Good, thorough survey

This is an excellent survey of U.S. history since World War II. Just about every topic imaginable is covered: the Cold War, the baby boom, McCarthyism, TV and popular culture in the 1950s, the civil rights movement, JFK, LBJ, the 1960s youth movement, Vietnam, Watergate, women's liberation, Reagan, Clinton, and even such recent events as 9/11, the war in Iraq, and Katrina.

One of the book's strengths is that one is able to see the onset (from the Cold War to the quest for social change) of much of the polarization in our current-day politics. One of the best chapters is devoted to the year 1968, a "watershed" year that author William Chafe refers to as "a time of horror, embitterment, despair, and agony." He skillfully describes the country literally coming apart at the seams: how several forces sought social change, and how Richard Nixon was able to exploit the anger and violence of the year to win the presidential election. We seem to have been fighting the culture wars ever since.

There are some weaknesses. As an editor by profession, I was annoyed to see Bull Connor referred to as Bull "Conner" on at least one occasion, and Helen Gahagan Douglas (Nixon's "pink lady") is referred to as Helen "Galagan" Douglas at least once in the text and even in the index. Chafe also mentions Hurricane Katrina hitting Louisiana in early September 2005, when it actually hit at the end of August. I also would have liked to have seen some topics discussed in greater length: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the assassinations of MLK and RFK almost seem to just get mentioned in passing. That being said, Chafe has a lot of ground to cover, and he crams a lot of information into about 600 pages.

(Strangely, Chafe also refers to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin as just Doris Kearns. Don't know what that's all about.)

All in all, though, this is a good, thorough survey of "the unfinished journey" of American history.

As awful as a history text could be

Isaiah Berlin, a far more competent historian than Mr. William H. Chafe, maintained that the first duty of the historian is to rigorously say what happened. One would think that principle applied with special force to the author of a twelfth-grade history text, but Mr. Chafe seems never to have heard of such a concept.

This supposed textbook is not history at all, but a personal essay, subjective and slanted. Just the factual mistakes are astonishing. But worse, Chafe packages his jumble of opinions and distortions as objective history. It is an allowable exaggeration to say that the book reads as if it were spewed out over a single weekend in a Berkeley commune.

Here is just a sampling of the book's errors.

To illustrate the venality of the Eisenhower era, Chafe quotes Charles Wilson, Secretary of Defense, as follows: "What's good for General Motors' business is good for America". Wilson never said that. What he said was, "What's good for America is good for General Motors", a statement of a different tenor. Chafe is not to be troubled with researching facts, but simply remembers loosely, in keeping with his preconceptions.

In displaying the silliness (as he deems it) of the Cold War, Chafe proclaims, "At no time did Russia constitute a military threat to the United States". No doubt Chafe could picture his 17-year-old pupils at the dinner table, challenging their parents and citing him as authority for that staggeringly ignorant assertion. The tens of thousands of tanks, planes, and artillery pieces arrayed against the Western democracies in central Europe were just decoration, one would suppose.

As for threat to our homeland, Chafe neglects to mention that the Soviet Union had more nuclear warheads aimed at our territory than we had aimed at theirs. Ah, but the Soviets were pure of heart, I guess. That's why they were no threat.

There are small errors that are trivial in themselves, but illustrative of his carelessness. He puts "Casablanca" in the wrong year, for example. No big deal, except he had just detained us with a long discourse on the movies of the era, strutting his expertise. No true movie buff would commit the "Casablanca" gaffe.

In addition to pure errors, Chafe is distortively selective. He expatiates about "big business", labor, "consumerism", and social welfare. But he says nothing at all on the larger subject of the contending schools of economic thought, one of he most consequential intellectual debates of the century (only a few offhand disparagments of "ideological" Reaganomics).

The errors and distortions are especially obvious in his treatment of the Vietnam War. He devotes a hundred pages to it, but he says nothing about the military strategies of the contending sides, their strengths and weaknesses. He never mentions Ia Drang, or Dak To, or Hamburger Hill, or Khe Sanh. This is equivalent to a World War II history that never mentions Stalingrad, or Utah Beach, or The Bulge.

Chafe features, as an emblem of "the end result" of the war, the notorious quote from an American officer that "we had to destroy the village in order to save it". He identifies the village as Bien Hoa. Bien Hoa is not a village at all, but a large urban suburb of Saigon, and the site of a huge U.S. military complex. The actual village was Ben Suc, a rural hamlet in the communist-controlled Iron Triangle to the north. No one with even a rudimentary knowledge of the country would make this mistake. It is equivalent to confusing London with Antwerp.

His ignorance is not just geographical, but racial and cultural as well. He subscribes to the racialist notion, reminiscent of the Jim Crow South, that the Vietnamese people are different from us, innately primitive and sluggish, unsuited to democracy and uninterested in freedom. As part of the evidence, he delivers to our children the old 1960s shibboleth about the Vietnamese language "not even having a word for the personal pronoun 'I'". This is not just incorrect, but laughable. He overflows with opinions about Vietnam, but knows next to nothing of he place.

Chafe almost crows over the My Lai massacre of 350 civilians, an isolated crime by a renegade platoon, and holds it to be "the ultimate consequence" of the general American attitude. But he holds the systematic, high-command-ordered communist execution of 5000 civilians at Hue the same year to be so inconsequential as not to be worth mentioning.

Instead of history, this book is in the nature of a sermon. Chafe is like the fundamentalist preacher who simply assumes everyone shares his belief in the literal truth of The Creation, and if you don't, well, that's proof of your moral degeneracy.

Someone once said "No life is completlely wasted. It can always serve as a bad example." Chafe's book can be made useful as a model of how our students should never write an academic work. I'm afraid, though, that the strategy might backfire, like that of the father who gives his son or daughter a cigarette to teach them how bad smoking is.

Updating Our Recent History

This text is a fine piece of historical work. It provides new historical perspectives on events that many of us have lived through. As our recent past recedes further into history, and as new original historical sources, such as presidential papers, become available, the view of history of any time period is subject to new and revised interpretations by scholars.

Reinterpratation of historical events are evidenced in this book. The book covers that period of U.S. History from the beginning of the Cold War through 9/11 and the Iraq War. This book does a very nice job as well in providing the history enthusiast or an amateur the present schloarly consensus on such major events as the Cuban Missile Crisis, race relations, the Vietnam War, and the women's movement.

It is well written, well documented and highly readable. I would highly recommend this to anyone who wants a good overview of recent U.S. history.

The book presents interesting motives

Joe Anguilano

WWII, a Lesson in Realpolitik?

Two powerful nations, the United States and the USSR, were pitted against each other in a power-struggle during and after World War Two. This dangerous power struggle, referred to as the Cold War, at its very core, originated due to the economic needs of the United States and foreign policy rhetoric. Due to an alliance held together by little more than a common enemy, two very different nations were brought together as allies and became entangled in a post-war diplomatic nightmare.
"In December 1940 America had begun its Lend-Lease plan for sending arms to Britain" (J, 3). The motives behind the Lend-Lease program for England are very important in determining the motives for US interests in Europe. In hindsight, the Soviets accused the US of an "economically aggressive...effort to dominate the globe," (Time 1). Similar to World War I, the US had a vested interest in an English victory because "trade lines with England and France, economic and political control over Latin America and South America-all would be best preserved if Germany were defeated" (J, 33). The US Lend-Lease program for England was meant to alleviate Nazi aggression threatening these interests as well as others. Chafe writes "posing the issue [of war] as strictly one of self-interest offered little chance of success given the depth of America's revulsion toward internationalism. [The] Roosevelt [administration] relied [on] rhetoric of American values as a means of justifying the international involvement that knew must inevitably lead to war" (J, 34). Yet, "in June 1941, Germany invaded Russia and Stalin became `Uncle Joe" (J, 32).
Why would the US ally itself with a government that oversaw prison camps and purge trials that killed up to 6 million (J, 32)? "From a Western perspective, there seemed little basis for distinguishing between Soviet tyranny and Nazi totalitarianism" (F, 32). By allying itself with the USSR, the United States decided to put its notion of a "city on a hill" aside to try to retain its economic and political interests abroad. But the rhetoric arguing for the war continued its "city on the hill" ideals. Roosevelt tried to reason with this compromise when writing to General MacArthur saying, "The Russian armies are killing more Axis personnel and destroying more Axis materiel than all the other twenty-five United Nations put together" (J, 36). The incentive for the USSR to take up arms with the US is due simply to the fact that Nazi forces were making advances in Russia and it was taking a heavy toll.
Economic motives and foreign policy rhetoric had a two-fold effect as origins for the Cold War. Motivations that did not stand up to "pure or altruistic" were primary reasons for entering the war and the Roosevelt administration's lack of acknowledgement of these motivations " severely limited the flexibility necessary to a multifaceted and effective diplomacy" (J, 33). Once the power struggle between the two super-powers of the war emerged the US could give little ground or concession because "action...might fall well short of the expectations generated by moralistic visions" (J, 33). After Hitler was defeated the US continued its "city on the hill" rhetoric but realized that the power struggle for Europe would be much more complicated than previously anticipated.

***This is something that I put together based on this book. I found the reading material interesting and wish I had not sold the book back at the end of the semester. I may buy it again for reference purposes although I also hear that "The People's History of the United States" is good as well.

4th edition is a ripoff

Only a few pages of the 4th edition are new so if you have the 3rd don't bother with the 4th. The publisher should be ashamed.