Reinventing World War II

Explores how World War II was retooled in popular culture starting in the mid-1980s to redress a crisis in American identity and restore social equilibrium.

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By the 1970s, World War II had all but disappeared from US popular culture, but in the mid-eighties it returned with a vengeance. Today, remembrance of World War II is ubiquitous across US media and politics, demonstrating its centrality to American collective identity. In this book, Barbara A. Biesecker explores this shift, revealing how “the Good War” was retooled to restore social equilibrium to the United States.

Drawing on methods of contemporary philosophy, Biesecker analyzes prominent cases of World War II remembrance, including the canceled exhibit of the Enola Gay at the National Air and Space Museum in 1995, the film Saving Private Ryan, and Tom Brokaw’s best-selling book The Greatest Generation. Situating these texts within the culture wars and the broader framework of American politics and international relations, Biesecker argues that the return of the Good War to public memory was an effect of the fall of the Soviet Union. Once America’s Other was gone, a new narrative was needed to maintain American identity. By highlighting the potent forms of American exceptionalism running through these texts, Biesecker shows how these reconstructions of World War II functioned as civic lessons, teaching the American public how a good citizen ought to live, solidifying the official remembrance of World War II, and perhaps most importantly, advancing a neoliberal nationalist politics.

By tracing the links between the popular memory of the war and an ethnonational state ideology, Biesecker not only uncovers the source of the MAGA movement but also underscores the power of public memory in shaping national identity. This book will interest historians as well as students and scholars in the fields of US politics and communication studies.