American–Soviet Cultural Diplomacy

American–Soviet Cultural Diplomacy PDF Author: Cadra Peterson McDaniel
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739199315
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
American–Soviet Cultural Diplomacy: The Bolshoi Ballet’s American Premiere is the first full-length examination of a Soviet cultural diplomatic effort. Following the signing of an American-Soviet cultural exchange agreement in the late 1950s, Soviet officials resolved to utilize the Bolshoi Ballet’s planned 1959 American tour to awe audiences with Soviet choreographers’ great accomplishments and Soviet performers’ superb abilities. Relying on extensive research, Cadra Peterson McDaniel examines whether the objectives behind Soviet cultural exchange and the specific aims of the Bolshoi Ballet’s 1959 American tour provided evidence of a thaw in American-Soviet relations. Interwoven throughout this study is an examination of the Soviets’ competing efforts to create ballets encapsulating Communist ideas while simultaneously reinterpreting pre-revolutionary ballets so that these works were ideologically acceptable. McDaniel investigates the rationale behind the creation of the Bolshoi’s repertoire and the Soviet leadership’s objectives and interpretation of the tour’s success as well as American response to the tour. The repertoire included the four ballets, Romeo and Juliet, Swan Lake, Giselle, and The Stone Flower, and two Highlights Programs, which included excerpts from various pre- and post-revolutionary ballets, operas, and dance suites. How the Americans and the Soviets understood the Bolshoi’s success provides insight into how each side conceptualized the role of the arts in society and in political transformation. American–Soviet Cultural Diplomacy: The Bolshoi Ballet’s American Premiere demonstrates the ballet’s role in Soviet foreign policy, a shift to "artful warfare," and thus emphasizes the significance of studying cultural exchange as a key aspect of Soviet foreign policy and analyzes the continued importance of the arts in twenty-first century Russian politics.

American–Soviet Cultural Diplomacy

American–Soviet Cultural Diplomacy PDF Author: Cadra Peterson McDaniel
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739199315
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Get Book Here

Book Description
American–Soviet Cultural Diplomacy: The Bolshoi Ballet’s American Premiere is the first full-length examination of a Soviet cultural diplomatic effort. Following the signing of an American-Soviet cultural exchange agreement in the late 1950s, Soviet officials resolved to utilize the Bolshoi Ballet’s planned 1959 American tour to awe audiences with Soviet choreographers’ great accomplishments and Soviet performers’ superb abilities. Relying on extensive research, Cadra Peterson McDaniel examines whether the objectives behind Soviet cultural exchange and the specific aims of the Bolshoi Ballet’s 1959 American tour provided evidence of a thaw in American-Soviet relations. Interwoven throughout this study is an examination of the Soviets’ competing efforts to create ballets encapsulating Communist ideas while simultaneously reinterpreting pre-revolutionary ballets so that these works were ideologically acceptable. McDaniel investigates the rationale behind the creation of the Bolshoi’s repertoire and the Soviet leadership’s objectives and interpretation of the tour’s success as well as American response to the tour. The repertoire included the four ballets, Romeo and Juliet, Swan Lake, Giselle, and The Stone Flower, and two Highlights Programs, which included excerpts from various pre- and post-revolutionary ballets, operas, and dance suites. How the Americans and the Soviets understood the Bolshoi’s success provides insight into how each side conceptualized the role of the arts in society and in political transformation. American–Soviet Cultural Diplomacy: The Bolshoi Ballet’s American Premiere demonstrates the ballet’s role in Soviet foreign policy, a shift to "artful warfare," and thus emphasizes the significance of studying cultural exchange as a key aspect of Soviet foreign policy and analyzes the continued importance of the arts in twenty-first century Russian politics.

Showcasing the Great Experiment

Showcasing the Great Experiment PDF Author: Michael David-Fox
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 019979457X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
Showcasing the Great Experiment provides the most far-reaching account of Soviet methods of cultural diplomacy innovated to influence Western intellectuals and foreign visitors. Probing the declassified records of agencies charged with crafting the international image of communism, it reinterprets one of the great cross-cultural and trans-ideological encounters of the twentieth century.

Cultural Exchange and the Cold War

Cultural Exchange and the Cold War PDF Author: Yale Richmond
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271031573
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Some fifty thousand Soviets visited the United States under various exchange programs between 1958 and 1988. They came as scholars and students, scientists and engineers, writers and journalists, government and party officials, musicians, dancers, and athletes—and among them were more than a few KGB officers. They came, they saw, they were conquered, and the Soviet Union would never again be the same. Cultural Exchange and the Cold War describes how these exchange programs (which brought an even larger number of Americans to the Soviet Union) raised the Iron Curtain and fostered changes that prepared the way for Gorbachev's glasnost, perestroika, and the end of the Cold War. This study is based upon interviews with Russian and American participants as well as the personal experiences of the author and others who were involved in or administered such exchanges. Cultural Exchange and the Cold War demonstrates that the best policy to pursue with countries we disagree with is not isolation but engagement.

Searching for a Cultural Diplomacy

Searching for a Cultural Diplomacy PDF Author: Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1845459946
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Recent studies on the meaning of cultural diplomacy in the twentieth century often focus on the United States and the Cold War, based on the premise that cultural diplomacy was a key instrument of foreign policy in the nation’s effort to contain the Soviet Union. As a result, the term “cultural diplomacy” has become one-dimensional, linked to political manipulation and subordination and relegated to the margin of diplomatic interactions. This volume explores the significance of cultural diplomacy in regions other than the United States or “western” countries, that is, regions that have been neglected by scholars so far—Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. By examining cultural diplomacy in these regions, the contributors show that the function of information and exchange programs differs considerably from area to area depending on historical circumstances and, even more importantly, on the cultural mindsets of the individuals involved.

Ballet in the Cold War

Ballet in the Cold War PDF Author: Anne Searcy
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190945109
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
This book tells the full story of the earliest Soviet-American ballet exchanges, in which the governments of the USSR and the United States sent their most prestigious ballet companies on tours to the other country. Author Anne Searcy draws on Soviet- and American- archival sources and shows the spectacular misunderstandings that happened when audiences trained to view one type of ballet saw a very different style.

Transmission Impossible

Transmission Impossible PDF Author: Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807141656
Category : Germany
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
"Containing a wealth of fresh information on the use of propaganda in the Cold War, the administrative structure of the U.S. occupation, Soviet-American conflicts, and Jewish biography, this book will be of interest to scholars of U.S. foreign relations, German history, occupation history, ethnicity, sociology, and culture."--BOOK JACKET.

Nikolai Bolkhovitinov and American Studies in the USSR

Nikolai Bolkhovitinov and American Studies in the USSR PDF Author: Sergei I. Zhuk
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498551254
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
This study is an intellectual biography of Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov (1930–2008), the prominent Soviet historian who was a pioneering scholar of US history and US–Russian relations. Alongside the personal history of Bolkhovitinov, this study also examines the broader social, cultural, and intellectual developments within the Americanist scholarly community in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Using archival documents, numerous studies by Russian and Ukrainian Americanists, various periodicals, personal correspondence, diaries, and more than one hundred interviews, it demonstrates how concepts, genealogies, and images of modernity shaped a national self-perception of the intellectual elites in both nations during the Cold War.

Dance for Export

Dance for Export PDF Author: Naima Prevots
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819573361
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
At the height of the Cold War in 1954, President Eisenhower inaugurated a program of cultural exchange that sent American dancers and other artists to political "hot spots" overseas. This peacetime gambit by a warrior hero was a resounding success. Among the artists chosen for international duty were José Limón, who led his company on the first government-sponsored tour of South America; Martha Graham, whose famed ensemble crisscrossed southeast Asia; Alvin Ailey, whose company brought audiences to their feet throughout the South Pacific; and George Balanchine, whose New York City Ballet crowned its triumphant visits to Western Europe and Japan with an epoch-making tour of the Soviet Union in 1962. The success of Eisenhower's program of cultural export led directly to the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts and Washington's Kennedy Center. Naima Prevots draws on an array of previously unexamined sources, including formerly classified State Department documents, congressional committee hearings, and the minutes of the Dance Panel, to reveal the inner workings of "Eisenhower's Program," the complex set of political, fiscal, and artistic interests that shaped it, and the ever-uneasy relationship between government and the arts in the US. CONTRIBUTORS: Eric Foner.

Cold War Modernists

Cold War Modernists PDF Author: Greg Barnhisel
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780231216593
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Cold War Modernists documents how the CIA, the State Department, and private cultural diplomats transformed modernist art and literature into pro-Western propaganda during the first decade of the Cold War.

Music in America's Cold War Diplomacy

Music in America's Cold War Diplomacy PDF Author: Danielle Fosler-Lussier
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520284135
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
"During the Cold War, thousands of musicians from the United States traveled the world under the sponsorship of the U.S. State Department's Cultural Presentations program. Using archival documents and newly collected oral histories, this study illuminates the reception of these musical events, for the practice of musical diplomacy on the ground sometimes differed substantially from what the department's planners envisioned. Performances of music in many styles--classical, rock 'n' roll, folk, blues, and jazz--were meant to compete with traveling Soviet and Chinese artists, enhancing the reputation of American culture. These concerts offered large audiences evidence of America's improving race relations, excellent musicianship, and generosity toward other peoples. Most important, these performances also built meaningful connections with people in other lands. Through personal contacts and the media, musical diplomacy created subtle musical, social, and political relationships on a global scale. Although these tours were sometimes conceived as propaganda ventures, their most important function was the building of imagined and real relationships, which constitute the essence of soft power"--Provided by publisher.