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Tom Engelhardt's The End of Victory Culture offers a left-liberal interpretation of the ways in which captivity narratives, heroic tales of embattled underdogs, and the pervasive presence of military images in popular culture have shaped the United States from the colonial era to the present. Much of his analysis concerns the period between the end of World War II and the end of the Cold War, a period that he presents not so much as the apex of U.S. power and hegemony, but as an era of anxiety engendered by a tension between the country's traditional understanding of itself as an embattled underdog and the realities of nuclear stalemate and overwhelming U.S. nuclear superiority. Engelhardt argues that an aura of "triumphalist despair" accompanied the Cold War, that widespread opposition to the war in Vietnam demonstrated disillusionment with militarism, and that neoconservative efforts to revive and sustain the Cold War agenda have been more farce than tragedy.
Engelhardt draws sporadically and unsystematically on recent scholarship....