Divisions: A New History of Race and America's World War II Military

USAHEC Perspectives Lectures Series (Audio)

America's World War II military was a force of good. While saving the world from Nazism, it also managed to unify a famously fractious American people. At least that is the story the U.S. Army put forward through wartime propaganda during WW2, and remains popular today.

In this talk, historian and George Washington University associate professor Thomas Guglielmo offers a decidedly different view. This new perspective draws from more than a decade of extensive research and stitches together stories of race and the military; of high command and ordinary GIs; of African Americans, white Americans, Japanese Americans, and more, stories which have long been told separately. Guglielmo underscores not national unities, but racist divisions as a defining feature of America’s World War II military and of the postwar world it helped to fashion.