Dr John Lemza graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1976. He served over 20 years in the Army with more than eight years abroad in Asia and Europe. His last assignment was at the Pentagon. He graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University with an MA in history and from George Mason University with a PhD in history. His research interests are early American history, post-1945 America, the Cold War, the history of immigration, military history, and oral history. Dr Lemza currently teaches history at Virginia Commonwealth University. Since 2005 he has been a member of the Lifelong Learning Institute in Chesterfield, Virginia, and is on the teaching faculty. He also sits on the LLI Board of Directors and is currently serving as its president. In addition, Dr Lemza sits on the advisory council for the Virginia Center on Ageing. He has published three books, American Military Communities in West Germany: Life in the Cold War Badlands, 1945-1990 (2016), The Big Picture: The Cold War on the Small Screen (2021), and Charles A. Willoughby and the Anti-Communist Crusade (2024). His current book project is an investigative survey of 200 American and foreign films that portray key events during the Cold War. He and his wife presently reside in Midlothian, Virginia.
Dr John Lemza graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1976. He served over 20 years in the Army with more than eight years abroad in Asia and Europe. His last assignment was at the Pentagon. He graduated from Virginia...
Beware the Red Peril! was the clarion call of General Charles A. Willoughby at the close of World War II. The refrain echoed from Capitol Hill into American living rooms. For three decades after the war, the Old Right crusaded against global communist expansion, sniffing out internal and external threats to the American way of life. These...
Capitalizing on thousands of feet of accumulated footage captured by combat camera crews during the early years of the Korean War, a small group of US Army officers conceptualized a film series that would widen viewers’ understanding of the service and its mission. Their efforts produced the documentary television series that in late 1951 would...
On April 28, 1946, a small group of American wives and children arrived at the port of Bremerhaven, West Germany, the first of thousands of military family members to make the trans-Atlantic journey. They were the basis of a network of military communities--“Little Americas”--that would spread across the postwar German landscape. During a...
