front cover of Crash Course
Crash Course
From the Good War to the Forever War
Franklin, H. Bruce
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Growing up during the Second World War, H. Bruce Franklin believed what he was told: that America’s victory would lead to a new era of world peace. Like most Americans, he was soon led to believe in a world-wide Communist conspiracy that menaced the United States, forcing the nation into a disastrous war in Korea. But once he joined the U.S. Air Force and began flying top-secret missions as a navigator and intelligence officer, what he learned was eye-opening. He saw that even as the U.S. preached about peace and freedom, it was engaging in an endless cycle of warfare, bringing devastation and oppression to fledgling democracies across the globe.
 
Now, after fifty years as a renowned cultural historian, Franklin offers a set of hard-learned lessons about modern American history. Crash Course is essential reading for anyone who wonders how America ended up where it is today: with a deeply divided and disillusioned populace, led by a dysfunctional government, and mired in unwinnable wars. It also finds startling parallels between America’s foreign military exploits and the equally brutal tactics used on the home front to crush organized labor, antiwar, and civil rights movements.
 
More than just a memoir or a history book, Crash Course gives readers a unique firsthand look at the building of the American empire and the damage it has wrought. Shocking and gripping as any thriller, it exposes the endless deception of the American public, and reveals from inside how and why many millions of Americans have been struggling for decades against our own government in a fight for peace and justice.  
[more]

front cover of Future Perfect
Future Perfect
American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology
Franklin, H. Bruce
Rutgers University Press, 1995
Winner of the 2008 American Studies Association's Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Prize "for lifetime of achievement and service"

This selection of unusual storeis by important American writers-Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Bellamy and Twain-and by less well-known tellers such as Ambrose Bierce, S. Weir Mitchell and Fitz-James O'Brien, challenges the commonly held belief that science fiction is a twenthiethcentury phenomenon, or that it began with Jule Verne and H,. G. Wells. Here are tales of marvelous inventions, automanta, biolgocial and psychological experiments, utopias, extra-sensory perception and time and space travel. Many of them have been out of print since before World War I, but they remain high in intrinsic interest of the general reader and for the specialist.

The accompanying critical essays explore the relationships between science fiction and other financial modes, and illuminate the nataure of the bonds betwen science and society and fantasies and social aspirations. Professor Franklin also offers an original, theoretical definition of science ficiton. This book comes as a revelatin. One of the best-edited anthologies I have ever encountered...Mr. Franklin's critical introductions, containing much valuable information about many works not included in this book, are as interesting as the stories he prints.
[more]

front cover of M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America
M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America
How and why belief in live POWs has possessed a nation
Franklin, H. Bruce
Rutgers University Press, 1992

This paperback edition of M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America adds major new material about Ross Perot's role, the 1991-1992 Senate investigation, and illegal operations authorized by Ronald Reagan.

[more]

front cover of The Most Important Fish in the Sea
The Most Important Fish in the Sea
Menhaden and America
H. Bruce Franklin
Island Press, 2008
In this brilliant portrait of the oceans’ unlikely hero, H. Bruce Franklin shows how menhaden have shaped America’s national—and natural—history, and why reckless overfishing now threatens their place in both. Since Native Americans began using menhaden as fertilizer, this amazing fish has greased the wheels of U.S. agriculture and industry. By the mid-1870s, menhaden had replaced whales as a principal source of industrial lubricant, with hundreds of ships and dozens of factories along the eastern seaboard working feverishly to produce fish oil. Since the Civil War, menhaden have provided the largest catch of any American fishery. Today, one company—Omega Protein—has a monopoly on the menhaden “reduction industry.” Every year it sweeps billions of fish from the sea, grinds them up, and turns them into animal feed, fertilizer, and oil used in everything from linoleum to health-food supplements.
 
The massive harvest wouldn’t be such a problem if menhaden were only good for making lipstick and soap. But they are crucial to the diet of bigger fish and they filter the waters of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, playing an essential dual role in marine ecology perhaps unmatched anywhere on the planet. As their numbers have plummeted, fish and birds dependent on them have been decimatedand toxic algae have begun to choke our bays and seas. In Franklin’s vibrant prose, the decline of a once ubiquitous fish becomes an adventure story, an exploration of the U.S. political economy, a groundbreaking history of America’s emerging ecological consciousness, and an inspiring vision of a growing alliance between environmentalists and recreational anglers.
[more]

logo for Island Press
The Most Important Fish in the Sea
Menhaden and America
H. Bruce Franklin
Island Press, 2008
In this brilliant portrait of the oceans’ unlikely hero, H. Bruce Franklin shows how menhaden have shaped America’s national—and natural—history, and why reckless overfishing now threatens their place in both. Since Native Americans began using menhaden as fertilizer, this amazing fish has greased the wheels of U.S. agriculture and industry. By the mid-1870s, menhaden had replaced whales as a principal source of industrial lubricant, with hundreds of ships and dozens of factories along the eastern seaboard working feverishly to produce fish oil. Since the Civil War, menhaden have provided the largest catch of any American fishery. Today, one company—Omega Protein—has a monopoly on the menhaden “reduction industry.” Every year it sweeps billions of fish from the sea, grinds them up, and turns them into animal feed, fertilizer, and oil used in everything from linoleum to health-food supplements.
 
The massive harvest wouldn’t be such a problem if menhaden were only good for making lipstick and soap. But they are crucial to the diet of bigger fish and they filter the waters of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, playing an essential dual role in marine ecology perhaps unmatched anywhere on the planet. As their numbers have plummeted, fish and birds dependent on them have been decimatedand toxic algae have begun to choke our bays and seas. In Franklin’s vibrant prose, the decline of a once ubiquitous fish becomes an adventure story, an exploration of the U.S. political economy, a groundbreaking history of America’s emerging ecological consciousness, and an inspiring vision of a growing alliance between environmentalists and recreational anglers.
[more]

front cover of Vietnam-Perkasie
Vietnam-Perkasie
W. Ehrhart
University of Massachusetts Press, 1995
In 1982, John Newman, curator of the Vietnam War Literature Collection at Colorado State University, said of W.D. Ehrhart: "As a poet and editor, Bill Ehrhart is clearly one of the major figures in Vietnam War literature." This autobiographical account of the war, the author's first extended prose work, demonstrates Ehrhart's abilities as a writer of prose as well. Vietnam–Perkasie is grim, comical, disturbing, and accurate. The presentation is novelistic—truly, a "page-turner"—but the events are all real, the atmosphere intensely evocative.
[more]

front cover of War Stars
War Stars
The Superweapon and the American Imagination
H. Bruce Franklin
University of Massachusetts Press, 2008
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.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter