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Even as growing polarization and hyper-partisanship define society and politics at home, American leaders seem to agree on one thing: US military dominance abroad is essential for national security and international stability. This is despite an upswing in popular support for “doing less” overseas. What explains Washington’s blinkered view of its foreign policy options? Why is the pursuit of military primacy so deeply entrenched in America that alternative approaches have become unthinkable? The answer, argues Peter Harris, can be found at the level of domestic politics. The modern US state was built during World War II and the Cold War to support a globe-spanning and long-term effort to project military power abroad. This domestic order is hardwired to reject foreign policies of restraint or retrenchment. If the United States is ever to assume a more normal world role, it must first undergo a period of domestic reform, renewal, and realignment. This book explains what these domestic changes might look like – and how a grand strategy of restraint can be implemented from the inside out.
De-Centering Cold War History challenges the Cold War master narratives that focus on super-power politics by shifting our analytical perspective to include local-level experiences and regional initiatives that were crucial to the making of a Cold War world. Cold War histories are often told as stories of national leaders, state policies and the global confrontation that pitted a Communist Eastern Bloc against a Capitalist West. Taking a new analytical approach this book reveals unexpected complexities in the historical trajectory of the Cold War. Contributions from an international group of scholars take a fresh look at historical agency in different places across the world, including Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. This collaborative effort shapes a street-level history of the global Cold War era, one that uses the analysis of the 'local' to rethink and reframe the wider picture of the 'global', connecting the political negotiations of individuals and communities at the intersection of places and of meeting points between 'ordinary' people and political elites to the Cold War at large. Essential reading for all students of Cold War history.
This insightful collection of essays details the political life of one of the most prominent and gifted American statesmen of the twentieth century. From his early training in international law to his five terms in the US Senate, J. William Fulbright (1905–1995) had a profound influence on US foreign policy, and his vision for mutual understanding shaped the extraordinary exchange program bearing his name. As a senator for Arkansas for thirty years and the longest serving chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Fulbright was one of the most influential figures of United States politics. His criticism of US involvement in Vietnam exemplified his belief in the effective management o...
Women and Gender in Postwar Europe charts the experiences of women across Europe from 1945 to the present day. Europe at the end of World War II was a sorry testimony to the human condition; awash in corpses, the infrastructure devastated, food and fuel in such short supply. From Soviet Union to the United Kingdom and Ireland the vast majority of citizens on whom survival depended, in the postwar years, were women. This book charts the involvement of women in postwar reconstruction through the Cold War and post Cold-War years with chapters on the economic, social, and political dynamism that characterized Europe from the 1950s onwards, and goes on to look at the woman’s place in a rebuilt ...
Sara Fieldston shows how humanitarian child welfare agencies sponsored by Americans filtered political power through the prism of familial love after World War II. These well-meaning institutions shaped perceptions of the United States as the benevolent parent in a family of nations, and helped to expand American hegemony around the globe.
The postwar period in America witnessed a tremendous consumer boom that introduced thousands of new items into the mass market. The contributors to Containing America challenge our conceptions of Cold War culture by examining a range of such products - clothes, food, television, magazines, radio, and other forms of entertainment - in order to shed light on how Cold War discourses actually influenced the practices of ordinary behaviour. Their essays address very different sectors of American society - in terms of race, class, ethnicity, sexuality and gender - thus emphasising the multiplicity, diversity, and differing nature of the voices that emerged in cultural production and consumption during the 1950s. Containing America points out directions for further research and provides a fresh approach for scholars, students, and others interested in the culture of the Cold War of the 1950s.
The first book-length survey of cinema's vital role in the Cold War cultural combat between the U.S. and the USSR. Focuses on 10 films--five American and five Soviet, both iconic and lesser-known works--showing that cinema provided a crucial outlet for the global "debate" between democratic and communist ideologies.
An innovative and interdisciplinary collection of new work on the forms and meanings of the modern city in literary, film and cultural studies.
Contributors examine the intersection of labour history and migration studies to explain the South's recent dynamism in both urban and rural settings. These essays examine the transformation of the Southern workplace since World War II, the impact migration has on workers who don't move, and the corporations and industry that have relocated below the Mason-Dixon line.