It is no accident, then, that each of our major wars has served to enhance the power of government in Washington: the Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In short, the war got off to a pretty good start, with the help of chaos.
The World War II generation believed the United States could do anything - anything... And Vietnam was a shattering experience for everyone.
My own family and thousands of other Japanese Americans were interned during World War II. It took our nation over 40 years to apologize.
World War II affected the male population in a very detrimental way. They were happy to be home, happy to be alive, happy they won, but they could not express to anybody the horror they had been through.
The detention of Japanese Americans during World War II would qualify as an example of majoritarian tyranny and misuse of executive prerogative, driven by fear and racial bias.
We are spending more as a percentage of our entire economy, almost 25 percent, than we have spent at any time since the end of World War II.
Dr. Kathryn Railly: You had a bullet from World War I in your leg, James! How did it get there?
I get offered a lot of science fiction work and there is a new project in the pipeline called Master Race, set in World War II, but that's a little way off yet.
Americans, we passionately believe, are a humane people. We showed that in restoring wounded economies abroad after World War II, even those of our enemies, Germany and Japan.
Growing up, I was fascinated with Buck Rogers' airplanes. As I began to mature in World War II, it became jets and rocket planes. But it was always in the air.
I started photographing people on the street during World War II. I used a little box Brownie. Nothing too expensive.
When I was in middle school, and teachers lectured about World War II, the conflict seemed impossibly distant and irrelevant. And it had only happened 15 years earlier.
I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.
My brother and sister are both older than I am and were born before my father went off to World War I.
On the eve of World War I, an estimated two million Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire. Well over a million were deported and hundreds of thousands were simply killed.
World War II... did not happen to everyone, but it happened to most. There were people from Germany who were throwing bombs at us.
In the months leading up to World War II, there was a tendency among many Americans to talk absently about the trouble in Europe. Nothing that happened an ocean away seemed very threatening.
The notion of a neutral, mainstream national media gained dominance only in World War II and in its aftermath, when what turned out to be a temporary moderate consensus came to govern the country.
They said it was against the rules to take sides on a controversial issue. I said, 'I wish you had told me that during World War II, when I took sides against Hitler.'
With the World War II era, there's so much written material to draw on. When you go back to the 14th century, you have to imagine more.
