The Cold War

Last update: 13 Dec 2024 22:22
First version: 20 June 2006

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Yet Another Inadequate Placeholder

Aspects of particular interest: how it shaped domestic developments in America; the cultural struggle aspect.

Let me expand on just one of those brief statements. One idea I'm increasingly interested in is that a lot of what people like me find attractive about contemporary western liberal capitalist democracies was shaped by reaction against our idea about the enemy, as well as (to some extent) the need to compete with them for influence and prestige. If we are actually open-minded, inclusive, and respectful of our fellows' choices about how to live their lives, that is at least in part due to recoiling so hard from what we perceived as a totalitarian opponent, as well as needing to not give them easy propaganda points.

See also:
• the USA
• the USSR
• China
• Afghanistan
• War
• Nukes
• Space exploration and the space race
• Espionage
• Totalitarianism
• American Foreign Policy

To read:
• Atsushi Akera, Calculating a Natural World: Scientists, Engineers, and Computers During the Rise of U.S. Cold War Research
• H. Spencer Banzhaf, "The Cold-War Origins of the Value of Statistical Life", Journal of Economic Perspectives 28 (2014): 213--226
• Laura A. Belmonte, Selling the American Way: U.S. Propaganda and the Cold War
• Carl J. Bon Tempo, Americans at the Gate: The United States and Refugees during the Cold War
• Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena
• H. W. Brands, The Devil We Knew: Americans and the Cold War
• Sarah Bridger, Scientists at War: The Ethics of Cold War Weapons Research
• Barbara Barksdale Clowse, Brainpower for the Cold War: The Sputnik Crisis and tha National Defense Education Act of 1958
• Jamie Cohen-Cole, The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature
• Campbell Craig, Destroying the Village: Eisenhower and Thermonuclear War
• Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logeval, America's Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity
• Nick Cullather, The Hungry World
• Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy
• Engel, Cold War at 30,000 Feet: The Anglo-American Fight for Aviation Supremacy
• Robert D. English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals and the End of the Cold War
• Paul Erickson, Judy L. Klein, Lorraine Daston, Rebecca Lemov, Thomas Sturm and Michael D. Gordin, How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality
• Matthew Evangelista, Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War
• John Fousek, To Lead the Free World: American Nationalism and the Cultural Roots of the Cold War
• Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War
• Aaron L. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America's Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy
• Jeff Goodwin, No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945-1991
• Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War
• Peter J. Kalliney, The Aesthetic Cold War: Decolonization and Global Literature
• Mark N. Katz, The USSR and Marxist Revolutions in the Third World [1991]
• Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945--1961
• John Krige, American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe
• Jennifer S. Light, From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America
• Sara Lorenzini, Global Development: A Cold War History
• Robert James Maddox, The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War
• Erika Lorraine Milan, Creatures of Cain: The Hunt for Human Nature in Cold War America [Via David Auerbach]
• Nicolaus Mills, Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America's Coming of Age as a Superpower
• William E. Odom, On Internal War: American and Soviet Approaches to Third World Clients and Insurgents [1992; "concludes that faulty notions of causation inform US policy in all strategies for counterinsurgency"!]
• Sergey Radchenko, To Run the World: The Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power
• Edward E. Rice, Wars of the Third Kind: Conflict in Underdeveloped Countries
• Eglė Rindzeviciutė, The Power of Systems: How Policy Sciences Opened Up the Cold War World
• Ron Robin, The Making of the Cold War Enemy: Culture and Politics in the Military-Intellectual Complex Joy Rohde, Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research during the Cold War
• Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters
• David F. Schmitz, Thank God They're on Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1921--1965
• Ellen Schrecker (ed.), Cold War Triumphalism: The Misuse of History after the Fall of Communism
• Christopher Sneddon, Concrete Revolution: Large Dams, Cold War Geopolitics, and the US Bureau of Reclamation
• Douglas T. Stuart, Creating the National Security State: A History of the Law That Transformed America
• Tom Vanderbilt, Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America
• Patrick Vitale, Nuclear Suburbs: Cold War Technoscience and the Pittsburgh Renaissance
• Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War
• Martin Walker, The Cold War: A History
• Zuoyue Wang, In Sputnik's Shadow: The President's Science Advisory Committee and Cold War America
• Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times
• Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War [in the US]
• Audra J. Wolfe, Freedom's Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science
• Vladislav Zubok and Constantie Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev