Word: americanize
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...comprehended just how immense his own deficit in Pacific-theater history was while making Saving Private Ryan. Around that time, novelist Nora Ephron (who wrote the screenplay for Sleepless in Seattle, which starred Hanks) sent him the two-volume, 1,882-page Library of America Reporting World War II: American Journalism (1938 to 1946) as a gift. Hanks grew intensely interested in all things related to the Pacific campaign - not necessarily the big names like Tojo or Ernest King, but the 3rd Marine Division, which was ambushed by snipers at Guam, or the intricacies of Operation Detachment at Iwo Jima...
...Occasionally, Hanks enjoyed a war thriller like Battle of the Bulge, but he much preferred the Three Stooges, James Bond and any film with Sophia Loren. Like a lot of Americans, he found memorizing historical facts boring. Because his family was directly related to Nancy Hanks Lincoln, mother of the 16th U.S. President, he routinely recycled the same short paper he had written about her for easy classroom grades. "My idea of American history was just a course you were forced to take," Hanks says, laughing. (See the top 10 Tom Hanks hairstyles...
...over the past two decades - from his movies Saving Private Ryan and Charlie Wilson's War to the HBO miniseries he has produced, From the Earth to the Moon, Band of Brothers, John Adams and The Pacific, which begins March 14 at 9 p.m. - Hanks has become American history's highest-profile professor, bringing a nuanced view of the past into the homes and lives of countless millions. (HBO is owned by TIME's parent company, Time Warner.) His view of American history is a mixture of idealism and realism, both of which have characterized all the work...
...lessons has changed. Band of Brothers, HBO's best-selling DVD to date, began airing two days before 9/11; The Pacific, his new 10-hour epic about the Pacific theater in World War II, plays out against a very different backdrop, when the country is weary of war and American exceptionalism is a much tougher sell. World War II in the European theater was a case of massive armies arrayed against an unambiguous evil. The Pacific war was mainly fought by isolated groups of men and was overlaid by a sense that our foes were fundamentally different from...
...Island-Hopping in the Pacific At school, all Hanks remembers learning about World War II was that Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese on December 7, 1941, and that the American revenge came on August 6, 1945, when Army pilot Paul Tibbets dropped an atomic bomb from the Enola Gay on Hiroshima. For Hanks, the U.S. armed forces' island-hopping - Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, among other bloody military engagements - was just a blur on a map that seemed impossibly exotic and faraway. "Strange to think that I've become the World War II guy," Hanks laughs...