UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Tom Engelhardt

Second edition with a new preface and afterword

An updated analysis of the demise of America's "victory culture," from Hiroshima to the War on Terror

In a substantial new afterword to his classic account of the collapse of American triumphalism in the wake of World War II, Tom Engelhardt carries that story into the twenty-first century. He explores how, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the younger George Bush headed for the Wild West (Osama bin Laden, "Wanted, Dead or Alive"); how his administration brought "victory culture" roaring back as part of its Global War on Terror and its rush to invade Saddam Hussein's Iraq; and how, from its "Mission Accomplished" moment on, its various stories of triumph crashed and burned in that land.

"Sets out to trace the vicissitudes of America's self-image since World War II as they showed up in popular culture: war toys, war comics, war reporting, and war films. It succeeds brilliantly. . . . Engelhardt's prose is smart and smooth, and his book is social and cultural history of a high order."

Boston Globe

"Engelhardt is absorbing and provocative. . . . Everything he writes is of a satisfyingly congruent piece."

New York Times

"America Victorious has been our country's postulate since its birth. Tom Engelhardt, with a burning clarity, recounts the end of this fantasy, from the split atom to Vietnam. . . . As powerful as a Joe Louis jab to the solar plexus."

Studs Terkel, author of The Good War

"A brilliant meditation on the past half-century of the American national story.. . . Its account of the disintegration of a confident post–World War II national identity is a stunning achievement."

Marilyn Young, author of The Vietnam Wars

"An extraordinarily original work that places postwar American history in an entirely new perspective."

John Dower, author of War without Mercy

"In this tour de force, Tom Engelhardt tracks the American 'war story' along its declining arc. . . . Full of brilliancies, this is one of those rare books that can change the way we see."

Todd Gitlin, author of The Sixties

Tom Engelhardt , for fifteen years a senior editor at Pantheon, is now consulting editor at Metropolitan Books, a Fellow of the Nation Institute, and a Teaching Fellow at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley. He is a regular book reviewer and essayist and is also creator and editor of the website Tomdispatch.com.

American Studies / Popular Culture
408 pp.
$26.95s paper, ISBN 978-1-55849-586-9
September 2007

A volume in the series Culture, Politics, and the Cold War

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