{ "item_title" : "The Good War on the Small Screen", "item_author" : [" Andrew J. Salvati "], "item_description" : "How early television helped transform the trauma of World War II into America's enduring story of the Good War.When television was still a new and uncertain medium, three ambitious documentary series brought the Second World War into American living rooms. Crusade in Europe (1949), Crusade in the Pacific (1951), and Victory at Sea (1952-1953) transformed millions of feet of wartime footage into sweeping narratives of combat, sacrifice, and American victory. Produced with unprecedented access to government archives, these programs demonstrated television's extraordinary power to make history immediate, dramatic, and intimate. Victory at Sea, in particular, became a landmark of early television, reaching audiences across the country and helping establish the documentary as one of the medium's defining genres.But these programs were more than documentaries about a war that had ended only a few years earlier. They were also products of a nation confronting a new and uncertain world. As the Cold War took shape, the three series looked back to World War II to explain the present, portraying the conflict as a heroic struggle between freedom and tyranny and American military power as an essential force in the defense of democracy. Together, they transformed the chaotic and often traumatic experience of modern warfare into a coherent national story of unity, sacrifice, and triumph.By examining these groundbreaking programs as television epics, Andrew Salvati reveals how filmmakers, broadcasters, and government officials helped shape the emerging cultural memory of World War II. He shows how television brought the war into the center of American homes and, in the process, helped domesticate its terrible realities, transforming images of destruction and death into an inspirational story of American identity, sacrifice, and global leadership. These early television epics helped establish an enduring popular memory of World War II as the Good War a just and noble struggle through which the United States emerged not simply victorious, but as the leader of the free world.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers1.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/0/70/064/461/070064461X_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "44.99", "online_price" : "44.99", "our_price" : "44.99", "club_price" : "44.99", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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