Books in the War Culture series

By focusing on how the idea of heroism on the battlefield helped construct, perpetuate, and challenge racial and gender hierarchies in the United States between World War I and the present, Warring over Valor provides fresh perspectives on the history of American military heroism.

Offers short, accessible essays addressing the central issues in the new military history - ranging from diplomacy and the history of imperialism to the environmental issues that war raises and the ways that war shapes and is shaped by discourses of identity, to questions of who serves in the US military and why and how US wars have been represented in the media and in popular culture.

Whether presented as exotic fantasy, a strategic location during World War II, or a site combining postwar leisure with military culture, Hawaii and the South Pacific figure prominently in the US national imagination. Hollywood's Hawaii is the first full-length study of the film industry's intense engagement with the Pacific region from 1898 to the present.

Considers two important questions: how the construction of gender, race, and class in media are productive of regimes of truth regarding war and military life, and how such constructions may also intensify militarism.

Traces a new aesthetic history of the World War II combat genre by looking back at it through the lens of contemporary video games. Tanine Allison locates some of video games' glorification of violence, disruptive audiovisual style, and bodily sensation in even the most canonical and seemingly conservative films of the genre.

Now that it has become so commonplace, we rarely blink an eye at camera footage framed by the crosshairs of a sniper's gun or from the perspective of a descending smart bomb. But how did this weaponized gaze become the norm for depicting war, and how has it influenced public perceptions? Through the Crosshairs traces the genealogy of this weapon's-eye view across a wide range of genres.