Departing from prior scholarship on T. E. Lawrence, this work examines the extent of Anglo-American cultural interplay and the popular cultural machinery involved in the manufacture of the Lawrence of Arabia legend. The book features several unpublished or rare photographs and draws upon previously unpublished manuscript material, business letters, and supporting documents to recreate the origins of the popular legend of Lawrence of Arabia.

Americans have always shown a fascination with the people, customs, and legends of the "East--witness the popularity of the stories of the Arabian Nights, the performances of Arab belly dancers and acrobats, the feats of turban-wearing vaudeville magicians, and even the antics of fez-topped Shriners. In this captivating volume, Susan Nance provides a social and cultural history of this highly popular genre of Easternized performance in America up to the Great Depression. According to Nance, these traditions reveal how a broad spectrum of Americans, including recent immigrants and impersonators, behaved as producers and consumers in a rapidly developing capitalist economy. In admiration of the Arabian Nights, people creatively reenacted Eastern life, but these performances were also demonstrations of Americans' own identities, Nance argues. The story of Aladdin, made suddenly rich by rubbing an old lamp, stood as a particularly apt metaphor for how consumer capitalism might benefit each person. The leisure, abundance, and contentment that many imagined were typical of Eastern life were the same characteristics used to define "the American dream." The recent success of Disney's Aladdin movies suggests that many Americans still welcome an interpretation of the East as a site of incredible riches, romance, and happy endings. This abundantly illustrated account is the first by a historian to explain why and how so many Americans sought out such cultural engagement with the Eastern world long before geopolitical concerns became paramount.

If you plan to portray a national icon in less than heroic terms, you had better be prepared for a fight, as Richard Aldington learned even before the publication of his 1955 biography, Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry. Fred D. Crawford provides the first examination of all major parties and points of view embroiled in the controversy generated by Aldington's biography of T. E. Lawrence. In two years of research, Aldington made major discoveries, including the extent to which Lawrence had cooperated with Lowell Thomas, Robert Graves, and B. H. Liddell Hart in the creation of the "Lawrence legend". For this and other reasons, Aldington concluded that Lawrence was a charlatan, a poseur, and a fraud. Upon learning of Aldington's antagonism to Lawrence a year before Aldington's book appeared, a powerful group including B. H. Liddell Hart, Robert Graves, A. W. Lawrence, and other Lawrence partisans worked behind the scenes to suppress and denigrate Aldington's biography. These attempts, Crawford notes, reveal a great deal about how private interests can determine what the public is allowed to read.

Combat Death in Contemporary American Culture: Popular Cultural Conceptions of War since World War II explores how war has been portrayed in the United States since World War II, with a particular focus on an emotionally charged but rarely scrutinized topic: combat death. Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet argues that most stories about war use three main building blocks: melodrama, adventure, and horror. Monnet examines how melodrama and adventure have helped make war seem acceptable to the American public by portraying combat death as a meaningful sacrifice and by making military killing look necessary and often even pleasurable. Horror no longer serves its traditional purpose of making the bloody realities of war repulsive, but has instead been repurposed in recent years to intensify the positivity of melodrama and adventure. Thus this book offers a fascinating diagnosis of how war stories perform ideological and emotional work and why they have such a powerful grip on the American imagination.

Drawing on new archival research into Hollywood production history and detailed analysis of individual films, Hollywood and the Invention of England examines the surprising affinity for the English past in Hollywood cinema. Stubbs asks why Hollywood filmmakers have so frequently drawn on images and narratives depicting English history, and why films of this type have resonated with audiences in America. Beginning with an overview of the cultural interaction between American film and English historical culture, the book proceeds to chart the major filmmaking cycles which characterise Hollywood's engagement with the English past from the 1930s to the present, assessing the value of English-themed films in the American film industry while also placing them in a broader historical context.

A brilliant narrative history tracing today’s troubles back to the grandiose imperial overreach of Great Britain and the United States. Kingmakers is the gripping story of how the modern Middle East came to be, as told through the lives of the Britons and Americans who shaped it. Some are famous (Lawrence of Arabia and Gertrude Bell); others infamous (Harry St. John Philby, father of Kim); some forgotten (Sir Mark Sykes, Israel’s godfather, and A. T. Wilson, the territorial creator of Iraq). All helped enthrone rulers in a region whose very name is an Anglo-American invention. The aim of this engrossing character-driven narrative is to restore to life the colorful figures who gave us the Middle East in which Americans are enmeshed today.

Popular cinema is saturated with images and narratives of empire. With "Projecting Empire", Chapman and Cull have written the first major study of imperialism and cinema for over thirty years. This welcome text maps the history of empire cinema in both Hollywood and Britain through a serious of case studies of popular films including biopics, adventures, literary adaptations, melodramas, comedies and documentaries, from the 1930s and "The Four Feathers" to the present, with "Indiana Jones" and "Three Kings". The authors consider industry-wide trends and place the films in their wider cultural and historical contexts. Using primary sources that include private papers, they look at the presence of particular auteurs in the cinema of Imperialism, including Korda, Lean, Huston and Attenborough, as well as the actors who brought the stories to life, such as Elizabeth Taylor and George Clooney. At a time when imperialism has a new significance in the world, this book will fulfil the needs of students and interested filmgoers alike.

This edited volume provides an overview on US involvement in Iraq from the 1958 Iraqi coup to the present-day, offering a deeper context to the current conflict. Using a range of innovative methods to interrogate US foreign policy, ideology and culture, the book provides a broad set of reflections on past, present and future implications of US-Iraqi relations, and especially the strategic implications for US policy-making. In doing so, it examines several key aspects of relationship such as: the 1958 Iraqi Revolution; the impact of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War; the impact of the Nixon Doctrine on the regional balance of power; US attempts at rapprochement during the 1980s; the 1990-91 Gulf War; and, finally, sanctions and inspections. Analysis of the contemporary Iraq crisis sets US plans against the ‘reality’ they faced in the country, and explores both attempts to bring security to Iraq, and the implications of failure.

The dream of building Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land has long been a quintessential part of English identity and culture: but how did this vision shape the Victorian encounter with the actual Jerusalem in the Middle East? The Holy Land in English Culture 1799-1917 offers a new cultural history of the English fascination with Palestine in the long nineteenth century, from Napoleon's failed Mediterranean campaign of 1799, which marked a new era in the British involvement in the land, to Allenby's conquest of Jerusalem in 1917. Bar-Yosef argues that the Protestant tradition of internalizing Biblical vocabulary - 'Promised Land', 'Chosen People', 'Jerusalem' - and applying it to different, often contesting, visions of England and Englishness evoked a unique sense of ambivalence towards the imperial desire to possess the Holy Land. Popular religious culture, in other words, was crucial to the construction of the orientalist discourse: so crucial, in fact, that metaphorical appropriations of the 'Holy Land' played a much more dominant role in the English cultural imagination than the actual Holy Land itself. As it traces the diversity of 'Holy Lands' in the Victorian cultural landscape - literal and metaphorical, secular and sacred, radical and patriotic, visual and textual - this study joins the ongoing debate about the dissemination of imperial ideology. Drawing on a wide array of sources, from Sunday-school textbooks and popular exhibitions to penny magazines and soldiers' diaries, the book demonstrates how the Orientalist discourse functions - or, to be more precise, malfunctions - in those popular cultural spheres that are so markedly absent from Edward Said's work: it is only by exploring sources that go beyond the highbrow, the academic, or the official, that we can begin to grasp the limited currency of the orientalist discourse in the metropolitan centre, and the different meanings it could hold for different social groups. As such, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799-1917 provides a significant contribution to both postcolonial studies and English social history.

The biopic presents a profound paradox—its own conventions and historical stages of development, disintegration, investigation, parody, and revival have not gained respect in the world of film studies. That is, until now. Whose Lives Are They Anyway? boldly proves a critical point: The biopic is a genuine, dynamic genre and an important one—it narrates, exhibits, and celebrates a subject's life and demonstrates, investigates, or questions his or her importance in the world; it illuminates the finer points of a personality; and, ultimately, it provides a medium for both artist and spectator to discover what it would be like to be that person, or a certain type of person. Through detailed analyses and critiques of nearly twenty biopics, Dennis Bingham explores what is at their core—the urge to dramatize real life and find a version of the truth within it. The genre's charge, which dates back to the salad days of the Hollywood studio era, is to introduce the biographical subject into the pantheon of cultural mythology and, above all, to show that he or she belongs there. It means to discover what we learn about our culture from the heroes who rise and the leaders who emerge from cinematic representations. Bingham also zooms in on distinctions between cinematic portrayals of men and women. Films about men have evolved from celebratory warts-and-all to investigatory to postmodern and parodic. At the same time, women in biopics have been burdened by myths of suffering, victimization, and failure from which they are only now being liberated. To explore the evolution and lifecycle changes of the biopic and develop an appreciation for subgenres contained within it, there is no better source than Whose Lives Are They Anyway?