The Cold War

21 Sep 2023 10:08

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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:
• H. Spencer Banzhaf, "The Cold-War Origins of the Value of Statistical Life", Journal of Economic Perspectives 28 (2014): 213--226
• 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
• 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
• Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy
• 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
• Mark N. Katz, The USSR and Marxist Revolutions in the Third World [1991]
• 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
• 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"!]
• Edward E. Rice, Wars of the Third Kind: Conflict in Underdeveloped Countries
• Ron Robin, The Making of the Cold War Enemy: Culture and Politics in the Military-Intellectual Complex
• 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
• 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
• Martin Walker, The Cold War: A History
• 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