African Americans and the Pacific War, 1941-1945

Chris Dixon is Professor of History at Macquarie University, Sydney. His publications include African America and Haiti: Emigration and Black Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (2000), Perfecting the Family: Antislavery Marriages in Nineteenth-Century America (1997), and Hollywood's South Seas and the Pacific War: Searching for Dorothy Lamour (with Sean Brawley, 2012).

• Introduction; 1. 'Jim Crow on the run': Black America, Pearl Harbor, and the patriotic imperative; 2. The segregated South Seas: hierarchies of race in the Pacific War; 3. A sexualized South Seas?: intersections of race and gender in the Pacific theater; 4. Nourishing the tree of democracy: Black Americans in White Australia; 5. Behaving like men: race, masculinity, and the politics of combat, 6. Liberators and occupiers: African Americans and the Pacific War aftermath; Conclusion.

'Chris Dixon shines a brilliant new light on how the experience of African American soldiers in the Pacific during World War Two significantly differed from that in Europe. Probing the complexity of how blacks related to other peoples of color in the Pacific, he illuminates the distinctive character of American racism - and its persistence - not only with white American soldiers, but also in interaction with non-whites from other nations.' William Chafe, Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of History, Emeritus, Duke University, North Carolina