J. SAMUEL WALKER

The roots of collective memory in the United States have attracted considerable scholarly attention in the past few years. The ways in which historical events — such as the Watergate scandal, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the reception of immigrants at Ellis Island — are perceived and interpreted in American culture have inspired study and debate among students in several disciplines. One important issue they have examined is the discrepancy, often great, between popular memory and scholarly views of historical events. Michael Schudson, a professor of sociology and communication, complains that popular memories of Watergate lose sight of the constitutional issues involved and instead focus on personalities. In a similar manner, Barbie Zelizer, a former reporter and now a professor of rhetoric and communication, is sharply critical of journalists who, in her opinion, created and continue to shape popular views of the Kennedy assassination for their own purposes. She asserts that journalists "refused to turn the assassination story over to historians because they wanted to remain its authoritative spokespersons," thus perpetuating a division between prevailing collective memory and competing interpretations advanced by scholars.
Perhaps the most vivid example of the gulf between popular perceptions and scholarly knowledge is the report of historian Michael Frisch on the results of a poll he conducted in his American history survey course over a period of years. He asked his students at the start of a term to write down the first ten names that came to mind from the beginning of American history to the end of the Civil War, exclusive of presidents, generals, and other prominent public officials. To his astonishment, the consistent and overwhelming winner was the "unsinkable" Betsy Ross for her mythical role in making the American flag.1
The same kind of dichotomy between popular views and scholarly findings seems apparent in how President Harry S. Truman's decision to use atomic bombs against Japan is remembered. There is no sure method for ascertaining exactly what constitutes collective memory on any given topic. The studies of the subject are more successful in explaining the influences on collective memory than in defining the content of collective memory, which can be done only with a liberal portion of assumption and extrapolation. In the case of the use of the bomb, collective memory, from all available evidence, regards Truman's action as a sound decision that ended the war without requiring an invasion of Japan and thus saved large numbers of American lives. Most Americans, it seems safe to say, would accept without serious reservation the assertion of President George H. W. Bush in 1991 that dropping the bombs "spared millions of American lives."2
One student of collective memory in the United States, John Bodnar, argues that the primary agent for shaping popular views of historical events in recent times has been the federal government. In alliance with state governments, middle-class professionals, and others, it sought to replace "vernacular interests" with "official culture" in order to build unity, foster patriotism, and ensure loyalty. Although Bodnar overstates the role of the federal government in creating collective memory, in the case of the decision to use atomic bombs against Japan, his findings are applicable.3
Recent scholarly work by James G. Hershberg and Barton J. Bernstein has shown how former government officials consciously and artfully constructed the history of the decision. James B. Co-nant, anxious to head off criticism, convinced former Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson to publish an article explaining and justifying the use of the bomb. In his widely publicized article, which appeared in Harper's in early 1947, Stimson suggested that the atomic attacks had avoided more than one million American casualties. Truman later drew on Stimson's estimate to support his claim that the bomb had saved as many as half a million American lives. Those figures formed the basis for popular views of Truman's action and decisively influenced collective memory of the reasons for his decision.4
Scholars now know better. One key finding of the past few years is that U.S. casualty estimates did not begin to approach one million and the projected American deaths from an invasion, in the unlikely event that an invasion was necessary, were much lower than one half million. Estimated deaths from an invasion were, in a worst case, about forty-six thousand. As military historian John Ray Skates has recently concluded: "The record does not support the postwar claims of huge Allied casualties to be suffered in the invasion of Japan." The evidence of the casualty figures that military planners presented to top policymakers in the summer of 1945 has added a new dimension to the historiographical controversy over the use of the bomb. The debate, ignited by the publication of Gar Alperovitz's Atomic Diplomacy in 1965 and carried on at varying levels of intensity ever since, has centered on the question of whether Truman was motivated primarily by military or political/diplomatic considerations in deciding to drop the bomb. It has produced a deluge of new information and a rich variety of intriguing arguments. While scholars continue to disagree on many points, a broad consensus emerged.5
According to the scholarly consensus, the United States did not drop the bomb to save hundreds of thousands of American lives. Although scholars generally agree that Truman used the bomb primarily to shorten the war, the number of American lives saved, even in the worst case, would have been in the range of tens of thousands rather than hundreds of thousands. Specialists also view political/diplomatic objectives as a secondary objective in the decision. They have not fully accepted the revisionist claim, articulated most trenchantly by Alperovitz, that Truman acted primarily to impress the Soviets and advance American political objectives, but it seems clear that the political implications of the use of the bomb figured in the administration's deliberations. The scholarly consensus holds that the war would have ended within a relatively short time without the atomic attacks and that an invasion of the Japanese islands was an unlikely possibility. It further maintains that several alternatives to ending the war without an invasion were available and that Truman and his close advisers were well aware of the options.6
The broad agreement among scholars differs markedly from the justifications presented by Stimson, Truman, and others, and from popular views of American actions. The discrepancy has much to do with the foundations of collective memory. David Lowenthal, in his book The Past Is a Foreign Country, identifies three basic sources of public perceptions of the past — history, memory, and relics. Lowenthal suggests that history is generally the most important of these, and clearly it is in the case of the decision to use the bomb. As Paul Boyer points out elsewhere in this volume, the ranks of those who remember Hiroshima are diminishing. And those who remember often do not have a full or accurate picture of the reasons for Truman's decision. The best example of the distortion that memory can cause is Paul Fussell's celebration, aptly titled Thank God for the Atom Bomb. One can sympathize with the vast relief of Fussell and other infantrymen who learned that they would not have to invade Japan, and he writes that he received many letters from former compatriots who "cheered themselves hoarse" in response to his tribute to the bomb. But their perceptions as soldiers in the field are of little value in understanding why U.S. policymakers made the choices they did.7
In a similar manner, relics are of limited application in studying the reasons behind the Truman administration's action. Artifacts can be helpful in visualizing and grasping the terrible destruction that the bomb produced and in serving as grim reminders of the costs of nuclear warfare. But whatever their value in understanding the effects of the bomb, they have little to contribute to understanding the reasons that Truman elected to authorize the atomic attacks.
That leaves historical documentation and presentation as the principal means of informing collective memory. In a rich array of books, articles, pamphlets, documentary collections, films, docudramas, and television programs, the sources that reach more students than any other are American history textbooks. This is particularly true of secondary school texts, which, in theory at least, impress the historical consciousness of nearly every high school student in America. As Frances FitzGerald has pointed out, the history that those students learn is often the version of events that will stay with them for the rest of their lives. She adds that long after facts have been forgotten, general impressions remain: "What sticks to the memory from those textbooks is not any particular series of facts, but an atmosphere, an impression, a tone."8
The information that leading secondary school textbooks provide on the decision to use the bomb generally gives an impression that Truman and his advisers would hardly find objectionable. Their discussion of the bomb would probably have pleased Conant, who urged Stimson to write his article as a way to preempt "sentimentalism" that might show up among school teachers. He worried that they might influence future generations by advancing "a distortion of history" about why the bomb was dropped.9
A sampling of secondary school texts shows that some accept the explanations of the Truman administration by reporting that the president had to choose between the bomb and an invasion that could cause the loss of one million American lives (a higher number than Truman himself cited).10 Others, which Conant would probably find less satisfactory, cite the figure of a possible one million deaths, but also make clear that alternatives to the bomb were available and that Truman's decision stirred controversy.11 One text, James West Davidson and Mark H. Lytle's The United States: A History of the Republic, departs from the pattern. It does not mention projected casualties or suggest that an invasion was likely without the bomb. A college textbook by the same authors and three collaborators, however, states that military leaders thought that an invasion would be necessary to end the war and that it would result in "half a million to a million casualties."12 The explanation for the use of the bomb that prevails in high school texts is summarized in a recent issue of Cobblestone: The History Magazine for Young People, a magazine aimed at secondary school students. It notes that alternatives to the bomb existed but concludes that Truman made his "difficult choice" because he wanted to avoid "losing an estimated one million Americans." Given the alternatives that are outlined in textbooks, it is highly probable that most high school students would agree with those in an Indiana survey that Truman made the right decision.13
The treatment of the use of the bomb in secondary school texts is not surprising in light of the demands of powerful state textbook selection committees and the inherent pressures to avoid controversy. The general impression that they deliver is that Truman faced a stark choice between the bomb and an extremely costly invasion, although some suggest that Truman's options were less clear-cut. Without the need to cater to selection committees and with a better educated and more mature audience to target, one might expect a more sophisticated treatment of the issue in college survey textbooks. In some ways, collegiate texts offer a richer and more subtle discussion of the issue. In other ways, however, many college textbooks perpetuate the same myths and simplifications as leading secondary school texts.
In general, college textbooks reflect the consensus among scholars that the Truman administration used the bomb primarily to shorten the war and secondarily to impress the Soviets.14 They do not fully accept a revisionist interpretation, but they are influenced by it. Without exception, college survey texts do not celebrate the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as something for which to "thank God." John M. Blum and his coauthors, for example, call the decision "the most tragic in the long course of American history."15 A few texts make it clear that Truman's decision was more complex than simply a choice between the bomb and an invasion. John A. Garraty calls it "the most controversial decision of the entire war."16
Nevertheless, the treatment of the atomic bomb decision in many college textbooks is surprisingly dated, and in some cases, misleading and superficial. The most common shortcoming is that the vast majority of the books under review state or imply that the bomb avoided the need for an extremely costly invasion. In some cases, the authors present this view as an incontrovertible fact; in others they hedge slightly by saying that Truman was convinced that the bomb would bring victory without an invasion of Japan. Even when they discuss other options that might have ended the war, most texts fail to make clear that an invasion was a remote possibility, even without the bomb.
As a corollary, most textbooks assert that by replacing the need for an invasion, the bomb spared large numbers of American lives. Some writers use the numbers cited by Stimson and Truman or some slight variation. Others use descriptive rather than quantitative terms - such as "untold thousands" or "colossal bloodbath."17 No textbook mentions the much smaller numbers of deaths and casualties that have been cited by specialists on the subject, although a few sidestep the issue by avoiding the use of numbers or descriptive terms altogether. The articles that first refuted the myths of one half million deaths or one million casualties appeared in the mid-1980s, which would seem to allow ample time to be included in more recent editions of textbooks. One popular reading book for students, James West Davidson and Mark H. Lytle's After the Fact, notes that the casualty figures have been "quite controversial."18 But the recent findings that the anticipated casualties in the summer of 1945 did not approach one million even in the worst scenarios have not been disputed by specialists on the subject.
The questions of the need for an invasion and the estimates of casualties go to the heart of understanding the reasons for the use of the bomb. Textbook authors do their readers an injustice if they simplify the alternatives faced by Truman and overstate both the chances and the costs of an invasion. Incorporating the information that scholars have reported over the past few years would not necessarily change the prevailing textbook interpretation of why Truman opted for the bomb. A case can be made that the prospect of saving forty-six thousand American lives in the unlikely but conceivable event that an invasion proved necessary (or a smaller number if the war dragged on for several weeks even without an invasion) provided sufficient military justification to use it.19 But the new information about casualty estimates introduces more ambiguity into the question of why the United States dropped the bomb. This kind of ambiguity is apparently what Stimson and Truman sought to avoid with their inflated casualty figures. Textbook writers should not fall into the trap of accepting those numbers uncritically. Even if inclusion of the recent findings makes textbook discussions of the bomb less tidy, it is preferable to treatments that are clear but inaccurate. Indeed, the best college textbook accounts of the decision to use the bomb — those of Blum, Boyer, Winthrop D. Jordan, and Mary Beth Norton - are among the least categorical in explaining Truman's motives.
In addition to their failure to grapple with important new findings on the decision to use the bomb, many textbooks suffer from factual errors or dubious assertions. Most of the lapses are trivial, such as citing the wrong date for the Alamogordo test or claiming that "many" atomic scientists opposed the use of the bomb.20 Other errors are more serious. Some books state explicitly and others imply that Truman made his decision only after thorough deliberation and careful weighing of the alternatives. Stimson made this point in his 1947 article. But in a book published in 1988, McGeorge Bundy, his "scribe" for the article, expressed doubt that the use of the bomb received the consideration it deserved. "Whether broader and more extended deliberation would have yielded a less destructive result we shall never know," Bundy wrote. "Yet one must regret that no such effort was made."21
Some of the factual mistakes in textbooks are inexplicably flagrant. Davidson's textbook, Nation of Nations, asserts that the radiation effects of the atomic blasts were "unexpected by many of the scientists who built the bomb," when, in fact, those scientists were well aware of the hazards of exposure to high levels of radiation. Arthur S. Link contends that Truman and his advisers apparently did not realize that Japan was on the verge of collapse in the summer of 1945. George Brown Tindall submits that Truman "had no idea" that an atomic bomb could "destroy virtually an entire city." Such errors would perhaps be less worthy of mention if they did not show the Truman administration in a more favorable light than a more accurate presentation of the facts would suggest.22
Many American history survey textbooks, in sum, sustain myths about and questionable explanations for the use of the bomb. Even while accepting revisionist views to a point, they reinforce many of the key arguments that have prevailed since the 1940s, especially the conclusion that Truman used the bomb to avoid an invasion and save huge numbers of American lives. Even allowing for the need for brevity, the desire for clarity, and the lead times for incorporating new scholarship, the treatment of the atomic bomb decision by many textbook authors is regrettably flawed. In general, it reflects the historiography of the mid-1970s and fails to consider or include new findings. The contribution that a large majority of college textbooks make to collective memory seems likely to underscore the interpretations or impressions that students receive from high school history books.
The misleading or simplified version of the use of the bomb that many textbooks advance is echoed in popular history accounts. Perhaps this is understandable in older books that were written before the discovery and publication of new evidence on Truman's decision. It is much less defensible in more recent books. The most popular and presumably most influential of these is David McCullough's best-selling, highly acclaimed, and Pulitzer Prize-winning blockbuster, Truman. McCullough's discussion of the atomic bomb is defiantly traditional. He informs his readers that Truman opted for the bomb to avoid the dreadful prospect of an invasion and to save many American lives, though he is uncertain about how many lives. He acknowledges that in the summer of 1945, military leaders estimated casualties in the first thirty days of an invasion in a range of 30,000 to 50,000 (which, using a death to casualty ratio of 1:4 or 1:5, would have placed the number of deaths in the range of 6,000 to 12,500). But he adds that one estimate placed the number of American deaths in the range of five hundred thousand to one million. This, McCullough asserts, "shows that figures of such magnitude were then in use at the highest levels." If McCullough had consulted Bernstein's article on projected casualties, he would have learned that the document that cited estimates of five hundred thousand to one million deaths was not taken seriously by military planners and was not circulated at the "highest levels." Later, McCullough suggests that the use of the bomb prevented 250,000 American casualties.
In this case and throughout his discussion of the bomb, McCullough dismisses the findings of scholars and the documentary evidence that raise questions about his own interpretation. His bibliography indicates that he did not bother to read the works of many leading scholars, including Alperovitz, Robert L. Messer, Leon V. Sigal, Michael S. Sherry, and Melvyn P. Leffler, and he lists only one edited book and one article of Bernstein's many important publications on the bomb. McCullough surely has an obligation to acquaint himself with the analyses of those scholars and, perhaps as a result, with the complexities involved in the decision to use the bomb. Scholars might well be justified in simply disregarding McCullough's arguments as too shallow to be taken seriously. But the book's impact on popular views and collective memory will entrench even more deeply the misconceptions about the decision to use the bomb that Stimson, Truman, and others created.23
Despite the prevalence of the conclusions that McCullough advances, students and the general public are exposed, at least potentially, to other interpretations. Even students who are assigned textbooks in survey courses and actually read them can get differing views from supplementary readings, lectures, or classroom discussions. Other materials are available for use either inside or outside the classroom. They include mass market books (though the mass is smaller than for McCullough), such as Richard Rhodes's The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Peter Wyden's Day One.24 Newspaper and magazine articles that are critical of Truman appear on occasion, usually around the anniversary of Hiroshima, and reach a larger audience than most scholarly histories. Several documentary films, an admirable television docudrama, Day One, and a woeful movie, Fat Man and Little Boy, dissent from the popular image of Truman's decision.
The influence of those books, articles, and films on prevailing views, although impossible to measure, seems limited. Perhaps this is because those accounts focus on the building or the effects of the bomb rather than on the decision to use it. Perhaps the authoritative tone of textbooks and the prestige of their authors give their interpretations the aura of gospel. In any event, textbooks play a key role in shaping collective memory. As Sara Evans and Roy Rosenzweig have suggested, "Textbooks are the single most important written source through which college students learn about the past." Or perhaps Truman has become such a folk hero, an image enhanced by McCullough's portrait of him, that the burden of proof on those who question the standard version of events is insurmountable.25
The chasm between scholarly views and collective memory could be narrowed if textbooks at both the secondary school and college levels and popular histories would incorporate new findings and their implications into their discussions of the use of the bomb. This does not mean that, by doing so, they necessarily have to fully accept a revisionist interpretation or condemn Truman for ordering the atomic attacks. But it does mean that they should make clear the alternatives that were available to Truman, the potential costs as projected before the attacks were authorized, and the complexities of the considerations that led to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Scholars have been working hard for years to make sense of new information so that we can gain a better understanding of one of the monumental decisions of the twentieth century. Authors who describe the bases for Truman's reasoning to students or the general public have an obligation to do the same. Otherwise, collective memory will remain poorly informed by an incomplete and oversimplified version of events, and textbook presentations and popular accounts will continue to reinforce the justifications and misconceptions that have skewed explanations of the decision to use the bomb for nearly half a century.

*This article expresses the personal views of the author. It does not represent an official position of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission or any other government agency. The author gratefully acknowledges the comments of Charles J. Errico, Donald A. Ritchie, and Allan M. Winkler.

1 Michael Schudson, Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget, and Reconstruct the Past (New York, 1992); Barbie Zelizer, Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory (Chicago, 1992), 186; Michael Frisch, "American History and the Structure of Collective Memory: A Modest Exercise in Empirical Iconography," Journal of American History 75 (March 1989): 1130-55. For other recent discussions of collective memory see the articles that appear with Frisch's in a special issue on "Memory and American History," Journal of American History 75 (March 1989): 1115-1280; Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, 1991); and John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 1992).
2 Washington Post, 2 December 1991.
3 Bodnar, Remaking America, esp. chaps. 1, 8. Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory, demonstrates how public memories of historical events are shaped by a variety of cultural influences as well as by the government. For a critique of Bodnar's emphasis on the role of the federal government see Dwight T. Pitcaithley's contribution to a roundtable on "Government-Sponsored Research: A Sanitized Past?" Public Historian 10 (Summer 1988): 40-6.
4 Barton J. Bernstein, "Writing, Righting, or Wronging the Historical Record: President Truman's Letter on His Atomic-Bomb Decision," Diplomatic History 16 (Winter 1992): 163-73; idem, "Seizing the Contested Terrain of Early Nuclear History: Stimson, Co-nant, and Their Allies Explain the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb," ibid. 17 (Winter 1993): 35—72; James G. Hershberg, James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (New York, 1993), 279-304.
5 Barton J. Bernstein, "A Postwar Myth: 500,000 U. S. Lives Saved," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 42 (June/July 1986): 38-40; Rufus B. Miles, Jr., "Hiroshima: The Strange Myth of Half a Million American Lives Saved," International Security 10 (Fall 1985): 121-40; Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and the Origins of the Arms Race, rev. ed. (New York, 1987); Robert A. Pape, "Why Japan Surrendered," International Security 18 (Fall 1993): 154-201; John Ray Skates, The Invasion of Japan: Alternative to the Bomb (Columbia, SC, 1994), 74-83.
6. J. Samuel Walker, "The Decision to Use the Bomb: A Historiographical Update," in this volume. For an essay that analyzes earlier writings on the bomb see Barton J. Bernstein, "The Atomic Bomb and American Foreign Policy, 1941-1945: An Historiographical Controversy," Peace and Change 2 (Spring 1974): 1-16. For a good example of the ongoing debate over the use of the bomb see the views that Gar Alperovitz and Robert L. Messer exchanged with Bernstein, "Correspondence: Marshall, Truman, and the Decision to Drop the Bomb," International Security 16 (Winter 1991/92): 204-21.
7. David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, England, 1985), 255-9; Paul Boyer, "Exotic Resonances: Hiroshima in American Memory," in this volume; Paul Fussell, Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays (New York, 1988), 45. For a critique of an earlier version of Fussell's essay see Martin J. Sherwin, "Hiroshima and Modern Memory," Nation, 10 October 1981, 329, 349-53.
8. Frances FitzGerald, America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1979), 16-18.
9. Bernstein, "Seizing the Contested Terrain," 40; Hershberg, James B. Conant, 294.
10 Daniel J. Boorstin and Brooks Mather Kelley, with Ruth Frankel Boorstin, A History of the United States (Lexington, MA, 1986); Henry F. Graff, America: The Glorious Republic (Boston, 1990).
11 Henry W. Bragdon, Samuel P. McCutchen, and Donald A. Ritchie, History of a Free Nation (New York, 1993); Andrew R. L. Cayton, Elizabeth Israel Perry, and Allan M. Winkler, American Pathways to the Present (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1994).
12 James West Davidson and Mark H. Lytle, The United States: A History of the Republic (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1990); James West Davidson, William B. Gienapp, Christine Leigh Heyrman, Mark H. Lytle, and Michael B. Stoff, Nation of Nations: A Narrative History of the American Republic (New York, 1990).
13 "World War II: Americans in the Pacific," Cobblestone: The History Magazine for Young People 15 (January 1994): 34-40; Boyer, "Exotic Resonances."
14 The discussion of college texts is drawn from a survey of eighteen books. For the sake of brevity, multi-author volumes will be cited hereafter by the name of the first-listed author. The texts, in addition to Davidson, Nation of Nations, are: Thomas A. Bailey and David M. Kennedy, The American Pageant, 9th ed. (Lexington, MA, 1991); Bernard Bailyn, Robert Dallek, David Brion Davis, David Herbert Donald, John C. Thomas, and Gordon S. Wood, The Great Republic: A History of the American People, 4th ed. (Lexington, MA, 1992); John M. Blum, William S. McFeely, Edmund S. Morgan, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Kenneth M. Stampp, and C. Vann Woodward, The National Experience: A History of the United States, 8th ed. (Fort Worth, 1993); Paul S. Boyer, Clifford E. Clark, Jr., Joseph E. Kett, Neal Salisbury, Harvard Sitkoff, and Nancy Woloch, The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People, 2d ed. (Lexington, MA, 1993); Alan Brinkley, Richard N. Current, Frank Freidel, and T. Harry Williams, American History: A Survey, 8th ed. (New York, 1991); Joseph R. Conlin, The American Past: A Brief History (San Diego, 1991); Robert A. Divine, T. H. Breen, George M. Fredrickson, and R. Hal Williams, America: Past and Present, 3d ed. (New York, 1991); John A. Garraty, A Short History of the American Nation, 6th ed. (New York, 1993); Winthrop D. Jordan and Leon F. Litwack, The United States, 7th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1991); Robert Kelley, The Shaping of the American Past, 5th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1990); Arthur S. Link, Stanley Coben, Robert V. Remini, Douglas Greenberg, and Robert C. McMath, Jr., The American People: A History, 2d ed. (Arlington Heights, IL, 1987); James Kirby Martin, Randy Roberts, Steven Mintz, Linda O. McMurry, and James H. Jones, America and Its People, 2d ed. (New York, 1993); Gary B. Nash, Julie Roy Jeffrey, John R. Howe, Peter J. Frederick, Allen F. Davis, and Allan M. Winkler, The American People: Creating a Nation and a Society, 2d ed. (New York, 1990); Mary Beth Norton, David M. Katzman, Paul D. Escott, Howard P. Chudacoff, Thomas G. Paterson, and William M. Tuttle, Jr., A People and a Nation: A History of the United States, 3d ed. (Boston, 1990); George Brown Tindall with David E. Shi, America: A Narrative History, 3d ed. (New York, 1992); Irwin Unger, These United States: The Questions of Our Past, 5th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1992); and R. Jackson Wilson, James Gilbert, Stephen Nissenbaum, Karen Ordahl Kupperman, and Donald Scott, The Pursuit of Liberty: A History of the American People, 2d ed. (Belmont, CA, 1990).
15 Blum, The National Experience, 779.
16 Garraty, Short History of the American Nation, 472.
17 Kelley, Shaping of the American Past, 660; Unger, These United States, 792.
18 James West Davidson and Mark H. Lytle, After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection, 3d ed. (New York, 1992), 286.
19 Barton J. Bernstein argues that no single alternative to the bomb would have ended the war as quickly. He concludes that it seems "very likely, though certainly not definite," that a combination of Soviet entry into the war, modifying the unconditional surrender demand, and continuing the blockade and heavy conventional bombing would have ended the war before the planned invasion of Kyushu on 1 November 1945. See Bernstein, "Understanding the Atomic Bomb and the Japanese Surrender: Missed Opportunities, Little-Known Near Disasters, and Modern Memory," in this volume.
20 Kelley, Shaping of the American Past, 659 (Alamogordo); Blum, The National Experience, 777 ("many" scientists).
21 Garraty, Short History of the American Nation, 472; Martin, America and Its People, 895, 897; Unger, These United States, 792; Wilson, The Pursuit of Liberty, 929-30; McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York, 1988), 97.
22 Davidson, Nation of Nations, 1076; Link, The American People, 746; Tindall, America, 1215.
23 David McCullough, Truman (New York, 1992), 436-44. For criticisms of Mc-Cullough's discussion of the atomic bomb decision see, for example, Walter Isaacson, "Where the Buck Stopped," Time, 29 June 1992, 80; and Gar Alperovitz and Kai Bird, "Giving Harry Hell," Nation, 10 May 1993, 640-1.
24 Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York, 1986); Peter Wyden, Day One: Before Hiroshima and After (New York, 1984).
25 Sara Evans and Roy Rosenzweig, "Textbooks and Teaching: Introduction," Journal of American History 78 (March 1992): 1377-9.