Download or read book An Archaeology of the Iron Curtain written by Anna McWilliams and published by . This book was released on 2013-12-20 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Iron Curtain was seen as the divider between East and West in Cold War Europe. The term refers to a material reality but it is also a metaphor; a metaphor that has become so powerful that it tends to mark our historical understanding of the period. Through the archaeological study of two areas that can be considered part of the former Iron Curtain, the Czech-Austrian border and the Italian-Slovenian border, this research investigates the relationship between the material and the metaphor of the Iron Curtain. As a study of the archaeology of the contemporary past this thesis brings forward methodological issues when dealing with many different sources as well as general reflections on our historical understanding.
Download or read book Bringing Down the Iron Curtain written by Klára Šabatová and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2020-03-26 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the fall of communism, archaeological research in Central and Eastern European countries has seen a large influx of new projects and ideas, fueled by bilateral contacts, Europe-wide circulation of scholars and access to research literature. This volume is the first study which relates these issues specifically to Bronze Age Archaeology.
Download or read book The Iron Curtain written by Bruce L. Brager and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2004 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visiting Central Europe, in 1962, a visitor would not see a real "Iron Curtain." There was no huge piece of grim drapery splitting Europe between Communist dictatorships and democracies. The Iron Curtain represented the Central European part of the Cold War, the generally peaceful, but highly dangerous, forty-year competition between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its allies. The Iron Curtain symbolically represented the attempt to permanently, artificially, and arbitrarily split one part of Central Europe from the other. Although there was no real iron curtain, there was lots of steel in the form of barbed wire, ground radar, watchtowers, and machine guns in the hands of troops willing to use them. The boundary between democracy and totalitarianism was clear. This book tells the story of the Iron Curtain, and the Cold War it so vividly represented, from the start of World War II to its end with the dramatic fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Book jacket.
Download or read book Iron Curtain written by Anne Applebaum and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 803 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag, acclaimed journalist Anne Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking history of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its sway. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union to its surprise and delight found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. In Iron Curtain, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. She draws on newly opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts translated for the first time to portray in devastating detail the dilemmas faced by millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief and took away everything they had accumulated. Today the Soviet Bloc is a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics Applebaum captures in the electrifying pages of Iron Curtain.
Download or read book Daily Life behind the Iron Curtain written by Jim Willis and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-01-24 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This compelling book describes how everyday people courageously survived under repressive Communist regimes until the voices and actions of rebellious individuals resulted in the fall of the Iron Curtain in Europe. Part of Greenwood's Daily Life through History series, Daily Life behind the Iron Curtain enables today's generations to understand what it was like for those living in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, particularly the period from 1961 to 1989, the era during which these people-East Germans in particular-lived in the imposing shadow of the Berlin Wall. An introductory chapter discusses the Russian Revolution, the end of World War II, and the establishment of the Socialist state, clarifying the reasons for the construction of the Berlin Wall. Many historical anecdotes bring these past experiences to life, covering all aspects of life behind the Iron Curtain, including separation of families and the effects on family life, diet, rationing, media, clothing and trends, strict travel restrictions, defection attempts, and the evolving political climate. The final chapter describes Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin wall and the slow assimilation of East into West, and examines Europe after Communism.
Download or read book Archaeology of The Teufelsberg written by Wayne D Cocroft and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-14 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For over 50 years, the white radomes of the Teufelsberg have been one of Berlin’s most prominent landmarks. For half of this time the city lay over 100 miles behind an 'Iron Curtain' that divided East from West, and was surrounded by communist East Germany and the densest concentration of Warsaw Pact military forces in Europe. From the vantage point high on the Teufelsberg, British and American personnel constantly monitored the electronic emissions from the surrounding military forces, as well as high-level political intelligence. Today, the Teufelsberg stands as a contemporary and spectacular ruin, representing a significant relic of a lost cyber space of Cold War electronic emissions and espionage. Based on archaeological fieldwork and recently declassified documents, this book presents a new history of the Teufelsberg and other Western intelligence gathering sites in Berlin. At a time when intelligence gathering is once more under close scrutiny, when questions are being asked about the intelligence relationship between the United States and Russia, and amidst wider debate about the US’s National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence programmes, sites like the Teufelsberg raise questions that appear both important and timely.
Download or read book Tourism and Travel during the Cold War written by Sune Bechmann Pedersen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-09-11 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Iron Curtain was not an impenetrable divide, and contacts between East and West took place regularly and on various levels throughout the Cold War. This book explores how the European tourist industry transcended the ideological fault lines and the communist states attracted an ever-increasing number of Western tourists. Based on extensive original research, it examines the ramifications of tourism, from sun-and-sea package tours to human rights travels, in key Eastern European locations including East Berlin, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Albania. The book’s analysis of the politics, culture, and history of tourism to the East offers important new perspectives on European tourism in the twentieth century. The Introduction of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Download or read book Iron Curtain written by Patrick Wright and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 507 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 shapedthe 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 thetheatricalization 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 Window Shopping Through the Iron Curtain written by David Hlynsky and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2015-02-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A deadpan celebration of the unique commercial aesthetic that flourished under the crumbling totalitarian Communist regimes of twentieth-century Europe Window-Shopping through the Iron Curtain presents a selection of more than 100 images of shop windows shot by David Hlynsky during four trips taken between 1986 and 1990 to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, East Germany, and Moscow. Using a Hasselblad camera, Hlynsky captured the slow, routine moments of daily life on the streets and in the shop windows of crumbling Communist countries. The resulting images could be still-lifes representing the intersection of a Communist ideology and a consumerist, Capitalist tool—the shop window—with the consumer stuck in the middle. Devoid of overt branding or calculated seduction, the shop windows were typically adorned with traditional yet incongruous symbols of cheer: homey lace curtains, paper flowers, painted butterflies, and pictures of happy children. Some windows were humble in their simple offerings of loaves and tinned fishes; others were zanily artistic, as in the modular display of military shirts in a Moscow storefront; and some illustrated intense professional pride, such as a sign in a Prague beauty salon depicting a pedicurist smiling fiendishly over an imperfect sole. The photographs are accompanied by essays by art historian Martha Langford and cultural studies specialist Jody Berland, as well as Hlynsky’s own account of his time as a flâneur in the shopping plazas of the collapsing Soviet empire—“a vast ad-hoc museum of a failing utopia” that in 1989 began to close forever.
Download or read book Perforating the Iron Curtain written by Poul Villaume and published by Museum Tusculanum Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cold War history research of the recent years suggests that the East-West detente process of the 1970s was a more significant element than previously believed in understanding and explaining the processes, on both sides of the East-West divide, which led to the peaceful end of the Cold War in the late 1980s. This anthology is a contribution to this research. The dozen articles elucidate the European detente process from grass-root - as well as diplomatic - levels, including the Helsinki Conference Final Act of 1975 on respect of human rights and human contacts across the Iron Curtain of the Cold War. The articles are based on recently opened state and private archives from West and East Europe, as well as the US. They are written by a mix of internationally distinguished senior scholars and younger promising researchers from the US, Germany, Poland, Switzerland, Italy, and Denmark.
Download or read book Scientific Communication Across the Iron Curtain written by Christopher D. Hollings and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-12-12 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph provides a concise introduction to the tangled issues of communication between Russian and Western scientists during the Cold War. It details the extent to which mid-twentieth-century researchers and practitioners were able to communicate with their counterparts on the opposite side of the Iron Curtain. Drawing upon evidence from a range of disciplines, a decade-by-decade account is first given of the varying levels of contact that existed via private correspondence and conference attendance. Next, the book examines the exchange of publications and the availability of one side's work in the libraries of the other. It then goes on to compare general language abilities on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain, with comments on efforts in the West to learn Russian and the systematic translation of Russian work. In the end, author Christopher Hollings argues that physical accessibility was generally good in both directions, but that Western scientists were afflicted by greater linguistic difficulties than their Soviet counterparts whose major problems were bureaucratic in nature. This volume will be of interest to historians of Cold War science, particularly those who study communications and language issues. In addition, it will be an ideal starting pointing for anyone looking to know more about this fascinating area.
Download or read book The Lost World of Communism written by Peter Molloy and published by BBC Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1989 was a year of revolution: it marked the collapse of communism in Eastern and Central Europe and an end to an entire way of life for millions of people behind the Iron Curtain. This title collects testimony of the people who lived in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania during the Cold War era.
Download or read book Imposing Maintaining and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain written by Mark Kramer and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2013-11-22 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cold War began in Europe in the mid-1940s and ended there in 1989. Notions of a “global Cold War” are useful in describing the wide impact and scope of the East-West divide after World War II, but first and foremost the Cold War was about the standoff in Europe. The Soviet Union established a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe in the mid-1940s that later became institutionalized in the Warsaw Pact, an organization that was offset by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) led by the United States. The fundamental division of Europe persisted for forty years, coming to an end only when Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe dissolved. Imposing, Maintaining, and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain: The Cold War and East-Central Europe, 1945–1989, edited by Mark Kramer and Vít Smetana, consists of cutting-edge essays by distinguished experts who discuss the Cold War in Europe from beginning to end, with a particular focus on the countries that were behind the iron curtain. The contributors take account of structural conditions that helped generate the Cold War schism in Europe, but they also ascribe agency to local actors as well as to the superpowers. The chapters dealing with the end of the Cold War in Europe explain not only why it ended but also why the events leading to that outcome occurred almost entirely peacefully.
Download or read book The Politics of Authenticity written by Joachim C. Häberlen and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2018-10-19 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the convulsions of 1968, one element uniting many of the disparate social movements that arose across Europe was the pursuit of an elusive “authenticity” that could help activists to understand fundamental truths about themselves—their feelings, aspirations, sexualities, and disappointments. This volume offers a fascinating exploration of the politics of authenticity as they manifested themselves among such groups as Italian leftists, East German lesbian activists, and punks on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Together they show not only how authenticity came to define varied social contexts, but also how it helped to usher in the neoliberalism of a subsequent era.
Download or read book Imagining the World from Behind the Iron Curtain written by Malgorzata Fidelis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-10 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Sixties occupy a prominent place in popular culture and scholarship as an era of global upheavals, including the Civil Rights Movement, de-colonization, radical social movements, student and youth protests, and the Vietnam War. This pioneering book explores the seemingly isolated Eastern bloc and a non-capitalist context, demonstrating the impact of those global upheavals on young people in Poland in the form of international youth culture, protest movements, and counterculture.
Download or read book The Iron Curtain written by Fraser J. Harbutt and published by New York : Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winston Churchill popularized the phrase "Iron Curtain" in a famous speech in Fulton, Missouri, 40 years ago, and that speech, according to Fraser J. Harbutt, set forth the basic ideology of the coming East-West struggle. It was also a calculated move within, and a dramatic public definition of, the Truman Administration's concurrent turn from accommodation to confrontation with the Soviet Union.
Download or read book Iron Curtain written by Anne Applebaum and published by Penguin Classics. This book was released on 2013 with total page 613 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union unexpectedly found itself in control of a huge swathe of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to a completely new political and moral system- Communism. Anne Applebaum's landmark history of this brutal time shows how societies were ruthlessly eviscerated by Communist regimes, how opposition was destroyed and what life was like for ordinary people who had to choose whether to fight, to flee or to collaborate. Iron Curtainis an exceptional work of historical and moral reckoning, and a haunting reminder of how fragile freedom can be. Chosen 16 times as a 'Book of the Year' - The top Non-Fiction pick of 2012'The best work of modern history I have ever read.' A. N. Wilson, Financial Times'The outstanding book of the year . . . a masterpiece.' Oliver Kamm, The Times, Books of the Year 'Exceptionally important, wise, perceptive, remarkably objective.' Antony Beevor 'Explains in a manner worthy of Arthur Koestler what totalitarianism really means . . . it is a window into a world of lies and evil that we can hardly imagine.' Edward Lucas, Standpoint 'At last the story can be told . . . a magisterial history.' Orlando Figes, Mail on Sunday
