Mr. Maurer
Am. History 3 6.0
Name: _______________________
“The World the War Made”
Excerpt Analysis
Instructions - In your notebook on your own paper, for each of the quotations below:
explain both the meaning and the significance of the quotation. What does it mean? What
does it tell us about World War II and the changes that it brought to the world?
1. (Paragraph 2) “High atop the big battleship’s flagstaff luffed the forty-eight-star flag that had
flown above the Capitol dome in Washington on December 7, 1941.”
2. (Paragraph 3) “One onlooking Japanese diplomat wondered ‘whether it would have been
possible for us, had we been victorious, to embrace the vanquished with a similar magnanimity.
clearly, it would have been different.’”
3. (Paragraph 4) “The conflict also marked the penultimate chapter in the history of Western
colonialism in Asia that had lasted since the fifteenth century.”
4. (Paragraph 5) “As for China, whose friendship had been the great goal of American
diplomacy before 1941, a friendship deemed so valuable as to set the United States on the
collision course with Japan that led to Pearl Harbor, there the results were peculiarly ironic, and
not a little bitter.”
5. (Paragraph 7) “The Americans surprised him, and perhaps themselves, by taking up Stalin’s
challenge, inaugurating the four and a half decades of Soviet-American confrontation known as
the Cold War, the unwanted war baby conceived in the fragile marriage of convenience that was
the Grand Alliance.”
6. (Paragraph 10) “In the mysterious zone where history mixes with memory to breed national
myths, Americans after 1945 enshrined another war altogether.”
7. (Paragraph 14) “Small wonder that Americans chose to think of it as the good war, It was a
war that had brought them as far as imagination could reach, and beyond…”
8. (Paragraph 16) “Somehow the good war had not settled things to the degree that Roosevelt
had promised. They had inherited a new world, and a brave one too. Like all worlds, it held its
share of peril as well as promise.”