Global Studies Focus Group Colloquium by Mark Selden

US Bombing Strategy, the Destruction of Japanese Cities, and the American Way of War from the Pacific War to Iraq

By Mark Selden

2:00 – 4: 00, October 10, 2007

World War II was a landmark in the development and deployment of technologies of mass destruction associated with air power, notably the B-29, napalm and the atomic bomb. This talk explores the logic and consequences-for its victims, for global patterns of warfare, notably the US way of war, and for international law-of new technologies and strategies of mass destruction associated with the rise of air power and bombing technology. In World War II, the death toll from bombing, the largest number of victims being civilians, was the largest in any war to the present. Particular attention is given to the path leading major powers, notably Germany, Japan, Britain and the United States, to direct bombing toward civilians, and subsequent praxis and debate over bombing in major wars in the Asia Pacific down to the present.

Dr. Selden had taught at Binghamton University (Sociology) until his retirement and move to Cornell University as a research associate at East Asia program. He wrote and edited more than 15 books on China and East Asia, including Revolution, Resistance and Reform in Village China (Yale, 2005), Chinese Society (Routledge, 2003), War and State Terrorism: The United States, Japan and the Asia-Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), Islands of Discontent: Okinawan Responses to Japanese and American Power (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), and The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China (Harvard, 1971). He is the coordinator of Japan Focus ejournal and book series editor of Asia’s Transformation (Routledge), Asian Voices, World Social Change, and War and Peace Library (Rowman & Littlefield), and Asic-Pacific (M. E. Sharpe)

Event Sponsor
Political Science, Center for Chinese Studies, WWII Working Group, Manoa

More Information
Jungmin Seo, 956-8092, seoj@hawaii.edu

Ongoing Events