Maria Höhn's study of American garrison towns in the agrarian and small town regions of the German Rhineland-Palatine in the 1950s fits well with the innovative approaches developed since the 1980s by other Anglo-Saxon historians of Germany. These scholars have focused on reconstructing postfascist and postwar Germans' mentalities, and the cultural expressions thereof, in both East and West. In this context, ordinary Germans' perspectives on the American victors were crucial—and nowhere can these be studied more closely than in those regions of Germany where U.S. troops were encountered first as conquerors, then as occupiers, and eventually as part of NATO troops defending Western Europe during the Cold War. In exploring these encounters in the villages and small towns of Rhineland-Palatine, where the largest contingents of Americans were stationed and where they outnumbered Germans by up to twelve to one, Maria Höhn has found an ideal place for studying German-American postwar relations. She asks how Germans experienced this peaceful “invasion” and how this experience led to interpretations of both the Americans and the national self. How did these encounters change the Germans over time, and especially during the 1950s, a time of social, economic, and national reconstruction in Germany?