Author: Markus Furrer
Publisher: Wochenschau Verlag
ISBN: 3734404304
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
Perceptions and images of the Cold War as they appear in textbooks, in the classroom but also in public and in the scientific discourse are topic of this volume "Remembering and Recounting the Cold War – Commonly Shared History?". These perceptions and images are particularly interesting because they are part of the communicative memory and are thus in the process of undergoing change. It is also the task of history didactics, here understood as a science concerned with investigating, theorizing on and staging the way of how people and societies deal with history and memories, to describe, to analyze and to interpret such moldings of teaching cultures, memory cultures and, of course, individual and collective views of this era.
Author: Jon Wiener
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520271416
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
“Here’s a book that would've split the sides of Thucydides. Wiener’s magical mystery tour of Cold War museums is simultaneously hilarious and the best thing ever written on public history and its contestation.“ —Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz “Jon Wiener, an astute observer of how history is perceived by the general public, shows us how official efforts to shape popular memory of the Cold War have failed. His journey across America to visit exhibits, monuments, and other historical sites, demonstrates how quickly the Cold War has faded from popular consciousness. A fascinating and entertaining book.” —Eric Foner, author of Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 "In How We Forgot the Cold War, Jon Wiener shows how conservatives tried—and failed—to commemorate the Cold War as a noble victory over the global forces of tyranny, a 'good war' akin to World War II. Displaying splendid skills as a reporter in addition to his discerning eye as a scholar, this historian's travelogue convincingly shows how the right sought to extend its preferred policy of 'rollback' to the arena of public memory. In a country where historical memory has become an obsession, Wiener’s ability to document the ambiguities and absences in these commemorations is an unusual accomplishment.” —Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America “In this terrific piece of scholarly journalism, Jon Wiener imaginatively combines scholarship on the Cold War, contemporary journalism, and his own observations of various sites commemorating the era to describe both what they contain and, just as importantly, what they do not. By interrogating the standard conservative brand of American triumphalism, Wiener offers an interpretation of the Cold War that emphasizes just how unnecessary the conflict was and how deleterious its aftereffects have really been.”—Ellen Schrecker, author of Many Are The Crimes: McCarthyism in America
Author: Marie Cronqvist
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030842819
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259
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Book Description
This open access edited collection brings together established and new perspectives on Cold War civil defence in Western Europe within a common analytical framework that also facilitates comparative and transnational dimensions. The current interest in creating disaster-resilient societies demands new histories of civil defence. Historical contextualization is essential in order to understand what is at stake in preparing, devising, and implementing forms of preparedness, protection, and security that are specifically targeted at societies and citizens. Applying the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries to civil defence history, the chapters of this volume cover a range of new themes, from technology and materiality to media, memory, and everyday experience. The book underlines the social embeddedness of civil defence by detailing how it both prompted new forms of social interaction and reflected norms and visions of the ‘good society’ in an age where nuclear technology seemed to hold the key to both doom and salvation.
Author: Barbara Christophe
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030119998
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 471
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Book Description
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book explores how the socially disputed period of the Cold War is remembered in today’s history classroom. Applying a diverse set of methodological strategies, the authors map the dividing lines in and between memory cultures across the globe, paying special attention to the impact the crisis-driven age of our present has on images of the past. Authors analysing educational media point to ambivalence, vagueness and contradictions in textbook narratives understood to be echoes of societal and academic controversies. Others focus on teachers and the history classroom, showing how unresolved political issues create tensions in history education. They render visible how teachers struggle to handle these challenges by pretending that what they do is ‘just history’. The contributions to this book unveil how teachers, backgrounding the political inherent in all memory practices, often nourish the illusion that the history in which they are engaged is all about addressing the past with a reflexive and disciplined approach.
Author: Mark Kramer
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 179363193X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 645
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Book Description
The Soviet Union and Cold War Neutrality and Nonalignment in Europe examines how the neutral European countries and the Soviet Union interacted after World War II. Amid the Cold War division of Europe into Western and Eastern blocs, several long-time neutral countries abandoned neutrality and joined NATO. Other countries remained neutral but were still perceived as a threat to the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. Based on extensive archival research, this volume offers state-of-the-art essays about relations between Europe’s neutral states and the Soviet Union during the Cold War and how these relations were perceived by other powers.
Author: Anna Koch
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110672650
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332
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Book Description
Even before World War II had ended, survivors, historians, writers, and artists tried to make sense of the Holocaust. To do so, they relied on belief systems and narratives that, as the bloc confrontation intensified, were increasingly shaped by Cold War thinking. Foregrounding the Cold War's role in shaping Holocaust memory, this book highlights how the global conflict between East and West influenced research, legal proceedings, and collective as well as individual memories of the murder of European Jews. Contributions focusing on different parts of the world reveal commonalities, differences, and entanglements between Eastern and Western memories of the Holocaust. Examining Holocaust memory from various disciplinary perspectives, the authors highlight the many ways in which scholars, writers, artists, and survivors both countered and contributed to dominant narratives shaped by oppositional ideological stances. While such distinct ideological positions often mattered greatly, at other times a shared interest in bringing perpetrators to justice, commemorating victims, and providing testimony to the atrocities committed against Europe's Jews led to cooperation and exchange across the Iron Curtain.
Author: Benn Steil
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198757913
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 621
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Book Description
Traces the history of the Marshall Plan and the efforts to reconstruct western Europe as a bulwark against communist authoritarianism during a two-year period that saw the collapse of postwar U.S.-Soviet relations and the beginning of the Cold War.
Author: Alice Fahs
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807875813
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297
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Book Description
The Civil War retains a powerful hold on the American imagination, with each generation since 1865 reassessing its meaning and importance in American life. This volume collects twelve essays by leading Civil War scholars who demonstrate how the meanings of the Civil War have changed over time. The essays move among a variety of cultural and political arenas--from public monuments to parades to political campaigns; from soldiers' memoirs to textbook publishing to children's literature--in order to reveal important changes in how the memory of the Civil War has been employed in American life. Setting the politics of Civil War memory within a wide social and cultural landscape, this volume recovers not only the meanings of the war in various eras, but also the specific processes by which those meanings have been created. By recounting the battles over the memory of the war during the last 140 years, the contributors offer important insights about our identities as individuals and as a nation. Contributors: David W. Blight, Yale University Thomas J. Brown, University of South Carolina Alice Fahs, University of California, Irvine Gary W. Gallagher, University of Virginia J. Matthew Gallman, University of Florida Patrick J. Kelly, University of Texas, San Antonio Stuart McConnell, Pitzer College James M. McPherson, Princeton University Joan Waugh, University of California, Los Angeles LeeAnn Whites, University of Missouri Jon Wiener, University of California, Irvine
Author: Thomas Reed
Publisher: Presidio Press
ISBN: 0307414620
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386
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Book Description
“The Cold War . . . was a fight to the death,” notes Thomas C. Reed, “fought with bayonets, napalm, and high-tech weaponry of every sort—save one. It was not fought with nuclear weapons.” With global powers now engaged in cataclysmic encounters, there is no more important time for this essential, epic account of the past half century, the tense years when the world trembled At the Abyss. Written by an author who rose from military officer to administration insider, this is a vivid, unvarnished view of America’s fight against Communism, from the end of WWII to the closing of the Strategic Air Command, a work as full of human interest as history, rich characters as bloody conflict. Among the unforgettable figures who devised weaponry, dictated policy, or deviously spied and subverted: Whittaker Chambers—the translator whose book, Witness, started the hunt for bigger game: Communists in our government; Lavrenti Beria—the head of the Soviet nuclear weapons program who apparently killed Joseph Stalin; Col. Ed Hall—the leader of America’s advanced missile system, whose own brother was a Soviet spy; Adm. James Stockwell—the prisoner of war and eventual vice presidential candidate who kept his terrible secret from the Vietnamese for eight long years; Nancy Reagan—the “Queen of Hearts,” who was both loving wife and instigator of palace intrigue in her husband’s White House. From Eisenhower’s decision to beat the Russians at their own game, to the “Missile Gap” of the Kennedy Era, to Reagan’s vow to “lean on the Soviets until they go broke”—all the pivotal events of the period are portrayed in new and stunning detail with information only someone on the front lines and in backrooms could know. Yet At the Abyss is more than a riveting and comprehensive recounting. It is a cautionary tale for our time, a revelation of how, “those years . . . came to be known as the Cold War, not World War III.”
Author: Max Frankel
Publisher: Presidio Press
ISBN: 0345466713
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 234
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Book Description
An examination of the Cuban Missile Crisis analyzes the roles, objectives, and actions of John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev during the October 1962 showdown between the U.S. and Soviet Union.
