RPW 2610W A Hands-On History of the American Research University - Loss, Meadows: WW II and the Cold War

In the decades after World War II, as government and social support surged and enrollments exploded, the role of colleges and universities in American society changed dramatically. Roger Geiger shows how American universities emerged after the war as the world's most successful system for the advancement of knowledge, how the pioneering of mass higher education led to the goal of higher education for all, and how the "selectivity sweepstakes" for admission to the most elite schools has resulted in increased stratification. He identifies 1980 as a turning point when the link between research and economic development stimulated a revival in academic research--and the ascendancy of the modern research university--that continues to the present.

The politically conservative educators of World War II dramatically and rapidly altered policies, programs, schedules, learning materials, classroom activities, and the content of academic courses. They motivated students to salvage materials, sell war stamps, grow crops, learn about wartime issues, and take pride in patriotism. They prepared millions of people for the armed services and the defense industries. These accomplishments were possible because the educators were supported by an unprecedented alliance that included teachers, school administrators, industrialists, military personnel, government leaders, and the President himself. After the war, conservative educators continued to portray themselves as home-front warriors waging a life-threatening battle against enduring global dangers.

When Dreams Came True is the inspiring history of how millions of World War II veterans and their families achieved the American dream - an education, a home, a stable and profitable career, and ownership of their own business.
More than any other law, the GI Bill was responsible for the post-World War II explosion in college graduates, the education of leaders of the civil rights movement, the growth and dominance of the suburbs, and the proliferation of interstate highways, supermarkets, and franchise stores and restaurants. Quite literally, the GI Bill changed the way we live, the way we house ourselves, the way we are educated, how we work and at what, even how we eat and transport ourselves.

To Serve My Country, to Serve my Race is the story of the historic 6888th, the first United States Women's Army Corps unit composed of African-American women to serve overseas. While African-American men and white women were invited, if belatedly, to serve their country abroad, African-American women were excluded for overseas duty throughout most of WWII. Under political pressure from legislators like Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the NAACP, the black press, and even President Roosevelt, the U.S. War Department was forced to deploy African-American women to the European theater in 1945. African-American women, having succeeded, through their own activism and political ties, in their quest to shape their own lives, answered the call from all over the country, from every socioeconomic stratum. Despite the social, political, and economic restrictions imposed upon these African-American women in their own country, they were eager to serve, not only out of patriotism but out of a desire to uplift their race and dispell bigoted preconceptions about their abilities.

In the popular imagination, American women during the time between the end of World War II and the 1960s--the era of the so-called "feminine mystique"--were ultraconservative and passive. "College Women in the Nuclear Age" takes a fresh look at these women, showing them actively searching for their place in the world while engaging with the larger intellectual and political movements of the times. Drawing from the letters and diaries of young women in the Cold War era, Babette Faehmel seeks to restore their unique voices and to chronicle their collective ambitions. She also explores the shifting roles that higher education played in establishing these hopes and dreams, making the case that the GI Bill served to diminish the ambitions of many American women even as it opened opportunities for many American men.

In many modern wars, there have been those who have chosen not to fight. Be it for religious or moral reasons, some men and women have found no justification for breaking their conscientious objection to violence. In many cases, this objection has led to severe punishment at the hands of their own governments, usually lengthy prison terms.
This important and thought-provoking anthology consists of thirty prison memoirs by conscientious objectors to military service, drawn from the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and centring on their jail experiences either during the first or second world wars or in Cold War America.