Historiographical Trends
Scholarly works on the bombings have been influenced by several trends in historiography in the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Following the war, historicist methodologies retained preeminence. As the United States emerged victorious from what was largely regarded as a just war against clearly aggressive regimes in Germany and Japan, consensus history seemed primed for the same supremacy to which the nation itself was ascending. For twenty years following the war, a period of economic prosperity that one historian called “rather placid,” the vision of America as the champion of democracy in a growing global conflict with communism had broad appeal. As the 1950s gave way to the 1960s and the United States became increasingly embroiled in yet another conflict in Southeast Asia, a rising subculture of mistrust in traditional institutions and authority began to dominate academia. The “New Left,” or “Radical Historians” objected to traditionalist interpretations of the past, even progressive ones. Historians like Walter La Feber argued that U. S. foreign policy was dictated by the demands of capitalism and denied that the Soviet Union was a communist monolith intent on world domination.5 This revisionist perspective cast the triumphal leaders of the World War II era as aggressors, using America’s technological and industrial might to promote moneyed interests and confront Soviet “aggression,” which they believed was simply a natural reaction to U. S. attempts to maintain hegemony along its borders.
This wave of socially conscious scholarship found fertile ground in a nation preoccupied with what many viewed as an unjustified and increasingly costly war in Vietnam, and whose faith in its leadership was badly shaken by the Watergate scandal. Postmodernist interpretations seemed to fit a world where change was so rapid and widespread that continuity seemed not only elusive, but perhaps an illusion altogether.
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