Echoes of War: A Thousand Years of Military History in Popular CultureUniversity Press of Kentucky, 2014 M10 17 - 296 pages Americans are often accused of not appreciating history, but this charge belies the real popular interest in the past. Historical reenactments draw thousands of spectators; popular histories fill the bestseller lists; PBS, A&E and The History Channel air a dizzying array of documentaries and historical dramas; and Hollywood war movies become blockbusters. Though historians worry that these popular representations sacrifice authenticity for broad appeal, Michael C.C. Adams argues that living history—even if it is an incomplete depiction of the past—plays a vital role in stimulating the historical imagination. In Echoes of War, he examines how one of the most popular fields of history is portrayed, embraced, and shaped by mainstream culture. Adams argues that symbols of war are of intrinsic military significance and help people to articulate ideas and values. We still return to the knight as a symbol of noble striving; the bowman appeals as a rebel against unjust privilege. Though Custer may not have been the Army's most accomplished fighter, he achieved the status of cultural icon. The public memory of the redcoated British regular soldier shaped American attitudes toward governments and gun laws. The 1863 attack on Fort Wagner by the black Fifty-fourth Massachusetts regiment was lost to public view until racial equality became important in the late twentieth century. Echoes of War is a unique look at how a thousand years of military history are remembered in popular culture, through images ranging from the medieval knight to the horror of U.S. involvement in the My Lai massacre. |
From inside the book
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... example ways of analyzing critically the various versions of the past presented to us. The book is arranged in six chapters, each of which takes a significant past era of military history and suggests some important reasons why we recur ...
... example, the election of school boards and lay governing bodies of universities. In military terms, the idea meant ... examples of unfairness to non-white peoples. At the start of the twenty-first Preface xiii.
... example, we remember Little Bighorn, but we rarely recall the Fetterman massacre, another Plains Indian victory. Cultural, like individual, memory is selective and tends over time to simplify the complexity of events into a digestible ...
... example, the stories of King Arthur and his knights are assumed to have been elaborated over a great period from a simple beginning. Now, however, an event like My Lai can enter the household vocabulary overnight and might stay in our ...
... examples include John Boorman's Excalibur (1981), Jerry Zucker's First Knight (1995), and Steve Barron's Merlin (1998). In Frank Herbert's 1965 sci-fi classic Dune, although we visit technologically advanced cultures with atomic weapons ...
Other editions - View all
Echoes of War: A Thousand Years of Military History in Popular Culture Michael C.C. Adams Limited preview - 2021 |
Echoes of War: A Thousand Years of Military History in Popular Culture Michael C. C. Adams No preview available - 2002 |
Echoes of War: A Thousand Years of Military History in Popular Culture Michael C.C. Adams No preview available - 2002 |