Download or read book A Journey through the Cold War written by Raymond L. Garthoff and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2004-06-23 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this memoir, Ambassador Ray Garthoff paints a dynamic diplomatic history of the cold war, tracing the life of the conflict from the vantage points of an observant insider. His intellectually formative years coincided with the earliest days of the cold war, and during his forty-year career, Garthoff participated in some of the most important policymaking of the twentieth century: • In the late 1950s he carried out pioneering research on Soviet military affairs at the Rand Corporation. • During his four-year tenure at the CIA (1957-61), in addition to drafting national intellingence estimates, Garthoff made trips to the Soviet Union with Vice President Richard Nixon and as an interpreter for a delegation from the Atomic Energy Commission. • As a special assistant in the State Department, Garthoff worked with Secretary Dean Rusk., and he was directly involved in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Later he served as executive officer and senior State Department adviser for the strategic arms limitation talks (SALT) delegation. • In the 1970s he served as a senior Foreign Service inspector, leading missions to a number of countries around the globe. • As U.S. Ambassador to Bulgaria (1977-79), Garthoff gained first-hand knowledge of the workings of a communist state and of the Soviet bloc. • In the 1980s, Garthoff wrote two major studies of American-Soviet relations. He traveled to the Soviet Union nearly a dozen times in the final decade of the cold war, and in the early 1990s he had access to the former Soviet Communist Party archives in Moscow. Garthoff¡'s journey through the Cold War informs the views, positions, and actions of the past. His anecdotes and observations will be of great value to those anticipating the challenges of reevaluating American post-cold war security policy.
Download or read book The Great Cold War written by Gordon S. Barrass and published by Stanford Security Studies. This book was released on 2009 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents an account about the Cold War. This work provides insights into the mixture of insecurity, ignorance, and ambition that drove the rivalry between the two sides. It concludes that bringing the Cold War to a peaceful end was a far greater challenge than just 'being tough with the Soviets'
Download or read book How We Forgot the Cold War written by Jon Wiener and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012-10-15 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “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
Download or read book Journey to the Soviet Union written by Samantha Smith and published by Little Brown. This book was released on 1985-01-01 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A ten-year-old from Maine describes her trip to Russia at the invitation of Yuri Andropov after writing him a letter expressing her fears about a nuclear war.
Download or read book Daughter of the Cold War written by Grace Kennan Warnecke and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2018-04-11 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grace Kennan Warnecke's memoir is about a life lived on the edge of history. Daughter of one of the most influential diplomats of the twentieth century, wife of the scion of a newspaper dynasty and mother of the youngest owner of a major league baseball team, Grace eventually found her way out from under the shadows of others to forge a dynamic career of her own. Born in Latvia, Grace lived in seven countries and spoke five languages before the age of eleven. As a child, she witnessed Hitler’s march into Prague, attended a Soviet school during World War II, and sailed the seas with her father. In a multi-faceted career, she worked as a professional photographer, television producer, and book editor and critic. Eventually, like her father, she became a Russian specialist, but of a very different kind. She accompanied Ted Kennedy and his family to Russia, escorted Joan Baez to Moscow to meet with dissident Andrei Sakharov, and hosted Josef Stalin’s daughter on the family farm after Svetlana defected to the United States. While running her own consulting company in Russia, she witnessed the breakup of the Soviet Union, and later became director of a women’s economic empowerment project in a newly independent Ukraine. Daughter of the Cold War is a tale of all these adventures and so much more. This compelling and evocative memoir allows readers to follow Grace's amazing path through life – a whirlwind journey of survival, risk, and self-discovery through a kaleidoscope of many countries, historic events, and fascinating people.
Download or read book A Soviet Journey written by Alex La Guma and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-04-18 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1978, the South African activist and novelist Alex La Guma (1925–1985) published A Soviet Journey, a memoir of his travels in the Soviet Union. Today it stands as one of the longest and most substantive first-hand accounts of the USSR by an African writer. La Guma’s book is consequently a rare and important document of the anti-apartheid struggle and the Cold War period, depicting the Soviet model from an African perspective and the specific meaning it held for those envisioning a future South Africa. For many members of the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party, the Soviet Union represented a political system that had achieved political and economic justice through socialism—a point of view that has since been lost with the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. This new edition of A Soviet Journey—the first since 1978—restores this vision to the historical record, highlighting how activist-intellectuals like La Guma looked to the Soviet Union as a paradigm of self-determination, decolonization, and postcolonial development. The introduction by Christopher J. Lee discusses these elements of La Guma’s text, in addition to situating La Guma more broadly within the intercontinental spaces of the Black Atlantic and an emergent Third World. Presenting a more expansive view of African literature and its global intellectual engagements, A Soviet Journey will be of interest to readers of African fiction and non-fiction, South African history, postcolonial Cold War studies, and radical political thought.
Download or read book The Red Line written by Christopher Knowles and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2017-04-30 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Red Line is the story of a train journey from London to Hong Kong. It is set in 1981, the year Christopher made the first of twenty-four such journeys as a tour guide, when the Cold War was still very much a fact of life. Although China appeared to be on the brink of significant change, no one could know for certain; Poland was stirring but the prospect of change in the USSR and its other allies seemed remote. This made a journey by train across that landscape particularly fascinating, because by using standard, scheduled services that together created one of the longest possible railway routes, one was necessarily immersed in the various countries in ways that otherwise would have been impossible. Equally fascinating were the reactions of Western travelers to finding themselves incarcerated for weeks on end in the eccentric world behind the Iron Curtain.In order to give the journey some coherence, the most memorable events over those years have been condensed into a single journey and the most notable personalities, plucked from various times and places, have been thrown together. To emphasize the fact that these events took place in the recent past, and to be able to show how extraordinarily quickly the world has changed in the few intervening years, the story is told by a narrator. Everything that occurs is true, although some circumstances have been slightly adapted for the sake of fluency and names of individuals have been changed.
Download or read book In Europe s Shadow written by Robert D. Kaplan and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A history of Romania traces the author's intellectual development throughout his extensive visits to the country, sharing his observations about its reflection of European politics, geography and key events while exploring the indelible role of Vladimir Putin."--NoveList.
Download or read book Murder and Madness written by and published by . This book was released on 1975 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Iron Curtain written by Patrick Wright and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-10-29 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. . .' With these words Winston Churchill famously warned the world in a now legendary speech given in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946. Launched as an evocative metaphor, the 'Iron Curtain' quickly became a brutal reality in the Cold War between Capitalist West and Communist East. Not surprisingly, for many years, people on both sides of the division have assumed that the story of the Iron Curtain began with Churchill's 1946 speech. In this fascinating investigation, Patrick Wright shows that this was decidedly not the case. Starting with its original use to describe an anti-fire device fitted into theatres, Iron Curtain tells the story of how the term evolved into such a powerful metaphor and the myriad ways in which it shaped the world for decades before the onset of the Cold War. Along the way, it offers fascinating perspectives on a rich array of historical characters and developments, from the lofty aspirations and disappointed fate of early twentieth century internationalists, through the topsy-turvy experiences of the first travellers to Soviet Russia, to the theatricalization of modern politics and international relations. And, as Wright poignantly suggests, the term captures a particular way of thinking about the world that long pre-dates the Cold War - and did not disappear with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Download or read book The Invention of Russia written by Arkady Ostrovsky and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE WINNER OF THE CORNELIUS RYAN AWARD FINALIST FOR THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR “Fast-paced and excellently written…much needed, dispassionate and eminently readable.” —New York Times “Filled with sparkling prose and deep analysis.” –The Wall Street Journal The breakup of the Soviet Union was a time of optimism around the world, but Russia today is actively involved in subversive information warfare, manipulating the media to destabilize its enemies. How did a country that embraced freedom and market reform 25 years ago end up as an autocratic police state bent once again on confrontation with America? A winner of the Orwell Prize, The Invention of Russia reaches back to the darkest days of the cold war to tell the story of Russia's stealthy and largely unchronicled counter revolution. A highly regarded Moscow correspondent for the Economist, Arkady Ostrovsky comes to this story both as a participant and a foreign correspondent. His knowledge of many of the key players allows him to explain the phenomenon of Valdimir Putin - his rise and astonishing longevity, his use of hybrid warfare and the alarming crescendo of his military interventions. One of Putin's first acts was to reverse Gorbachev's decision to end media censorship and Ostrovsky argues that the Russian media has done more to shape the fate of the country than its politicians. Putin pioneered a new form of demagogic populism --oblivious to facts and aggressively nationalistic - that has now been embraced by Donald Trump.
Download or read book Cold War Social Science written by Mark Solovey and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-05-13 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how the social sciences became entangled with the global Cold War. While duly recognizing the realities of nation states, national power, and national aspirations, the studies gathered here open up new lines of transnational investigation. Considering developments in a wide array of fields – anthropology, development studies, economics, education, political science, psychology, science studies, and sociology – that involved the movement of people, projects, funding, and ideas across diverse national contexts, this volume pushes scholars to rethink certain fundamental points about how we should understand – and thus how we should study – Cold War social science itself.
Download or read book The Cold War through Documents written by Edward H. Judge and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-06-10 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text is a comprehensive collection of more than 100 carefully edited documents (speeches, treaties, statements, and articles), making the great events of the era come alive through the words and phrases of those who were actively involved. Coverage traces the Cold War from its roots in East-West tensions before and during World War II through its origins in the immediate postwar era, up to and including the collapse of the Soviet Union during 1989-1991.
Download or read book The New Cold War written by Edward Lucas and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2014-07-29 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first edition of The New Cold War was published to great critical acclaim. Edward Lucas has established himself as a top expert in the field, appearing on numerous programs, including Lou Dobbs, MSNBC, NBC Nightly News, CNN, and NPR. Since The New Cold War was first published in February 2008, Russia has become more authoritarian and corrupt, its institutions are weaker, and reforms have fizzled. In this revised and updated third edition, Lucas includes a new preface on the Crimean crisis, including analysis of the dismemberment of Ukraine, and a look at the devastating effects it may have from bloodshed to economic losses. Lucas reveals the asymmetrical relationship between Russia and the West, a result of the fact that Russia is prepared to use armed force whenever necessary, while the West is not. Hard-hitting and powerful, The New Cold War is a sobering look at Russia's current aggression and what it means for the world.
Download or read book A Girl s Guide to Missiles written by Karen Piper and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-08-13 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A poignant, surreal, and fearlessly honest look at growing up on one of the most secretive weapons installations on earth, by a young woman who came of age with missiles The China Lake missile range is located in a huge stretch of the Mojave Desert, about the size of the state of Delaware. It was created during the Second World War, and has always been shrouded in secrecy. But people who make missiles and other weapons are regular working people, with domestic routines and everyday dilemmas, and four of them were Karen Piper's parents, her sister, and--when she needed summer jobs--herself. Her dad designed the Sidewinder, which was ultimately used catastrophically in Vietnam. When her mom got tired of being a stay-at-home mom, she went to work on the Tomahawk. Once, when a missile nose needed to be taken offsite for final testing, her mother loaded it into the trunk of the family car, and set off down a Los Angeles freeway. Traffic was heavy, and so she stopped off at the mall, leaving the missile in the parking lot. Piper sketches in the belief systems--from Amway's get-rich schemes to propaganda in The Rocketeer to evangelism, along with fears of a Lemurian takeover and Charles Manson--that governed their lives. Her memoir is also a search for the truth of the past and what really brought her parents to China Lake with two young daughters, a story that reaches back to her father's World War II flights with contraband across Europe. Finally, A Girl's Guide to Missiles recounts the crossroads moment in a young woman's life when she finally found a way out of a culture of secrets and fear, and out of the desert.
Download or read book The Great Transition written by Raymond L. Garthoff and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 834 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Raymond L. Garthoff examines the fateful final decade of U.S.- Soviet relations, from the start of the Reagan administration in 1981 through the end of the Soviet era-- the collapse of the communist bloc, the end of Gorbachev's failed perestroika, and the demise of the Soviet Union itself at the end of 1991. While standing on its own, the book is a sequel to the author's earlier acclaimed, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan, which covers the period 1969-1980. This volume features a detailed examination of the perspectives and actions of both the United States and the Soviet Union and their interaction, including the interrelationships of domestic factors with foreign and security policies in both countries and the involvement of both powers with other countries around the world, which infringed on their direct relationship. Besides analyzing the turn from confrontation to détente over the years of the Reagan and Bush administrations and Brezhnev through the Gorbachev administration, it reflects on the significance of the great transition from the cold war to a new era. It thus illuminates the very relevant recent history that underlines and informs American-Russian relations and the new situation of a post-Soviet, post-cold war world. Garthoff has obtained access to many formerly secret Soviet documents on this period in the Russian archives, as well as to a number of official American documents that have only recently been declassified. In addition, he has been able to interview and discuss the issues with many active or former Soviet and American officials. The author concludes that the key development was the advent of a Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who recognized the need to cast off a failed world view and to end the cold war-- and who successfully moved with the United States, under the Reagan and Bush administrations, and others, to achieve that goal; notwithstanding his failure in the parallel attempt to revitalize and transform the Soviet Union. Selected by Choice as an Outstanding Book of 1994
Download or read book From the Cold War to Isil written by Jason Bohm and published by . This book was released on 2024-02-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the former Soviet Union forced America's armed forces to redefine themselves and codify their role as a key element of national power. New threats and emerging technologies changed the very character of war and demanded new strategies and an adaptable military to address them. Jason Q. Bohm began his service to our nation as a Marine at the start of this tumultuous era. He takes the reader on a journey from the turbulent times at the end of the Cold War through the current fight against the self-proclaimed Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Bohm provides candid and useful historical background as, through a series of personal vignettes and rich operational experience, he describes how Marines translated strategic and operational objectives into tactical actions. In this unique way, he not only tells his story but that of the Marine Corps, and provides an invaluable look at the challenging times confronting Marines.
