David Nasaw

The Wounded Generation (eBook, ePUB)

Coming Home After World War II

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

From award-winning and bestselling author David Nasaw, a revelatory reexamination of post-World War II America and the nation's unhealed traumas, exposing the fault lines that characterized the country then and now The veterans of World War II returned to America with great expectations. After all, the Great Depression was over, the Germans and the Japanese were defeated, and the home front was celebrating victory. After their heroic service overseas, Black service members believed their countrymen would look beyond racial divides, Jewish soldiers hoped antisemitism would be vanquished, and the wounded assumed that America would care for their injuries. More than 75 years later, the enduring image of postwar America is still informed by the hopes and dreams these veterans carried home with them, that their future - and with it, the nation's - would be brighter than the past. However, as historian David Nasaw makes evident in this masterful recontextualization of these years, the stories of post-World War II America which persist across art, history, and literature, have failed to account for the realities of the veterans' return as well as the traumas that characterized postwar America- the consequences of which we still live with today. In The Wounded Generation, David Nasaw illustrates how veterans and civilians alike were confronted with the aftershocks of World War II, and how the media and the government failed to prepare America for what lay ahead. News outlets, which had censored the carnage of battle, now had to account for the grief and guilt felt by surviving soldiers; motion pictures and radio programs struggled to portray the true anxieties of homecoming, as husbands, wives, and children were reunited after not just time but trauma. Women who had been welcomed into the workforce lost their jobs to returning soldiers, and were pushed back into the home; doctors, who had no understanding of PTSD, were unprepared for the rise of neuropsychiatric disorders and unable to treat those afflicted. The nation faced enormous challenges transitioning to a peacetime economy; jobs, homes, and cars were in short supply; crime, alcoholism, unemployment, homelessness, and divorce were on the rise. The country took a major step in passing the GI Bill, which provided veterans with tuition, unemployment compensation, low-cost mortgages, and business loans, but Nasaw also reveals the political machinations behind the bill, and how states eager to preserve the status quo disproportionately blocked Black, gay, and female veterans from receiving benefits. The social issues which were laid bare in the immediate post war period - racism, gender biases, homophobia, lack of affordable housing, no national healthcare system, and severe income inequality- continue to ravage our nation and its people. In this richly textured examination, David Nasaw presents a fascinating and complicating tableau of the postwar years. Drawing on a wealth of primary source material, including personal memoirs and oral histories from veterans themselves, he looks beyond the welcome crowds and victory parades, and illuminates a largely hidden story of a country in transition.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Seitenzahl: 496
• Erscheinungstermin: 14. Oktober 2025
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780593298701
• Artikelnr.: 72828873

Autorenporträt

David Nasaw is the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Professor of History Emeritus at the CUNY Graduate Center and a past president of the Society of American Historians. His most recent book, The Last Million: Europe's Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War, was named a best book of the year by National Public Radio and History Today. He is the author of The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy, a New York Times choice as one of the Five Best Non-Fiction Books of the Year and a Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Biography. His bestseller Andrew Carnegie was also a Pulitzer Prize Finalist, as well as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and the winner of the New-York Historical Society's American History Book Prize. The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst was awarded the Bancroft Prize for History, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for Non-Fiction, the Ambassador Book Prize for Biography, the Sperber Prize for Biography, and was the basis for the two-part 2022 PBS "American Experience" documentary, Citizen Hearst. In November 2023, David Nasaw was with Steven Spielberg, Bill T. Jones, Khaled Hosseini, and Ina Garten, honored by the New York Public Library as a Library Lion.