War in the American Imagination

Catalog description

Americans often like to think of the United States as a nation founded on ideals, but the United States also was, as one historian has put it, a nation “founded in blood.” Valley Forge was once our Statue of Liberty. After all, the American Revolution was not just a struggle for the ideals of liberty and equality that Thomas Jefferson so eloquently expounded in the Declaration of Independence; it was also a war for independence from Britain, an international conflict that included France and Spain, and, let us not forget, a bitter and cruel civil war among Americans themselves. In effect, we were birthed as a nation divided. How did this legacy of bloodshed shape American identity? To what extent did Americans sacralize bloodshed and thus conflate it with idealism? We remember the Alamo, but can anyone recall the basis of our claim to that territory? Are we not here going further and actually equating bloodshed with idealism? To what extent did Americans see their later wars as an extension of the Revolutionary War? Was the Civil War a second American Revolution, or was the American Revolution the nation's first civil war? The course will examine these questions by looking at how Americans perceived and remembered the wars in which they fought—from the American Revolution to the Vietnam War. Among the wars to be considered are the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. The course will culminate with a role- play simulation of the debate over the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In effect, the course offers an exploration into how we may “see things not as they are but as we are.” Postwar: Europe on the Move and on the Screen