Film moves audiences like no other medium; both documentaries and feature films are especially remarkable for their ability to influence viewers. Best-selling author James Brady remarked that he joined the Marines to fight in Korea after seeing a John Wayne film, demonstrating how a motion picture can change the course of a human life—in this case, launching the career of a major historian and novelist.

In Why We Fought: America’s Wars in Film and History, editors Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor explore the complexities of war films, describing the ways in which such productions interpret history and illuminate American values, politics, and culture.

This comprehensive volume covers representations of war in film from the American Revolution in the 18th century to today’s global War on Terror. The contributors examine iconic battle films such as The Big Parade (1925), All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), From Here to Eternity (1953), and Platoon (1986), considering them as historical artifacts. The authors explain how film shapes our cultural understanding of military conflicts, analyzing how war is depicted on television programs, through news media outlets, and in fictional and factual texts.

With several essays examining the events of September 11, 2001, and their aftermath, the book has a timely relevance concerning the country’s current military conflicts. Jeff Chown examines controversial documentary films about the Iraq War, while Stacy Takacs considers Jessica Lynch and American gender issues in a post-9/11 world, and James Kendrick explores the political messages and aesthetic implications of United 93.

From filmmakers who reshaped our understanding of the history of the Alamo, to Ken Burns’s popular series on the Civil War, to the uses of film and media in understanding the Vietnam conflict, Why We Fought offers a balanced outlook— one of the book’s editors was a combat officer in the United States Marines, the other an antiwar activist—on the conflicts that have become touchstones of American history.

As Air Force veteran and film scholar Robert Fyne notes in the foreword, American war films mirror a nation’s past and offer tangible evidence of the ways millions of Americans have become devoted, as was General MacArthur, to “Duty, honor, and country.” Why We Fought chronicles how, for more than half a century, war films have shaped our nation’s consciousness.

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Peter C. Rollins, John E. O'Connor - Why We Fought , America's Wars in Film and History (2008).pdf

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Roy J. Harris Jr. - Pulitzer's Gold, Behind the Pr ize for Public Service Journalism (2008).jpg

Pulitzer s Gold is the first book to trace the ninety-year history of the coveted Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, awarded annually to a newspaper rather than to individuals. Harris recalls dozens of stories behind the stories, often allowing the journalists involved to share their own accounts. Readers will recognize some of the stories, like the New York Times Pentagon Papers exclusive and the Watergate scandal that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein dug out for the Washington Post. But Harris takes his Gold Medal saga through two World Wars, the Great Depression, the Civil Rights struggle, and the Vietnam era before bringing public-service journalism into today s age of environmental and corporate exposes. Story after story illustrates how for small town papers or metropolitan dailies alike, public-service reporting is a point of pride for the American press.

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Roy J. Harris Jr. - Pulitzer's Gold, Behind the Pr ize for Public Service Journalism (2008).pdf

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Steve J. Wurtzler - Electric Sounds, Technological Change and the Rise of Corporate Mass Media (2007 ).jpg

Electric Sounds brings to vivid life an era when innovations in the production, recording, and transmission of sound revolutionized a number of different media, especially the radio, the phonograph, and the cinema.

The 1920s and 1930s marked some of the most important developments in the history of the American mass media: the film industry's conversion to synchronous sound, the rise of radio networks and advertising-supported broadcasting, the establishment of a federal regulatory framework on which U.S. communications policy continues to be based, the development of several powerful media conglomerates, and the birth of a new acoustic commodity in which a single story, song, or other product was made available to consumers in multiple media forms and formats.

But what role would this new media play in society? Celebrants saw an opportunity for educational and cultural uplift; critics feared the degradation of the standards of public taste. Some believed acoustic media would fulfill the promise of participatory democracy by better informing the public, while others saw an opportunity for manipulation. The innovations of this period prompted not only a restructuring and consolidation of corporate mass media interests and a shift in the conventions and patterns of media consumption but also a renegotiation of the social functions assigned to mass media forms.

Steve J. Wurtzler's impeccably researched history adds a new dimension to the study of sound media, proving that the ultimate form technology takes is never predetermined. Rather, it is shaped by conflicting visions of technological possibility in economic, cultural, and political realms. Electric Sounds also illustrates the process through which technologies become media and the ways in which media are integrated into American

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Tim McNeese - The Donner Party, A Doomed Journey ( 2009).jpg

In the mid-1840s, a group of 33 settlers, their goods, and animals began moving west by wagon train from Springfield, Illinois, to California. After stopping in St. Louis, the Donner Party followed the California Trail until they reached Little Sandy River, in what is now Wyoming, where they camped alongside other groups of travelers. Now numbering 87, the settlers took a shortcut called Hastings Cutoff, but found themselves stranded in the Sierra Nevada Mountains during a snowstorm that blocked the trail through what is now called Donner Pass. What started out as an adventurous trek to a new land turned into a nightmare as the days turned into months, their food and supplies dwindled, and several members of the party died. The rest of the group resorted to cannibalism to survive. Of the original 87 travelers, 39 died, and 48 survived. "The Donner Party" details the trials faced by these settlers as they made the journey west to California.

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Tim McNeese - The Donner Party, A Doomed Journey ( 2009).pdf

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William Bonner and Addison Wiggin - EMPIIRE OF DEB T The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis (2006).jpg

Description ,review and table of contents of EMPIIRE OF DEBT The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis : American businesses are still capitalistic. They operate, as everyone knows, in the most dynamic, free, and open economy in the world. A recent press item reports, that General Motors will never be able to compete unless it ditches its crushing health care costs. Why does it not just cut the costs? It seems to lack either the nerve or the right, but the journalist proposed a solution: Nationalize health care! Meanwhile, CEO pay has soared to the point where the average chief executive in 2000 earned compensation equal to 500 times the average hourly wage. Stockholders, whose money was being squandered, barely said a word. They were still under the illusion that the companies were working for them. They had not noticed that the whole capitalist institution had been trussed up with so many chains, wires, red tape, and complications, it no longer functioned like the freewheeling, moneymaking corporations of the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, corporations in China—a communist country—had their hands and feet free to eat our lunches and kick our derrieres.

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William Bonner and Addison Wiggin - EMPIIRE OF DEB T The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis (2006).pdf

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Wolfgang W. E. Samuel - American Raiders, The Race to Capture the Luftwaffe’s Secrets (2004).jpg

At the close of World War II, Allied forces faced frightening new German secret weapons buzz bombs, V-2s, and the first jet fighters. When Hitler's war machine began to collapse, the race was on to snatch these secrets before the Soviet Red Army found them. The last battle of World War II, then, was not for military victory but for the technology of the Third Reich. In American Raiders: The Race to Capture the Luftwaffe's Secrets Wolfgang Samuel assembles from official Air Force records and survivors' interviews the largely untold stories of the disarmament of the once mighty Luftwaffe and of Operation Lusty the hunt for Nazi technologies. In April 1945 American armies were on the brink of winning their greatest military victory, yet America's technological backwardness was shocking when measured against that of the retreating enemy. Senior officers, including the Commanding General of the Army Air Forces "Hap" Arnold, knew all too well the seemingly overwhelming victory was less than it appeared. There was just too much luck involved in its outcome. Two intrepid American Army Air Forces colonels set out to regain America?s technological edge. One, Harold E. Watson, went after the German jets; the other, Donald L. Putt, went after the Nazis' intellectual capital-their world class scientists.

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Wolfgang W. E. Samuel - American Raiders, The Race to Capture the Luftwaffe’s Secrets (2004).pdf

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Tyler Cowen - Creative Destruction, How Globalizat ion Is Changing the World's Cultures (2002).jpg

Cowen argues that global trade and communication are enriching all the world's cultures and that there's no such thing as cultural authenticity. . . . In fact, Cowen believes that commerce and art are allies. And he contends that because commerce is driving technology, ideas, goods, services and people across borders more freely than ever before, we are in the midst of an unprecedented boom in creativity all over the world. The quality, quantity and variety of cultural output is greater than ever; if there is more dreck, there is also more genius. And more people have more access to it than ever, at lower prices, regardless of where they live.

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Michael C. Ruppert - Crossing the Rubicon, The Dec line of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil (2006).jpg

USA Books - Michael C. Ruppert - Crossing the Rubicon, The Decline... the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil 2006.jpg

The attacks of September 11, 2001, were accomplished through an amazing orchestration of logistics and personnel. Crossing the Rubicon discovers and identifies key suspects-finding some of them in the highest echelons of American government-by showing how they acted in concert to guarantee that the attacks produced the desired result.

Crossing the Rubicon is unique not only for its case-breaking examination of 9/11, but for the breadth and depth of its world picture-an interdisciplinary analysis of petroleum, geopolitics, narcotraffic, intelligence and militarism-without which 9/11 cannot be understood.

The US manufacturing sector has been mostly replaced by speculation on financial data whose underlying economic reality is a dark secret. Hundreds of billions of dollars in laundered drug money flow through Wall Street each year from opium and coca fields maintained by CIA-sponsored warlords and US-backed covert paramilitary violence. America's global dominance depends on a continually turning mill of guns, drugs, oil and money. Oil and natural gas-the fuels that make economic growth possible-are subsidized by American military force and foreign lending.

In reality, 9/11 and the resulting "war on terror" are parts of a massive authoritarian response to an emerging economic crisis of unprecedented scale. Peak Oil-the beginning of the end for our industrial civilization-is driving the elites of American power to implement unthinkably draconian measures of repression, warfare and population control. Crossing the Rubicon is more than a story. It is a map of the perilous terrain through which, together and alone, we are all now making our way.

Michael C. Ruppert is the publisher and editor of From the Wilderness, a newsletter read by more than 16,000 subscribers in 40 countries. A former Los Angeles Police Department narcotics investigator, he is widely known for his groundbreaking stories on US involvement in the drug trade, Peak Oil and 9/11.

About the Author
Mike Ruppert is the Publisher/Editor of From the Wilderness, a newsletter read by more than 16,000 subscribers in 40 countries. A former LAPD narcotics investigator, he is widely known for his groundbreaking stories on US involvement in the drug trade, Peak Oil and 9/11. His video on the latter, The Truth and Lies About 9-11, has sold more than 10,000 copies.

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Michael C. Ruppert - Crossing the Rubicon, The Dec line of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil (2006).pdf

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Kenneth S. Friedman - Myths of the Free Market (2 003).jpg

Myths of the Free Market is arguably the most significant book in economics and politics since John Maynard Keynes. It systematically presents a broad range of telling criticisms of free market economics, criticisms that have not been presented elsewhere. Despite our genuine faith in the free market, laissez faire has not maximized wealth. When we moved from the purer free market policies of the 1920s and early 1930s to the proto-socialism of Roosevelt, our economic growth increased. As we have moved back to a purer free market, growth has slowed. We have lagged our trading partners who have mixed economies. Nor is this new. In the late 1800s the mixed economies of Bismarck's Germany and Meiji Japan outperformed the relatively free market economies of Great Britain and France. It is worse. Even in principle, laissez faire cannot work - it is incompatible with institutions that increase wealth. Patent protection is one example, easily generalized. It is worse yet. Laissez faire promotes the excessive concentration of wealth and exposes us all to avoidable danger. Over the last millennium there has been a 200-300 year cycle of wealth dispersion. Each time wealth disparity grew beyond a critical point it presaged decline and disaster for all of society. We now have the greatest disparity of wealth in our history. Kenneth Friedman holds an MS in Physics and PhD in Philosophy of Science from MIT. He has been interviewed in Barron's and on CNBC and quoted in The Wall Street Journal.

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Kenneth S. Friedman - Myths of the Free Market (2 003).pdf

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Joel Bakan - The Corporation, The Pathological Pur suit of Profit and Power (2006).jpg

Over the last 150 years the corporation has risen from relative obscurity to become the world's dominant economic institution. Eminent Canadian law professor and legal theorist Joel Bakan contends that today's corporation is a pathological institution, a dangerous possessor of the great power it wields over people and societies.

In this revolutionary assessment of the history, character, and globalization of the modern business corporation, Bakan backs his premise with the following observations:

* The corporation's legally defined mandate is to pursue relentlessly and without exception its own economic self-interest, regardless of the harmful consequences it might cause to others.

* The corporation's unbridled self-interest victimizes individuals, society, and, when it goes awry, even shareholders and can cause corporations to self-destruct, as recent Wall Street scandals reveal.

* Governments have freed the corporation, despite its flawed character, from legal constraints through deregulation and granted it ever greater authority over society through privatization.

But Bakan believes change is possible and he outlines a far-reaching program of achievable reforms through legal regulation and democratic control.

Featuring in-depth interviews with such wide-ranging figures as Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman, business guru Peter Drucker, and cultural critic Noam Chomsky, The Corporation is an extraordinary work that will educate and enlighten students, CEOs, whistle-blowers, power brokers, pawns, pundits, and politicians alike.

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Tim Weiner - Legacy of Ashes, The History of the C IA (2007).jpeg

For the last sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, burying its blunders in top-secret archives. Its mission was to know the world. When it did not succeed, it set out to change the world. Its failures have handed us, in the words of President Eisenhower, “a legacy of ashes.”

Now Pulitzer Prize–winning author Tim Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIA—and everything is on the record. LEGACY OF ASHES is based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA itself, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten Directors of Central Intelligence. It takes the CIA from its creation after World War II, through its battles in the cold war and the war on terror, to its near-collapse after 9/ll.

Tim Weiner’s past work on the CIA and American intelligence was hailed as “impressively reported” and “immensely entertaining” in The New York Times.

The Wall Street Journal called it “truly extraordinary . . . the best book ever written on a case of espionage.” Here is the hidden history of the CIA: why eleven presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world; why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape than he found it; and how these failures have profoundly jeopardized our national security.

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Maury Klein - Rainbow's End, The Crash of 1929 (20 03).jpg

The first major history of the Crash in over a decade, Rainbow's End tells the story of the stock market collapse in a colorful, swift-moving narrative that blends a vivid portrait of the 1920s with an intensely gripping account of Wall Street's greatest catastrophe. The book offers a vibrant picture of a world full of plungers, powerful bankers, corporate titans, millionaire brokers, and buoyantly optimistic stock market bulls. We meet Sunshine Charley Mitchell, head of the National City Bank, powerful financiers Jack Morgan and Jacob Schiff, Wall Street manipulators such as the legendary Jesse Livermore, and the lavish-living Billy Durant, founder of General Motors. As Klein follows the careers of these men, he shows us how the financial house of cards gradually grew taller, as the irrational exuberance of an earlier age gripped America and convinced us that the market would continue to rise forever. Then, in October 1929, came a "perfect storm"-like convergence of factors that shook Wall Street to its foundations. We relive Black Thursday, when police lined Wall Street, brokers grew hysterical, customers "bellowed like lunatics," and the ticker tape fell hours behind.
This compelling history of the Crash--the first to follow the market closely for the two years leading up to the disaster--illuminates a major turning point in our history.

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Maury Klein - Rainbow's End, The Crash of 1929 (20 03).pdf

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Charles R. Geisst - Undue Influence, How the Wall Street Elite Puts the Financial System at Risk (20 04).jpg

A critical look at over 80 years of conflict, collusion, and corruption between financiers and politicians
Undue Influence paints a vivid portrait of the dealings between "the few", in this case members of Congress, the banking community, and the Fed, and sheds light on how radical new deregulatory measures could be introduced by unelected officials and then foisted upon Congress in the name of progress. In the process, the background of the new financial elite is examined-because they are markedly different than their predecessors of the 1920s and 1930s. Undue Influence also brings readers up to speed on other important issues, including how the financial elite has been able to perpetuate itself, how the markets lend themselves to these special interest groups, and how it is possible that after 80 years of financial regulation and regulatory bodies the same problems of financial malfeasance and fraud still plague the markets.
Charles R. Geisst (Oradell, NJ) is the author of 15 books, including Wheels of Fortune (0-471-47973-X), Deals of the Century (0-471-26397-4) and the bestsellers Wall Street: A History and 100 Years of Wall Street. Geisst has taught both political science and finance, worked in banking and finance on Wall Street and in London, as well as consulted. His articles have been published in the International Herald Tribune, Neue Zurcher Zeitung, Newsday, Wall Street Journal, and Euromoney.

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Charles R. Geisst - Undue Influence, How the Wall Street Elite Puts the Financial System at Risk (20 04).pdf

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Paul Muolo, Mathew Padilla - Chain of Blame, How W all Street Caused the Mortgage and Credit Crisis ( 2008).jpg

In the summer of 2007, the subprime empire that Wall Street had built all came crashing down. On average, fifty lenders a month were going bust-and the people responsible for the crisis included not just unregulated loan brokers andcon artists, but also investment bankers and home loan institutions traditionally perceived as completely trustworthy.

Chain of Blame chronicles this incredible disaster, with a specific focus on the players who participated in such a fundamentally flawed fiasco. Authors Paul Muolo and Mathew Padilla, well-regarded journalists for National Mortgage News and the Orange County Register respectively, reveal the truth behind how this crisis occurred, what individuals and institutions-from lenders and brokers to some of the biggest investment banks in the world-were doing during this critical time, and who is ultimately responsible for what happened.

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Paul Muolo, Mathew Padilla - Chain of Blame, How W all Street Caused the Mortgage and Credit Crisis ( 2008).pdf

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David A. Zimmerman - Panic!, Markets, Crises, and Crowds in American Fiction (2006).jpg

During the economic depression of the 1890s and the speculative frenzy of the following decade, Wall Street, high finance, and market crises assumed unprecedented visibility in the United States. Fiction writers published scores of novels in the period that explored this new cultural phenomenon. In Panic!, David A. Zimmerman studies how American novelists and their readers imagined--and in one case, incited--market crashes and financial panics.

Panic! examines how Americans' attitudes toward securities markets, popular investment, and financial catastrophe were entangled with their conceptions of gender, class, crowds, corporations, and history. Zimmerman investigates how writers turned to mob psychology, psychic investigations, and conspiracy discourse to understand not only how financial markets worked, but also how mass acts of financial reading, including novel reading, could trigger economic disaster and cultural chaos. In addition, Zimmerman shows how, by concentrating on markets in crisis, novelists were able to explore the limits of fiction's aesthetic, economic, and ethical capacities. With readings of canonical as well as lesser-known novelists, Zimmerman provides an original and wide-ranging analysis of the relation between fiction and financial modernity.

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David A. Zimmerman - Panic!, Markets, Crises, and Crowds in American Fiction (2006).pdf

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John Lubetkin - Jay Cooke's Gamble (edition 2006).jpg

In 1869, Jay Cooke, the brilliant but idiosyncratic American banker, decided to finance the Northern Pacific, a transcontinental railroad planned from Duluth, Minnesota, to Seattle. M. John Lubetkin tells how Cooke's gamble reignited war with the Sioux, rescued George Armstrong Custer from obscurity, created Yellowstone Park, pushed frontier settlement four hundred miles westward, and triggered the Panic of 1873.Staking his reputation and wealth on the Northern Pacific, Cooke was soon whipsawed by the railroad's mismanagement, questionable contracts, and construction problems. Financier J. P. Morgan undermined him, and the Crédit Mobilier scandal ended congressional support. When railroad surveyors and army escorts ignored Sioux chief Sitting Bull's warning not to enter the Yellowstone Valley, Indian attacks--combined with alcoholic commanders--led to embarrassing setbacks on the field, in the nation's press, and among investors.Lubetkin's suspenseful narrative describes events played out from Wall Street to the Yellowstone and vividly portrays the soldiers, engineers, businessmen, politicians, and Native Americans who tried to build or block the Northern Pacific.

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John Lubetkin - Jay Cooke's Gamble (edition 2006).pdf

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Richard Goldberg - The Battle for Wall Street, Beh ind the Lines in the Struggle that Pushed an Indus try into Turmoil (2009).jpg

USA Books - Richard Goldberg - The Battle for Wall Street, Behind ...the Struggle that Pushed an Industry into Turmoil 2009.jpg

The Battle for Wall Street follows the struggle for power between two giants: the sellers, traditional commercial and investments banks; and the buyers, upstart hedge funds, private equity firms and the like. The battle is about winning the hearts, minds, and – yes, the wallets – of global investors. This battle is still running its course, and with the insights of industry veteran Richard Goldberg, who has had a front row seat, readers will gain a detailed understanding as to what, exactly, is going on within this dynamic arena, specifically the forces behind the shift of power from the old sell side gatekeepers to the new buy side players. The book will play out in three acts: Act One will examine the instruments of change – liquidity and financial technology – along with their influence on the sell and buy sides. Act Two will look at the agents of change – hedge funds, private equity, financial entrepreneurs, endowments, exchanges and sovereign wealth funds – and their impact on the sell and buy sides. In Act Three, Goldberg will take out his crystal ball and walk through the strategic implications for the winners and losers in this battle, against the dramatic backdrop of the subprime mortgage crisis and the resulting shakeup of global firms like Bear Stearns.

But Wall Street isn’t simply about institutions or corporate battles. It’s a landscape dominated by personalities. Goldberg’s unique access to major players will bring this book to life with amazing anecdotes and stories about the financial generals who have left their mark in The Battle for Wall Street.

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