Witness To The Twentieth Century.

Witness To The Twentieth Century

Theodore McNelly

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Also available in a hardcover edition (141346552, $31.99), Witness To The Twentieth Century is Theodore McNelly's autobiography and describes his life as a student of music and French, and how he became a leading American authority on Japanese politics and the Japanese constitution. McNelly came by his interest in Japanese culture from his mother who had been born in Japan to American missionary parents. It was his grandfather who first explained to him Japan's imperial constitution which was adopted in 1889 during his grandfather's residence in Japan. Witness To The Twentieth Century is also an account of how McNelly's father, mother, and three siblings were able to sustain a middle class life style, even after his father's death and the years of the Great Depression. McNelly recounts how his performance as an operatic singer won him a four-year scholarship at the University of Wisconsin and the number of important roles he performed. McNelly goes on to discuss his training and experience with foreign languages which resulted in his recruitment by the U.S. Signal Intelligence Service during World War II. After the war he was involved in the civil intelligence section of General MacArthur's Tokyo headquarters during the occupation. McNelly's "insider" account of the formation of Japan's postwar democratic constitution, his years of teaching courses in politics and history at American military bases in German, France, England, Japan, Okinawa, and Korea, his side trips to the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, his articulate descriptions of the effects of World War II on the peoples of these lands, his interpretation of the collapse of the Fourth Republic of France, his thirty-year career as a professor at the University of Maryland at College Park, and so much more, prove the reader with a fascinating perspective on key events of the twentieth century. This is an outstanding memoir and a recommended addition to academic library Biography collections and Japanese History supplemental reading lists.