INAF 100-73: Proseminar Fall 2018 History and Popular Culture

This book explores the American use of atomic bombs and the role these weapons played in the defeat of the Japanese Empire in World War II. It focuses on President Harry S. Truman's decision-making regarding this most controversial of all his decisions.

Few aspects of American military history have been as vigorously debated as Harry Truman's decision to use atomic bombs against Japan.

This book sheds light on the political and strategic decisions that led to the bombing itself, the impact of the bomb on Hiroshima and the endgame of the Pacific War, the effects of the bombing and the bomb on society and culture, and the state of all things nuclear in the early 21st-century world.

Drawing on the latest research on the atomic bomb and its history, the contributors to this provocative collection of eighteen essays.

v. 1. The decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan

Links to declassified PDF documents and pictures from the National Security Archive concerning the decision to use the atomic bomb to end World War II, the Manhattan Project, intercepted Japanese diplomatic cable traffic, and translations of meetings of Japanese high-level meetings

Using contemporary diaries and letters, mainly translated from Japanese, we follow a group of Nagasaki residents from the early morning of the day of the bombing of Hiroshima to midnight on the day of the second bombing in Nagasaki. A compelling narrative based on eyewitness accounts, contemporary diaries, letters, and interviews.

A compilation of archival film clips beginning with the first atomic bomb detonation in the New Mexico desert. The footage, much of it produced as government propaganda, follows the story of the bomb through the two atomic attacks on Japan that ended World War II to the bomb's central role in the cold war.

Set in the three weeks from the test explosion in New Mexico to the dropping of the bomb, the action takes viewers into the room where the crucial political decisions are made, on board the Enola Gay, inside the bomb as it explodes, and in Hiroshima

As a World War II combat soldier, Howard Zinn took part in the aerial bombing of Royan, France. Two decades later, he was invited to visit Hiroshima and meet survivors of the atomic attack. In this short and powerful book, Zinn offers his deep personal reflections and political analysis of these events, their consequences, and the profound influence they had in transforming him from an order-taking combat soldier to one of our greatest anti-authoritarian, antiwar historians.