After a devastating world war, culminating in the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was clear that the United States and the Soviet Union had to establish a cooperative order if the planet ...was to escape an atomic World War III.
In this provocative study, Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko show how the atomic bomb pushed the United States and the Soviet Union not toward cooperation but toward deep bipolar confrontation. Joseph Stalin, sure that the Americans meant to deploy their new weapon against Russia and defeat socialism, would stop at nothing to build his own bomb. Harry Truman, initially willing to consider cooperation, discovered that its pursuit would mean political suicide, especially when news of Soviet atomic spies reached the public. Both superpowers, moreover, discerned a new reality of the atomic age: now, cooperation must be total. The dangers posed by the bomb meant that intermediate measures of international cooperation would protect no one. Yet no two nations in history were less prepared to pursue total cooperation than were the United States and the Soviet Union. The logic of the bomb pointed them toward immediate Cold War.
When first published in 1976, Godfrey Hodgson's America in Our Time won immediate recognition as a major interpretive study of the postwar era. Although the termliberal consensus, or its ...approximation, had received some previous expression, Hodgson was responsible for its entry into the lexicon of American history. Yet what he considered a substantive phenomenon would inevitably become a controversial paradigm as a massive outpouring of literature cited evidence of a significant conservative presence at the grassroots level from the 1930s to the 1960s. Here, leading scholars-including Hodgson himself-confront the longstanding theory that a liberal consensus shaped the United States after World War II. The essays draw on fresh research to examine how the consensus related to key policy areas, how it was viewed by different factions and groups, what its limitations were, and why it fell apart in the late 1960s. They find that although elite politicians from both parties did share certain principles that gave direction to postwar America, the nation still experienced major political, cultural, and ideological conflict Identifying the forces at work that gave rise to a newly confident conservatism promoted by corporate leaders, Sunbelt boosters, and religious activists, the contributors offer new insights into the era and diverging opinions on one of the most influential interpretations of mid-twentieth-century U.S. history.
In the period from the end of World War II until his death, Stalin became an increasingly distrustful despot. He habitually picked on and humiliated members of his inner circle, had them guarded ...around the clock, had their correspondence decoded by secret police, bugged the lines of even his most senior deputies, and even drove several to the point of publicly betraying their spouses in order to prove their allegiance. This book argues that Stalin's behavior was not entirely paranoid and erratic but followed a clear political logic. This book contends that his system of leadership was at once both modern — Stalin vested authority in committees, elevated younger specialists, and made key institutional innovations — and patrimonial-repressive, informal, and based on personal loyalty. Always, Stalin's goal was to make the USSR a global power and, though the country teetered on the edge of violence during this period of acute domestic and international pressure, he succeeded in achieving superpower status and in holding on to power despite his old age and ill health.
America in the Forties is a readable and concise narrative that tells the story of the forties in the United States. The book argues that the forties were an important period in American life, shaped ...by charismatic, brilliant, and sometimes controversial leaders. It traces the entire decade from the first stirrings of war in a nation consumed by the Great Depression to fights with Europe and Japan and through the start of the Cold War and the dawn of the atomic age.
By 1945 Washington and London envisioned a new era in which the U.S. shouldered global responsibilities while Britain focused its regional interests narrowly. Mapping the End of Empire reveals how ...Anglo-American perceptions of geography and perspectives on the Muslim world shaped postcolonial futures from the Middle East to South Asia.
In this cultural history of the origins of the Cold War, John Fousek argues boldly that American nationalism provided the ideological glue for the broad public consensus that supported U.S. foreign ...policy in the Cold War era. From the late 1940s through the late 1980s, the United States waged cold war against the Soviet Union not primarily in the name of capitalism or Western civilization--neither of which would have united the American people behind the cause--but in the name of America.Through close readings of sources that range from presidential speeches and popular magazines to labor union debates and the African American press, Fousek shows how traditional nationalist ideas about national greatness, providential mission, and manifest destiny influenced postwar public culture and shaped U.S. foreign policy discourse during the crucial period from the end of World War II to the beginning of the Korean War. Ultimately, he says, in the atmosphere created by apparently unceasing international crises, Americans rallied around the flag, eventually coming to equate national loyalty with global anticommunism and an interventionist foreign policy.
Art and life in India have been inextricably intertwined from ancient times to the present day. Art as a way of life, as ritual, as decoration and as unity with the Sublime bore testament to the ...socio-cultural milieu; the high level of sophistication that developed in ancient India was reflected in the arts in a holistic light. The arts, thus, strived to hone man's intellectual sensibilities, thus raising him to the level of the transcendental, which in India was Brahma or ultimate reality. This book brings forth the popular theories of Indian aesthetics and Indian poetics.
In this book, Gary Donaldson argues that the 1952 presidential election, which exposed deep internal divisions on the left and the right, set the stage for the current U.S. political landscape. This ...book will prove an invaluable resource to readers, students, and scholars interested in rooting out the origins of our contemporary political landscape, on the right and the left.
The Hijacked War Cheng Chang, David
2019, 2020, 2020-01-07
eBook
The Korean War lasted for three years, one month, and two days—but armistice talks occupied more than two of those years, as 14,000 Chinese prisoners of war refused to return to Communist China, ...effectively hijacking the negotiations and thwarting the designs of world leaders at a pivotal moment in Cold War history. In The Hijacked War, David Cheng Chang vividly portrays the experiences of Chinese prisoners in the dark, cold, and damp tents of Koje and Cheju islands in Korea and how their decisions derailed the high politics being conducted in the corridors of power in Washington, Moscow, and Beijing. The Truman-Acheson administration's policies of voluntary repatriation and prisoner reindoctrination for psychological warfare purposes—the first overt and the second covert—had unintended consequences. The "success" of the reindoctrination program backfired when anti-Communist Chinese prisoners persuaded and coerced fellow Chinese prisoners to renounce their homeland, derailing negotiations between the U.S. and China and changing the course of the Cold War in East Asia. Drawing on newly declassified archival materials from China, Taiwan, and the United States and interviews with more than eighty surviving Chinese and North Korean prisoners of war, Chang depicts the struggle over prisoner repatriation that dominated the second half of the Korean War, from late 1951 to July 1953, in the prisoners' own words.
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