who served on the National Security Council under President George W. Bush, Inboden is also a distinguished scholar of international history. His most […]
