Cold War Reckonings

Cold War Reckonings PDF Author: Jini Kim Watson
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 0823294846
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Honorable Mention, 2022 René Wellek Prize How did the Cold War shape culture and political power in decolonizing countries and give rise to authoritarian regimes in the so-called free world? Cold War Reckonings tells a new story about the Cold War and the global shift from colonialism to independent nation-states. Assembling a body of transpacific cultural works that speak to this historical conjuncture, Jini Kim Watson reveals autocracy to be not a deficient form of liberal democracy, but rather the result of Cold War entanglements with decolonization. Focusing on East and Southeast Asia, the book scrutinizes cultural texts ranging from dissident poetry, fiction, and writers’ conference proceedings of the Cold War period, to more recent literature, graphic novels, and films that retrospectively look back to these decades with a critical eye. Paying particular attention to anti-communist repression and state infrastructures of violence, the book provides a richaccount of several U.S.–allied Cold War regimes in the Asia Pacific, including the South Korean military dictatorship, Marcos’ rule in the Philippines, illiberal Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, and Suharto’s Indonesia. Watson’s book argues that the cultural forms and narrative techniques that emerged from the Cold War-decolonizing matrix offer new ways of comprehending these histories and connecting them to our present. The book advances our understanding of the global reverberations of the Cold War and its enduring influence on cultural and political formations in the Asia Pacific. Cold War Reckonings is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

Cold War Reckonings

Cold War Reckonings PDF Author: Jini Kim Watson
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 0823294846
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Get Book Here

Book Description
Honorable Mention, 2022 René Wellek Prize How did the Cold War shape culture and political power in decolonizing countries and give rise to authoritarian regimes in the so-called free world? Cold War Reckonings tells a new story about the Cold War and the global shift from colonialism to independent nation-states. Assembling a body of transpacific cultural works that speak to this historical conjuncture, Jini Kim Watson reveals autocracy to be not a deficient form of liberal democracy, but rather the result of Cold War entanglements with decolonization. Focusing on East and Southeast Asia, the book scrutinizes cultural texts ranging from dissident poetry, fiction, and writers’ conference proceedings of the Cold War period, to more recent literature, graphic novels, and films that retrospectively look back to these decades with a critical eye. Paying particular attention to anti-communist repression and state infrastructures of violence, the book provides a richaccount of several U.S.–allied Cold War regimes in the Asia Pacific, including the South Korean military dictatorship, Marcos’ rule in the Philippines, illiberal Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, and Suharto’s Indonesia. Watson’s book argues that the cultural forms and narrative techniques that emerged from the Cold War-decolonizing matrix offer new ways of comprehending these histories and connecting them to our present. The book advances our understanding of the global reverberations of the Cold War and its enduring influence on cultural and political formations in the Asia Pacific. Cold War Reckonings is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

Red Reckoning

Red Reckoning PDF Author: Mark Boulton
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807180815
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Though it ended more than thirty years ago, the Cold War still casts a long shadow over American society. Red Reckoning examines how the great ideological conflict of the twentieth century transformed the nation and forced Americans to reconsider almost every aspect of their society, culture, and identity. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the volume’s contributors examine a broad array of topics, including the Cold War’s impact on national security, race relations, gun culture and masculinity, law, college football, advertising, music, film, free speech, religion, and even board games. Above all, Red Reckoning brings a vitally important era back to life for those who lived through it and for students and scholars wishing to understand it.

Reckoning

Reckoning PDF Author: Neal F. Thompson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780615622729
Category : Cold War
Languages : en
Pages : 588

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Book Description
Cold War orthodoxy provides Americans with every reason to be proud of their "long twilight struggle" against Communism. It begins, of course, with Harry Truman, his heroic resistance to Soviet aggression in Europe, his defense of democracy in Korea and his opposition to the disastrous influence of McCarthyism, a malevolent force injected into "the bloodstream of the society" by the right in 1948. Moving on, orthodoxy teaches us of John Kennedy's doomed if honorable attempts to save an unsustainable ally in Southeast Asia, Lyndon Johnson's disastrous attempt to follow Kennedy's path and the courage and insight of those who saw the folly before them and led America out of this singularly unjust, ill-advised campaign. Orthodoxy ends with the West's final, brilliantly engineered triumph over Soviet Communism, which represents a splendid, bi-partisan accomplishment in which all Americans, left and right can take pride. This is all very nice if only it were true. Reckoning: Vietnam and America's Cold War Experience, 1945-1991, is a compelling exercise in saying things that, in George Orwell's words, it is "just not done to say" and identifying facts that have been hiding in plain sight-"elephants in the living room" as they are commonly known. Starting with the "Communist movement of the 1930s" and all that came with it, Reckoning chronicles the Soviets' massive North American espionage network, Truman's feckless response, his relentless obstruction of Congressional attempts to investigate these matters and his ruthless purge of leftists from the federal civil service, all of which combined to poison political discourse in this country for decades. Reckoning examines Truman's slaughterous, senseless campaign in Korea in all its folly and brutality-a campaign that led the United States directly into Southeast Asia-which, orthodoxy aside, was a war winnable within a reasonable definition of victory but fought ineffectively and lost by politicians like John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, whose every move was dictated by an obsessive fear of, in Johnson's words, "another Korea," which, although listed today in America's "win" column, had driven Truman from office with 22% poll ratings. Finally, Reckoning examines the campaign in Southeast Asia in full Cold War context, focusing on history rather than ideology and applying a single, reasonably objective set of standards to judge the conduct of enemies, allies and Americans from 1939 to the fall of the Soviet Union, demonstrating thereby that there is no intellectually honest way to condemn this country's war in Southeast Asia that does not serve to delegitimize the Truman Doctrine in its entirety. In short, if the Cold War, with the Truman Doctrine at its core, represents a just cause successfully concluded, as orthodoxy would have us believe, embracing America's ultimate victory over Communism while condemning the campaign in Southeast Asia is like accepting World War II as this country's finest hour while denouncing MacArthur's defense of and eventual return to the Philippines because the United States, having stepped into Spanish shoes as colonial occupier at the turn of the century, had no rightful presence or interests there. You might be surprised much of what you read here, but a paradigm shift in worldview awaits anyone willing to read Reckoning with an intellectually honest, open mind.

The Aesthetic Cold War

The Aesthetic Cold War PDF Author: Peter J. Kalliney
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691230641
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
How decolonization and the cold war influenced literature from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean How did superpower competition and the cold war affect writers in the decolonizing world? In The Aesthetic Cold War, Peter Kalliney explores the various ways that rival states used cultural diplomacy and the political police to influence writers. In response, many writers from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean—such as Chinua Achebe, Mulk Raj Anand, Eileen Chang, C.L.R. James, Alex La Guma, Doris Lessing, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, and Wole Soyinka—carved out a vibrant conceptual space of aesthetic nonalignment, imagining a different and freer future for their work. Kalliney looks at how the United States and the Soviet Union, in an effort to court writers, funded international conferences, arts centers, book and magazine publishing, literary prizes, and radio programming. International spy networks, however, subjected these same writers to surveillance and intimidation by tracking their movements, tapping their phones, reading their mail, and censoring or banning their work. Writers from the global south also suffered travel restrictions, deportations, imprisonment, and even death at the hands of government agents. Although conventional wisdom suggests that cold war pressures stunted the development of postcolonial literature, Kalliney's extensive archival research shows that evenly balanced superpower competition allowed savvy writers to accept patronage without pledging loyalty to specific political blocs. Likewise, writers exploited rivalries and the emerging discourse of human rights to contest the attentions of the political police. A revisionist account of superpower involvement in literature, The Aesthetic Cold War considers how politics shaped literary production in the twentieth century.

The Real History of the Cold War

The Real History of the Cold War PDF Author: Alan Axelrod
Publisher: Sterling Publishing Company, Inc.
ISBN: 9781402763021
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
Reveals the intriguing, suspenseful true story behind the globe-spanning battle of wills between the US and the Soviet Union after the fall of Nazi Germany.

The Cold War

The Cold War PDF Author: Elizabeth Sirimarco
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish
ISBN: 9780761416944
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
Presents the history of the Cold War through excerpts from letters, newspaper articles, speeches, and songs dating from the period. Includes review questions.

Reckonings

Reckonings PDF Author: Mary Fulbrook
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198811233
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 694

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Book Description
Reckonings documents how Holocaust victims have sought justice over the decades and the haunting disparity between crime and punishment.

The Global Cold War

The Global Cold War PDF Author: Odd Arne Westad
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521853648
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
The Cold War shaped the world we live in today - its politics, economics, and military affairs. This book shows how the globalization of the Cold War during the last century created the foundations for most of the key conflicts we see today, including the War on Terror. It focuses on how the Third World policies of the two twentieth-century superpowers - the United States and the Soviet Union - gave rise to resentments and resistance that in the end helped topple one superpower and still seriously challenge the other. Ranging from China to Indonesia, Iran, Ethiopia, Angola, Cuba, and Nicaragua, it provides a truly global perspective on the Cold War. And by exploring both the development of interventionist ideologies and the revolutionary movements that confronted interventions, the book links the past with the present in ways that no other major work on the Cold War era has succeeded in doing.

The Cold War

The Cold War PDF Author: Stephen E. Ambrose
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 030748307X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
Even fifteen years after the end of the Cold War, it is still hard to grasp that we no longer live under its immense specter. For nearly half a century, from the end of World War II to the early 1990s, all world events hung in the balance of a simmering dispute between two of the greatest military powers in history. Hundreds of millions of people held their collective breath as the United States and the Soviet Union, two national ideological entities, waged proxy wars to determine spheres of influence–and millions of others perished in places like Korea, Vietnam, and Angola, where this cold war flared hot. Such a consideration of the Cold War–as a military event with sociopolitical and economic overtones–is the crux of this stellar collection of twenty-six essays compiled and edited by Robert Cowley, the longtime editor of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. Befitting such a complex and far-ranging period, the volume’s contributing writers cover myriad angles. John Prados, in “The War Scare of 1983,” shows just how close we were to escalating a war of words into a nuclear holocaust. Victor Davis Hanson offers “The Right Man,” his pungent reassessment of the bellicose air-power zealot Curtis LeMay as a man whose words were judged more critically than his actions. The secret war also gets its due in George Feiffer’s “The Berlin Tunnel,” which details the charismatic C.I.A. operative “Big Bill” Harvey’s effort to tunnel under East Berlin and tap Soviet phone lines–and the Soviets’ equally audacious reaction to the plan; while “The Truth About Overflights,” by R. Cargill Hall, sheds light on some of the Cold War’s best-kept secrets. The often overlooked human cost of fighting the Cold War finds a clear voice in “MIA” by Marilyn Elkins, the widow of a Navy airman, who details the struggle to learn the truth about her husband, Lt. Frank C. Elkins, whose A-4 Skyhawk disappeared over Vietnam in 1966. In addition there are profiles of the war’s “front lines”–Dien Bien Phu, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay of Pigs–as well as of prominent military and civil leaders from both sides, including Harry S. Truman, Nikita Khrushchev, Dean Acheson, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Richard M. Nixon, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, and others. Encompassing so many perspectives and events, The Cold War succeeds at an impossible task: illuminating and explaining the history of an undeclared shadow war that threatened the very existence of humankind.

The Cold War

The Cold War PDF Author: John Lewis Gaddis
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440684502
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
“Outstanding . . . The most accessible distillation of that conflict yet written.” —The Boston Globe “Energetically written and lucid, it makes an ideal introduction to the subject.” —The New York Times The “dean of Cold War historians” (The New York Times) now presents the definitive account of the global confrontation that dominated the last half of the twentieth century. Drawing on newly opened archives and the reminiscences of the major players, John Lewis Gaddis explains not just what happened but why—from the months in 1945 when the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. went from alliance to antagonism to the barely averted holocaust of the Cuban Missile Crisis to the maneuvers of Nixon and Mao, Reagan and Gorbachev. Brilliant, accessible, almost Shakespearean in its drama, The Cold War stands as a triumphant summation of the era that, more than any other, shaped our own. Gaddis is also the author of On Grand Strategy.