The Macarthur Highway And Other Relics Of American Empire In The Philippines

It has been more than a century since the American conquest and subsequent annexation of the Philippines. Although the nation was given its independence in 1946, American cultural authority remains. In order to locate and lend significance to the relics of American empire, Joseph McCallus retraces the route Gen. Douglas MacArthur took during his liberation of the country from the Japanese in 1944 and 1945. While following MacArthur's footsteps, he provides a historical and geographical account of this iconic soldier's military career, accompanied by a description of the contemporary Philippine landscape. McCallus uses the past and the present to explore how America influenced the country's political and educational systems and language, as well as the ramifications of the continued U.S. military presence and the effects of globalization on traditional Filipino society. He examines the American influence on its architecture and introduces to the reader the American expatriate business community--people who have lived in the Philippines for decades and continue to help shape the nation. The MacArthur Highway and Other Relics of American Empire in the Philippines is an absorbing look at how American military intervention and colonial rule have indelibly shaped a nation decades after the fact.

This interdisciplinary case study invokes historical, sociological, and anthropological means to examine the ascendance of the United States to a world power in its first imperial venture. In the aftermath of the Spanish-American War of 1898 the U.S. acquired and occupied the Philippine Islands for nearly a half century in an attempt to install a democratic form of government, a capitalist economy, the Protestant religion, and a particular value system. Sport became a primary means to achieve such goals, fostered initially by the military, and then widely promoted in the schools and the YMCA. Competitive programs, including international athletic spectacles, channeled Filipino nationalism against Asian rivals rather than the American occupiers as guerrilla warfare ensued in the islands. The strategies learned in the Philippines, now known as “soft power” remain prominent factors in current American foreign policy.

“Illuminating.… An eloquent testament to a doomed city and its people.” —The Wall Street Journal In early 1945, General Douglas MacArthur prepared to reclaim Manila, America’s Pearl of the Orient, which had been seized by the Japanese in 1942. Convinced the Japanese would abandon the city, he planned a victory parade down Dewey Boulevard—but the enemy had other plans. The Japanese were determined to fight to the death. The battle to liberate Manila resulted in the catastrophic destruction of the city and a rampage by Japanese forces that brutalized the civilian population, resulting in a massacre as horrific as the Rape of Nanking. Drawing from war-crimes testimony, after-action reports, and survivor interviews, Rampage recounts one of the most heartbreaking chapters of Pacific War history.

This comprehensive title is among the first to extensively use newly released 2010 U.S. Census data to examine multiculturalism today and tomorrow in America. This distinction is important considering the following NPR report by Eyder Peralta: “Based on the first national numbers released by the Census Bureau, the AP reports that minorities account for 90 percent of the total U.S. growth since 2000, due to immigration and higher birth rates for Latinos.” According to John Logan, a Brown University sociologist who has analyzed most of the census figures, “The futures of most metropolitan areas in the country are contingent on how attractive they are to Hispanic and Asian populations.” Both non-Hispanic whites and blacks are getting older as a group. “These groups are tending to fade out,” he added. Another demographer, William H. Frey with the Brookings Institution, told The Washington Post that this has been a pivotal decade. “We’re pivoting from a white-black-dominated American population to one that is multiracial and multicultural.” Multicultural America: A Multimedia Encyclopedia explores this pivotal moment and its ramifications with more than 900 signed entries not just providing a compilation of specific ethnic groups and their histories but also covering the full spectrum of issues flowing from the increasingly multicultural canvas that is America today. Pedagogical elements include an introduction, a thematic reader’s guide, a chronology of multicultural milestones, a glossary, a resource guide to key books, journals, and Internet sites, and an appendix of 2010 U.S. Census Data. Finally, the electronic version will be the only reference work on this topic to augment written entries with multimedia for today’s students, with 100 videos (with transcripts) from Getty Images and Video Vault, the Agence France Press, and Sky News, as reviewed by the media librarian of the Rutgers University Libraries, working in concert with the title’s editors.

From the liberation of the Philippines to the Japanese surrender, the final volume of John C. McManus's trilogy on the US Army in the Pacific War “Brilliant [and] riveting… a truly great book.”—Gen. David Petraeus • “Triumphant [and] compelling.”—Richard Frank • “McManus is one of the best—if not the best—World War II historians working today.”—World War II magazine The dawn of 1945 finds a US Army at its peak in the Pacific. Allied victory over Japan is all but assured. The only question is how many more months—or years—of fight does the enemy have left. John C. McManus, winner of the Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History, concludes his magisterial series, described by the Wall Street Journal as being “as vast and splendid as Rick Atkinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Liberation Trilogy,” with this brilliant final volume. On the island of Luzon, a months-long stand-off between US and Japanese troops finally breaks open, as American soldiers push into Manila, while paratroopers and amphibious invaders capture nearby Corregidor. The Philippines are soon liberated, and Allied strategists turn their eyes to China, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and the Japanese home islands themselves. Readers will walk in the boots of American soldiers and officers, braving intense heat, rampant disease, and a by-now suicidal enemy, determined to kill as many opponents as possible before defeat, and they will encounter Japanese soldiers faced with the terrible choice between capitulation or doom. At the same time, this outstanding narrative lays bare the titanic ego and ambition of the Pacific War’s most prominent general, Douglas MacArthur, and the complex challenges he faced in Japan’s unconditional surrender and America’s lengthy occupation.

The Mission of Development interrogates the complex relationships between Christian mission and international development in Asia from the 19th to the 21st century. Through detailed case studies the chapters break new ground in the study of religion, techno-politics and development.

In Fire and Fortitude—winner of the Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military History—John C. McManus presented a riveting account of the US Army's fledgling fight in the Pacific following Pearl Harbor. Now, in Island Infernos, he explores the Army’s dogged pursuit of Japanese forces, island by island, throughout 1944, a year that would bring America ever closer to victory or defeat. “A feat of prodigious scholarship.”—The Wall Street Journal • “Wonderful.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch • “Outstanding.”—Publishers Weekly • “Rich and absorbing.”—Richard Overy, author of Blood and Ruins • “A considerable achievement, and one that, importantly, adds much to our understanding of the Pacific War.”—James Holland, author of Normandy ’44 After some two years at war, the Army in the Pacific held ground across nearly a third of the globe, from Alaska’s Aleutians to Burma and New Guinea. The challenges ahead were enormous: supplying a vast number of troops over thousands of miles of ocean; surviving in jungles ripe with dysentery, malaria, and other tropical diseases; fighting an enemy prone to ever-more desperate and dangerous assaults. Yet the Army had proven they could fight. Now, they had to prove they could win a war. Brilliantly researched and written, Island Infernos moves seamlessly from the highest generals to the lowest foot soldiers and in between, capturing the true essence of this horrible conflict. A sprawling yet page-turning narrative, the story spans the battles for Saipan and Guam, the appalling carnage of Peleliu, General MacArthur’s dramatic return to the Philippines, and the grinding jungle combat to capture the island of Leyte. This masterful history is the second volume of John C. McManus’s trilogy on the US Army in the Pacific War, proving McManus to be one of our finest historians of World War II.

A look at how our monuments to World War II shape the way we think about the war by an award-winning historian. Keith Lowe, an award-winning author of books on WWII, saw monuments around the world taken down in political protest and began to wonder what monuments built to commemorate WWII say about us today. Focusing on these monuments, Prisoners of History looks at World War II and the way it still tangibly exists within our midst. He looks at all aspects of the war from the victors to the fallen, from the heroes to the villains, from the apocalypse to the rebuilding after devastation. He focuses on twenty-five monuments including The Motherland Calls in Russia, the US Marine Corps Memorial in the USA, Italy’s Shrine to the Fallen, China’s Nanjin Massacre Memorial, The A Bomb Dome in Hiroshima, the balcony at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and The Liberation Route that runs from London to Berlin. Unsurprisingly, he finds that different countries view the war differently. In monuments erected in the US, Lowe sees triumph and patriotic dedications to the heroes. In Europe, the monuments are melancholy, ambiguous and more often than not dedicated to the victims. In these differing international views of the war, Lowe sees the stone and metal expressions of sentiments that imprison us today with their unchangeable opinions. Published on the 75th anniversary of the end of the war, Prisoners of History is a 21st century view of a 20th century war that still haunts us today.