Images of war saturated American culture between the 1940s and the 1970s, as U.S. troops marched off to battle in World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Exploring representations of servicemen in the popular press, government propaganda, museum exhibits, literature, film, and television, Andrew Huebner traces the evolution of a storied American icon — the combat soldier. Huebner challenges the pervasive assumption that Vietnam brought drastic changes in portrayals of the American warrior, with the jaded serviceman of the 1960s and 1970s shown in stark contrast to the patriotic citizen-soldier of World War II. In fact, Huebner shows, cracks began to appear in sentimental images of the military late in World War II and were particularly apparent during the Korean conflict. Journalists, filmmakers, novelists, and poets increasingly portrayed the steep costs of combat, depicting soldiers who were harmed rather than hardened by war, isolated from rather than supported by their military leadership and American society. Across all three wars, Huebner argues, the warrior image conveyed a growing cynicism about armed conflict, the federal government, and Cold War militarization.

"This edition continues the evolution of the The Unfinished Nation as authors John M. Giggie and Andrew J. Huebner build upon this canonical text, with a focus on making history relatable and accessible to today's students. John M. Giggie is a historian of race and religion, Andrew J. Huebner is a historian of war and society, and both more generally study and teach American social and cultural history"--

Love and Death in the Great War merges the stories of several American families with analysis of wartime popular culture. It argues that family, in lived experience and as symbolic motivator, gave the war meaning, recovering the conflict's personal dimensions. But that narrative had undergone transformative challenges by war's end.

"The title 'The Unfinished Nation' is meant to suggest several things. It is a reminder of America's exceptional diversity of the degree to which, despite all the many efforts to build a single, uniform definition of the meaning of American nationhood, that meaning remains contested. It is a reference to the centrality of change in American history to the ways in which the nation has continually transformed itself and continues to do so in our own time. It is also a description of the writing of American history itself of the ways in which historians are engaged in a continuing, ever unfinished process of asking new questions"--