As more and more people are questioning the assumptions of present U.S. foreign policy they are reexamining the roots of these policies in the diplomacy of the Cold War. This scrutiny has made the ...origins of the Cold War the most controversial issue in American diplomatic history. Now a complete new dimension has been added to the debate by the charges leveled by Robert James Maddox inThe New Left and the Origins of the Cold War.
How did the Cold War begin? Who or what was responsible? Could it have been avoided? Was it a temporary condition created by a combination of individual personalities and historical factors, or did it represent the clash of fundamentally irreconcilable political systems? The orthodox explanation of the Cold War is that it was "the brave and essential response of free men to Communist aggression." A number of scholars more or less identified with the New Left have challenged the conventional explanation by asserting that the U.S. bears the major responsibility for its onset. One group of revisionists sees this as the result of a failure of statesmanship on the part of Truman and the advisors around him, the other that the Cold War was the inevitable result of the American system as it developed over the years.
Their conclusions have often been challenged in matters of interpretation. Robert Maddox, however, believes that an examination of themannerin which new interpretations are reached should precede dialogues over the ideas themselves. Consequently he has examined seven of the most prominent New Left works:The Tragedy of American Diplomacyby William Appleman Williams;The Cold War and Its Originsby D. F. Fleming;Atomic Diplomacyby Gar Alperovitz;The Free World Colossusby David Horowitz;The Politics of Warby Gabriel Kolko;Yaltaby Diane Shaver Clemens; andArchitects of Illusionby Lloyd C. Gardner. After detailed comparisons of the evidence they present with the sources from which it was taken, he concludes that these books are based on pervasive misuse of the source materials and fail to measure up to the most elementary standards of good scholarship.
Originally published in 1974.
ThePrinceton Legacy Libraryuses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
The US Army 7708 War Crimes Group investigated atrocities committed in Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II. These young Americans - many barely out of their teens - gathered ...evidence, interviewed witnesses, apprehended suspects and prosecuted defendants at trials held at Dachau. This book tells the story of the WCG.
For much of the twentieth century the Mediterranean was a colonized
sea. Italy's Sea: Empire and Nation in the Mediterranean
(1895-1945) reintegrates Italy, one of the least studied
imperial states, ...into the history of European colonialism. It takes
a critical approach to the concept of the Mediterranean in the
period of Italian expansion and examines how within and through the
Mediterranean Italians navigated issues of race, nation and
migration troubling them at home as well as transnational questions
about sovereignty, identity, and national belonging created by the
decline and collapse of the Ottoman empire in North Africa, the
Balkans, and the eastern Mediterranean, or Levant. While most
studies of Italian colonialism center on the encounter in Africa,
Italy's Sea describes another set of colonial identities
that accrued in and around the Aegean region of the Mediterranean,
ones linked not to resettlement projects or to the rhetoric of
reclaiming Roman empire, but to cosmopolitan imaginaries of Magna
Graecia, the medieval Christian crusades, the Venetian and Genoese
maritime empires, and finally, of religious diversity and
transnational Levantine Jewish communities that could help render
cultural and political connections between the Italian nation at
home and the overseas empire in the Mediterranean. Using
postcolonial critique to interpret local archival and oral sources
as well as Italian colonial literature, film, architecture, and
urban planning, the book brings to life a history of
mediterraneità or Mediterraneanness in Italian culture,
one with both liberal and fascist associations, and enriches our
understanding of how contemporary Italy-as well as Greece-may
imagine their relationships to Europe and the Mediterranean today.
This article uses a detailed examination of British policy towards the occupation zone in Germany after World War II as a lens through which to illuminate enduring elements of structural and ...functional continuity in British foreign policy-making. Many of the problems facing British policy-makers in the post-World War II era replicated those relating to the occupation of the Rhineland and Ruhr in the early 1920s. Analysing the response of British policy-making to these resonances highlights underlying thematic trends in overall British foreign policy. The areas of continuity revealed challenge traditional historiographical views that foreign policy was shaped by elite group thinking in the Foreign Office. This article also evaluates British foreign policy in the light of recent developments in the historiography of the Cold War. Recent scholarship emphasises the multi-faceted and organic nature of the Cold War and highlights the difficulties involved in approaching issues such as ideology when the states involved were varied and had different infrastructures, cultures and foreign policy traditions and systems. By drawing out deeper resonances in foreign policy-making, this article contributes to a deeper understanding of the culture and tensions through which British policy was generated in the post-World War II period.
This is a major new account of the Soviet occupation of postwar Germany and the beginning of the Cold War. Dr Filip Slaveski shows how in the immediate aftermath of war the Red Army command struggled ...to contain the violence of soldiers against German civilians and, at the same time, feed and rebuild the country. This task was then assumed by the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SVAG) which was established to impose order on this chaos. Its attempt, however, intensified the battle for resources and power among competing occupation organs, especially SVAG and the army, which spilled over from threats and sabotage into fighting and shootouts in the streets. At times, such conflicts threatened to paralyse occupation governance, leaving armed troops, liberated POWs and slave labourers free to roam. SVAG's successes in reducing the violence and reconstructing eastern Germany were a remarkable achievement in the chaotic aftermath of war.
Security apparatus was a very important vehicle which was used by communists during the fight for power after II World War. Thousands of functionaries needed the appropriate schooling. During ...1945–1947 they were trained by Central School of Ministry of Public Security in Łódź. The lecturers in this School were the prewar Polish communists and so-called „kujbyszewiacy” – the graduates from NKVD People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs – a course which was organized in the period between April–July 1944 in the Soviet town Kuybyshev on the river Volga. The personnel was characterized by young age and lack of professional experience. Therefore their usefulness for education of functionaries of security apparatus in the postwar Poland was minore.
Wohl kaum eine Ereignis der deutschen Geschichte hatte so vielfältige und weitreichende Folgen wie das Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges. Der Schock produzierte eine wahre Flut an Überlegungen, ...Planspielen und Denkschriften, die sich immer wieder mit der Frage der politischen, gesellschaftlichen und moralischen Erneuerung beschäftigten. Weitgehend unbekannt sind in diesem Zusammenhang die heftigen Diskussionen geblieben, die seit Sommer 1945 im deutschen Südwesten entbrannten. Katholische Intellektuelle und Honoratioren sahen nun den Zeitpunkt gekommen, die nationale Bindung aufzugeben; an die Stelle eines preußisch-kleindeutschen Reichs sollte eine stammesföderalistisch geprägte Neugliederung treten. Überlegungen dieser Art lassen sich bereits vor 1933 zwischen Lörrach, Konstanz und Karlsruhe, aber auch bis Augsburg und Bregenz nachweisen. Zusätzliche schien die Aufteilung der Länder Baden und Württemberg durch die französische und amerikanische Besatzungszone, die Chance für eine völlig neue Grenzziehung zu erhöhen. Auf der Basis unbekannter französischer, deutschen, schweizerischer und österreichischer Quellen sowie bislang unzugänglicher Privatnachlässe schildert der Autor minutiös den Verlauf der Diskussion und die Visionen der wichtigsten Wortführer.
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