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This collection of essays, written by the some of the foremost
historians in the field of Coast Guard history, highlights the
wartime roles played by the United States' oldest federal maritime
service, from its inception through the last decade of the
twentieth century. The Fighting Coast Guard features three distinct
sections: "Beginnings," which includes a short overview of the US
Revenue Cutter Service (the USCG's primary forerunner, established
in 1790) and two chapters on World War I; "Conflagration," the role
of the USCG during the World War II era; and "The Cold War and
Beyond," an assessment of the Coast Guard's participation in the
Korean Conflict, the Vietnam War, and the Persian Gulf War of 1991.
The Fighting Coast Guard is a significant contribution to the
limited historiography of the Coast Guard and a critical analysis
of various wartime roles undertaken by the Coast Guard during
America's twentieth-century conflicts.Because the Coast Guard
operated as part of the Department of the Navy during the two world
wars, its service and history is often overlooked or enveloped by
the larger service, while the USCG's limited participation in cold
and hot wars since 1945 is often ignored altogether. This anthology
provides readers with a solid overview while highlighting some of
the service's most important contributions as a combatant force.
This definitive study of the role of the US Coast Guard in wartime,
from its modern inception in 1915 through the end of the twentieth
century, is long overdue and will shed new light on America's
smallest military service.
During World War II, hundreds of thousands of prisoners were worked
to death by the Nazis under a brutal system of slave labor in the
concentration camps. By 1942, this vast network of slavery extended
across all of German-occupied Europe, but the whole operation was
run by a surprisingly small staff of bureaucrats--no more than 200
engineers and managers who worked in the Business Administration
Main Office of the SS. Their projects included designing and
constructing the concentration camps and gas chambers, building
secret underground weapons factories, and brokering slave laborers
to private companies such as Volkswagen and IG Farben. The Business
of Genocide powerfully contradicts the assumption that the SS
forced slavery upon the German economy, demonstrating that instead
industrialists actively sought out the Business Administration Main
Office as a valued partner in the war economy. Moreover, while the
bureaucrats who oversaw Holocaust operations have often been seen
as technocrats or simple ""cogs in the machinery,"" the book
reveals their ideological dedication, even fanatical devotion, to
slavery and genocide in the name of National Socialism. |Allen
examines the SS executives and engineers who built up the vast
slave-labor system in Nazi concentration camps. While the
bureaucrats who oversaw Holocaust operations are often portrayed as
simply ""cogs in the machinery,"" he reveals their ideological
dedication to National Socialism.
This collection explores how technologies become forms of power,
how people embed their authority in technological systems, and how
the machines and the knowledge that make up technical systems
strengthen or reshape social, political, and cultural power. The
authors suggest ways in which a more nuanced investigation of
technology's complex history can enrich our understanding of the
changing meanings of modernity. They consider the relationship
among the state, expertise, and authority; the construction of
national identity; changes in the structure and distribution of
labor; political ideology and industrial development; and political
practices during the Cold War. The essays show how insight into the
technological aspects of such broad processes can help synthesize
material and cultural methods of inquiry and how reframing
technology's past in broader historical terms can suggest new
directions for science and technology studies.The essays were
written in honor of Thomas Parke Hughes and Agatha Chipley Hughes,
whose spirit of inquiry they seek to continue.Contributors Janet
Abbate, Michael Thad Allen, W. Bernard Carlson, Gabrielle Hecht,
Erik P. Rau, Eric Schatzberg, Amy Slaton, John Staudenmaier, Edmund
N. Todd, Hans Weinberger.
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