Kirjahaku

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.

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.