"Until now, the story of America's role in World War II has been presented primarily through the lives of powerful policymakers and generals, or through the heroism of American soldiers of predominantly European ancestry. Historian Ronald Takaki's multicultural history offers a different perspective. In Double Victory, history is told through the lives of ordinary, ethnically diverse Americans - a Tuskegee pilot wanting to fly and fight for freedom, a Navajo code talker using his native language to transmit battle messages, a Mexican-American woman riveting B-29 bombers in an airplane factory, a Japanese American feeling betrayed by his own government, and a Jewish-American soldier at Buchenwald pressing human ashes into his palm so that he would never forget what he had seen." "What emerges from Takaki's study is the affirming story of how minorities fought for a "double victory" against fascism abroad and prejudice at home."--BOOK JACKET.

1. Introduction: A Different Memory -- 2. A Declaration of War: "Double Victory" -- 3. "Bomb the Color Line": The War Against Jim Crow -- 4. The Original Americans: From Battlefields to Ceremonies -- 5. A Dream of El Norte: Crossing the Tracks -- 6. Diversity and Its Discontents: Who Is an American? -- 7. Remembering Pearl Harbor: From Internment to Hiroshima -- 8. Struggling for a World of "No Race Prejudice": Jewish Americans and the Holocaust -- 9. A Multicultural "Manifest Destiny": We Are "Not a Narrow Tribe"