America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe

America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe PDF Author: Volker R. Berghahn
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691102566
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
In 1958 an attempt was made to measure America's cultural impact on Europe, with the aim of determining whether efforts to improve opinions of American culture were succeeding. This work examines the triangular relationship between the producers of ideologies, corporate America and policymakers.

America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe

America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe PDF Author: Volker R. Berghahn
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691102566
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
In 1958 an attempt was made to measure America's cultural impact on Europe, with the aim of determining whether efforts to improve opinions of American culture were succeeding. This work examines the triangular relationship between the producers of ideologies, corporate America and policymakers.

America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe

America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe PDF Author: Volker R. Berghahn
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691186189
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
In 1958, Shepard Stone, then directing the Ford Foundation's International Affairs program, suggested that his staff "measure" America's cultural impact in Europe. He wanted to determine whether efforts to improve opinions of American culture were yielding good returns. Taking Stone's career as a point of departure and frequent return, Volker Berghahn examines the triangular relationship between the producers of ideas and ideologies, corporate America, and Washington policymakers at a peculiar juncture of U.S. history. He also looks across the Atlantic, at the Western European intellectuals, politicians, and businessmen with whom these Americans were in frequent contact. While shattered materially and psychologically by World War II, educated Europeans did not shed their opinions about the inferiority, vulgarity, and commercialism of American culture. American elites--particularly the East Coast establishment--deeply resented this condescension. They believed that the United States had two culture wars to win: one against the Soviet Bloc as part of the larger struggle against communism and the other against deeply rooted negative views of America as a civilization. To triumph, they spent large sums of money on overt and covert activities, from tours of American orchestras to the often secret funding of European publications and intellectual congresses by the CIA. At the center of these activities were the Ford Foundation, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and Washington's agents of cultural diplomacy. This was a world of Ivy League academics and East Coast intellectuals, of American philanthropic organizations and their backers in big business, of U.S. government agencies and their counterparts across the Atlantic. This book uses Shepard Stone as a window to this world in which the European-American relationship was hammered out in cultural terms--an arena where many of the twentieth century's major intellectual trends and conflicts unfolded.

Cold Wars

Cold Wars PDF Author: Lorenz M. Lüthi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108418333
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 775

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Book Description
A new interpretation of the Cold War from the perspective of the smaller and middle powers in Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History

The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History PDF Author: Dan Stone
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199560986
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 796

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Book Description
The postwar period is no longer current affairs but is becoming the recent past. As such, it is increasingly attracting the attentions of historians. Whilst the Cold War has long been a mainstay of political science and contemporary history, recent research approaches postwar Europe in many different ways, all of which are represented in the 35 chapters of this book. As well as diplomatic, political, institutional, economic, and social history, the The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History contains chapters which approach the past through the lenses of gender, espionage, art and architecture, technology, agriculture, heritage, postcolonialism, memory, and generational change, and shows how the history of postwar Europe can be enriched by looking to disciplines such as anthropology and philosophy. The Handbook covers all of Europe, with a notable focus on Eastern Europe. Including subjects as diverse as the meaning of 'Europe' and European identity, southern Europe after dictatorship, the cultural meanings of the bomb, the 1968 student uprisings, immigration, Americanization, welfare, leisure, decolonization, the Wars of Yugoslav Succession, and coming to terms with the Nazi past, the thirty five essays in this Handbook offer an unparalleled coverage of postwar European history that offers far more than the standard Cold War framework. Readers will find self-contained, state-of-the-art analyses of major subjects, each written by acknowledged experts, as well as stimulating and novel approaches to newer topics. Combining empirical rigour and adventurous conceptual analysis, this Handbook offers in one substantial volume a guide to the numerous ways in which historians are now rewriting the history of postwar Europe.

The Cultural Cold War

The Cultural Cold War PDF Author: Frances Stonor Saunders
Publisher: New Press, The
ISBN: 1595589147
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
During the Cold War, freedom of expression was vaunted as liberal democracy’s most cherished possession—but such freedom was put in service of a hidden agenda. In The Cultural Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders reveals the extraordinary efforts of a secret campaign in which some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West were working for or subsidized by the CIA—whether they knew it or not. Called "the most comprehensive account yet of the [CIA’s] activities between 1947 and 1967" by the New York Times, the book presents shocking evidence of the CIA’s undercover program of cultural interventions in Western Europe and at home, drawing together declassified documents and exclusive interviews to expose the CIA’s astonishing campaign to deploy the likes of Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, Robert Lowell, George Orwell, and Jackson Pollock as weapons in the Cold War. Translated into ten languages, this classic work—now with a new preface by the author—is "a real contribution to popular understanding of the postwar period" (The Wall Street Journal), and its story of covert cultural efforts to win hearts and minds continues to be relevant today.

The Shock of America

The Shock of America PDF Author: David Ellwood
Publisher: Oxford University Press (UK)
ISBN: 0198228791
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 599

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Book Description
An ambitious, original book describing a century of Europe coping with America: its inventions, personalities, films, armies, business, and politics. These decades reveal how much emotional energy Europeans invested in finding their own ways to reconcile tradition and modernity under the pressure of the ever-evolving American challenge.

The Dancer Defects

The Dancer Defects PDF Author: David Caute
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 9780191554582
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 828

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Book Description
The cultural Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West was without precedent. At the outset of this original and wide-ranging historical survey, David Caute establishes the nature of the extraordinary cultural competition set up post-1945 between Moscow, New York, London and Paris, with the most intimate frontier war staged in the city of Berlin. Using sources in four languages, the author of The Fellow-Travellers and The Great Fear explores the cultural Cold War as it rapidly penetrated theatre, film, classical music, popular music, ballet, painting and sculpture, as well as propaganda by exhibition. Major figures central to Cold War conflict in the theatre include Brecht, Miller, Sartre, Camus, Havel, Ionesco, Stoppard and Konstantin Simonov, whose inflammatory play, The Russian Question, occupies a chapter of its own based on original archival research. Leading film directors involved included Eisenstein, Romm, Chiarueli, Aleksandrov, Kazan, Tarkovsky and Wajda. In the field of music, the Soviet Union in the Zhdanov era vigorously condemned 'modernism', 'formalism', and the avant-garde. A chapter is devoted to the intriguing case of Dmitri Shostakovich, and the disputed authenticity of his 'autobiography' Testimony. Meanwhile in the West the Congress for Cultural Freedom was sponsoring the modernist composers most vehemently condemned by Soviet music critics; Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Hindemith among them. Despite constant attempts at repression, the Soviet Party was unable to check the appeal of jazz on the Voice of America, then rock music, to young Russians. Visits to the West by the Bolshoi and Kirov ballet companines, the pride of the USSR, were fraught with threats of cancellation and the danger of defection. Considering the case of Rudolf Nureyev, Caute pours cold water on overheated speculations about KGB plots to injure him and other defecting dancers. Turning to painting, where socialist realism prevailed in Russia, and the impressionist heritage was condemned, Caute explores the paradox of Picasso's membership of the French Communist Party. Re-assessing the extent of covert CIA patronage of abstract expressionism (Pollock, De Kooning), Caute finds that the CIA's role has been much exaggerated, likewise the dominance of the New York School. Caute challenges some recent, one-dimensional, American accounts of 'Cold War culture', which ignore not only the Soviet performance but virtually any cultural activity outside the USA. The West presented its cultural avant-garde as evidence of liberty, even through monochrome canvases and dodecaphonic music appealed only to a minority audience. Soviet artistic standards and teaching levels were exceptionally high, but the fear of freedom and innovation virtually guaranteed the moral defeat which accelerated the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Tomorrow, the World

Tomorrow, the World PDF Author: Stephen Wertheim
Publisher: Belknap Press
ISBN: 067424866X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year “Even in these dismal times genuinely important books do occasionally make their appearance...You really ought to read it...A tour de force...While Wertheim is not the first to expose isolationism as a carefully constructed myth, he does so with devastating effect.” —Andrew J. Bacevich, The Nation For most of its history, the United States avoided making political and military commitments that would entangle it in power politics. Then, suddenly, it conceived a new role for itself as an armed superpower—and never looked back. In Tomorrow, the World, Stephen Wertheim traces America’s transformation to World War II, right before the attack on Pearl Harbor. As late as 1940, the small coterie formulating U.S. foreign policy wanted British preeminence to continue. Axis conquests swept away their assumptions, leading them to conclude that America should extend its form of law and order across the globe, and back it at gunpoint. No one really favored “isolationism”—a term introduced by advocates of armed supremacy to burnish their cause. We live, Wertheim warns, in the world these men created. A sophisticated and impassioned account that questions the wisdom of U.S. supremacy, Tomorrow, the World reveals the intellectual path that brought us to today’s endless wars. “Its implications are invigorating...Wertheim opens space for Americans to reexamine their own history and ask themselves whether primacy has ever really met their interests.” —New Republic “For almost 80 years now, historians and diplomats have sought not only to describe America’s swift advance to global primacy but also to explain it...Any writer wanting to make a novel contribution either has to have evidence for a new interpretation, or at least be making an older argument in some improved and eye-catching way. Tomorrow, the World does both.” —Paul Kennedy, Wall Street Journal

Europe in Crisis

Europe in Crisis PDF Author: Mark Hewitson
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857457276
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
The period between 1917 and 1957, starting with the birth of the USSR and the American intervention in the First World War and ending with the Treaty of Rome, is of the utmost importance for contextualizing and understanding the intellectual origins of the European Community. During this time of 'crisis,' many contemporaries, especially intellectuals, felt they faced a momentous decision which could bring about a radically different future. The understanding of what Europe was and what it should be was questioned in a profound way, forcing Europeans to react. The idea of a specifically European unity finally became, at least for some, a feasible project, not only to avoid another war but to avoid the destruction of the idea of European unity. This volume reassesses the relationship between ideas of Europe and the European project and reconsiders the impact of long and short-term political transformations on assumptions about the continent's scope, nature, role and significance.

Europe in the Era of Two World Wars

Europe in the Era of Two World Wars PDF Author:
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400832616
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
How and why did Europe spawn dictatorships and violence in the first half of the twentieth century, and then, after 1945 in the west and after 1989 in the east, create successful civilian societies? In this book, Volker Berghahn explains the rise and fall of the men of violence whose wars and civil wars twice devastated large areas of the European continent and Russia--until, after World War II, Europe adopted a liberal capitalist model of society that had first emerged in the United States, and the beginnings of which the Europeans had experienced in the mid-1920s. Berghahn begins by looking at how the violence perpetrated in Europe's colonial empires boomeranged into Europe, contributing to the millions of casualties on the battlefields of World War I. Next he considers the civil wars of the 1920s and the renewed rise of militarism and violence in the wake of the Great Crash of 1929. The second wave of even more massive violence crested in total war from 1939 to 1945 that killed more civilians than soldiers, and this time included the industrialized murder of millions of innocent men, women, and children in the Holocaust. However, as Berghahn concludes, the alternative vision of organizing a modern industrial society on a civilian basis--in which people peacefully consume mass-produced goods rather than being 'consumed' by mass-produced weapons--had never disappeared. With the United States emerging as the hegemonic power of the West, it was this model that finally prevailed in Western Europe after 1945 and after the end of the Cold War in Eastern Europe as well.