H. Bruce Franklin

"H. Bruce Franklin has elucidated some of the most significant events and issues of our time: Vietnam, nuclear weapons, the U.S. prison system. Here he turns his talents as a historian and storyteller to a small, unappetizing fish that most have never heard of. Why? Because menhaden have shaped America's natural - and national - history, and today a single company threatens their place in both."--Jacket.

Almost two decades after the Vietnam War, most Americans remain convinced that U.S. prisoners are still being held captive in Southeast Asia, and many even accuse the government of concealing their existence. But as H. Bruce Franklin demonstrates in his startling investigation, there is no plausible basis for the belief in live POWs. Through scrupulous research, he shows for the first time how this illusion was fabricated and then converted into a powerful myth. Franklin reveals that in 1969 the Nixon administration, aided by militant pro-war forces, manufactured the POW/MIA issue to deflect attention from American atrocities in Vietnam, to undermine the burgeoning anti-war movement, and to stymie the Paris peace talks, resulting in the prolongation of the Vietnam War for another four years. Successive administrations, in an effort to mobilize public support for their continued economic and political warfare against Vietnam, asserted the possibility of live POWs at great emotional cost to both family members of the missing and countless Americans distressed about the fate of those supposedly left behind in Indochina. Born of political expediency, the POW/MIA issue was transformed in the 1980s into a potent myth. American culture was transfigured as movies and novels designed to reimage the Vietnam War turned the imagined post-war POWs into crucial symbols of betrayed American manhood and honor. Finally the myth began to turn against its creators when many Americans became convinced that the government itself was conspiring to betray the missing men. As he traces the evolution of the POW/MIA myth, Franklin not only exposes it as an elaborate hoax at the highest levels of government, but also explains why the myth has penetrated to the heart of American life. By confronting the "true tragedy of the missing in Vietnam," Franklin helps us to understand how to heal the terrible psychological and spiritual wounds of the Vietnam War.

"This book offers a wide-ranging exploration of the causes, meaning, and continuing significance of the American war in Vietnam. It is a synthesis of H. Bruce Franklin's decades of engagement with that conflict - a fusion of critical analysis, meticulous scholarship, and moral insight that reveals crucial truths about the war while exposing the many fantasies about Vietnam that permeate American culture and politics."--BOOK JACKET.

"How did the mightiest nation in the history of the planet end up forever fighting unwinnable wars under a dysfunctional government despised by an increasingly divided citizenry? To help make sense of this crash course, Bruce Franklin offers another kind of crash course, a personal odyssey through modern American history. Readers are plunged into history, partly by reliving some of the author's experience and evolving consciousness: born in the Depression, molded by the victory culture of World War II, acculturated into the anti-Communist frenzy of early postwar years, employed by Communists during the Korean War, plunged into class warfare while working on the New York waterfront, flying as a Strategic Air Command Arctic navigator and intelligence officer, becoming a leading anti-war and progressive activist and thus a target of COINTELPRO, and emerging as a trailblazing cultural historian. The main subject is America's wars, abroad against nations and peoples in every continent except Australia, at home along racial and class lines. By bringing multi-disciplinary knowledge and cutting-edge analysis to the forces that shaped and reshaped one American for eight decades, each chapter offers compelling and eye-opening reading to 21st-century Americans"--

This unique collection dramatizes the history of the modern American prison and offers a harrowing vision of prison life in America today. H. Bruce Franklin, a leading authority on American prison writing, has gathered more than sixty selections from some of the most powerful works - memoirs, stories, novels, poemswritten in the last hundred years.