How America Became an Empire
http://consortiumnews.com/2013/01/01/how-america-became-an-empire/
How America Became an Empire
January 1, 2013
Exclusive: Director Oliver Stone and historian Peter Kuznick offer a major reexamination of modern American history in “The Untold History of the United States,” which has many strengths amid a few shortcomings, writes Jim DiEugenio in this first of a two-part review.
By Jim DiEugenio
The title of Oliver Stone’s “The Untold History of the United States” is a bit of a misnomer, both as a book and a Showtime series. It’s more precisely a reinterpretation of official U.S. history over the past century or so. You might call it “The Little Understood Back Story of America’s Imperial Era.”
The 750-page book, which seems to be more the work of Stone’s collaborator, American University history professor Peter Kuznick, picks up the tale around the time of the Spanish-American War at the end of the 19thCentury, with the U.S. conquest and occupation of the Philippines.
Director Oliver Stone. (Photo credit: Georges Biard)
The Showtime series – some of which is now on YouTube – is narrated by Stone and begins, more or less, with the gathering clouds of World War II and the events that led to the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
What’s relatively “untold” about this history is the impact of some little remembered decisions, such as the Democratic Party’s replacing Vice President Henry Wallace with Missouri Sen. Harry Truman in 1944, and some ideologically suppressed memories, like how the Soviet Union broke the back of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich in World War II.
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http://www.sho.com/sho/oliver-stones-untold-history-of-the-united-states/home
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