Home Fronts: A Wartime America Reader
Editors Foley and O’Malley write that The Radical Reader: A Documentary History of the American Radical Tradition (2003), edited by Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John McMillian, inspired them to assemble this work. It collects a variety of contemporary writings for and against America’s wars from 1898 to the present. Opposing camps are adequately represented, making their case in a variety of formats, from formal declarations of war to public manifestos to lyrics of popular songs. The volume’s content of 159 documents, each with a preface identifying the writer and explaining the writer’s purpose, centers on the domestic effect of a war, the socioeconomic and civil-liberties dimensions of which particularly engage the editors’ selections. They especially wish their selections to demonstrate the lineage of dissent; their choices duly exhibit protest against the Espionage and Sedition Acts of World War I, against the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II, against loyalty programs and the draft during the cold war and the Vietnam War, and against the Iraq War. A war-and-peace browser that would see action in current affairs collections. --Gilbert Taylor