Sixty years after the event, World War II is transfixed in American mythology as the central event of the twentieth century. The official American history of this war reinstates the belief that the US is a champion of liberty and justice. But there are many alternative, contradictory, and more complicated stories about World War II. These other stories need to be told because they do more justice to the complexity of lived experience. Moreover, they are pertinent because if the single war story of World War II is seen as a template for model behavior, it can easily be appropriated by politicians who want to wage questionable wars. Tales of the Great American Victory contains essays by young, up-and-coming European and American scholars as well as by top researchers in the field of war and culture, including Steven Gould Axelrod on war poetry, Lorrie Goldensohn on Holocaust memoirs, and Pulitzer-prize winning historian John W. Dower on the analogy between World War II and the Iraqi war.
