Download or read book The Decline and Fall of the United States Information Agency written by Nicholas J. Cull and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-09-25 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using newly declassified archives and interviews with practitioners, Nicholas J. Cull has pieced together the story of the final decade in the life of the United States Information Agency, revealing the decisions and actions that brought the United States' apparatus for public diplomacy into disarray.

Download or read book The Decline and Fall of the United States Information Agency written by Nicholas J. Cull and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-09-25 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using newly declassified archives and interviews with practitioners, Nicholas J. Cull has pieced together the story of the final decade in the life of the United States Information Agency, revealing the decisions and actions that brought the United States' apparatus for public diplomacy into disarray.

Download or read book The Cold War and the United States Information Agency written by Nicholas J. Cull and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-11-16 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published at a time when the U.S. government's public diplomacy is in crisis, this book provides an exhaustive account of how it used to be done. The United States Information Agency was created in 1953 to "tell America's story to the world" and, by engaging with the world through international information, broadcasting, culture and exchange programs, became an essential element of American foreign policy during the Cold War. Based on newly declassified archives and more than 100 interviews with veterans of public diplomacy, from the Truman administration to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Nicholas J. Cull relates both the achievements and the endemic flaws of American public diplomacy in this period. Major topics include the process by which the Truman and Eisenhower administrations built a massive overseas propaganda operation; the struggle of the Voice of America radio to base its output on journalistic truth; the challenge of presenting Civil Rights, the Vietnam War, and Watergate to the world; and the climactic confrontation with the Soviet Union in the 1980s. This study offers remarkable and new insights into the Cold War era.

Download or read book U S International Exhibitions during the Cold War written by Andrew James Wulf and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-01-30 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although cultural diplomacy has become an increasingly fashionable term embraced by academics, foreign-service personnel, and private sector commercial and cultural interests, the very practice of this idea remains conspicuously challenging to define. This book takes on this problem, advancing a new understanding of cultural diplomacy that results from a historical investigation of a single area of government and private sector partnership, and what became in the mid-twentieth century the most prominent manifestation of this alliance—the cultural exhibitions sent abroad to “tell America’s story” with the goal of “winning hearts and minds.” To illustrate this point, selected exhibitions and the intentions of the policymakers who proposed them are interrogated for the first time beside archival documentation, writings from the history of design, advertising, science, as well as art historical and museum studies theories that address various aspects of the history of collecting and display, all of which explore the reality of how these exhibitions were conceived and prepared for foreign audiences. Most importantly, personal interviews with the designers and government representatives responsible for the ultimate appearance of these events upturn preconceived notions of how these events came to be. Seventy-five photographs from the exhibits make this history come alive. Through this discussion these questions are answered: What was America showing of itself through these exhibitions? And, more urgently, what do these exhibitions tell us about U.S. interest in verisimilitude? This investigation spans the crucial years of American exhibitions abroad (1955-1975), beginning with the formation of an official system of exhibiting American commercial wares and political ideas at trade fairs, through official exchanges with the U.S.S.R., to pavilions at world's fairs, and finally to museum exhibitions that signaled a return to the display of founding American values. They are thus complex ideological symbols in which concepts of national identity, globalization, technology, consumerism, design, and image management both coincided and clashed. The investigation of these exhibitions enhances the understanding of a significant chapter of U.S. cultural diplomacy at the height of the Cold War and how America constantly reimagined itself.

Download or read book Beyond Repair written by Charles Faddis and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2011-10-04 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author's Introduction: Let me start by saying what this book is not. It is not an attack on the men and women of the Clandestine Service of the Central Intelligence Agency, the overwhelming majority of whom are dedicated, patriotic Americans working hard everyday on behalf of their fellow citizens. God knows that they do not do it for the money nor do they do it for the recognition. They do it because they believe in the work, and because they know, as I do, that there really are monsters in the world, and someone has to protect us from them. It is also not an argument against the existence of a central human intelligence collection organization within the United States Government. We desperately needed a central intelligence agency in 1947 when the CIA was created. We even more desperately need such an entity today. The threats facing us are multiplying and becoming more complex. The time horizons in which threats are emerging are shortening. Technology is evolving at an astonishing rate, and we really are fast approaching the day when there will be dozens of groups and nations on this planet capable of threatening us with biological, chemical, radiological and nuclear weapons. This is not pulp fiction. This is reality. This book is an argument that the existing Central Intelligence Agency is no longer capable of performing the task for which it was designed and must, rapidly, be replaced.

Download or read book Capturing News Capturing Democracy written by Kate Wright and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-27 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Voice of America (VOA) is the oldest and largest U.S. government-funded international media organization. In 2020, Donald Trump nominated Michael Pack, a right-wing documentarian and close friend of Steve Bannon, to lead the organization and curb what Trump saw as the network's overly negative reporting on the U.S. During the seven months that Pack oversaw the agency, more than 30 whistleblowers filed complaints against him, a judge ruled that he had infringed journalists' constitutional right to freedom of speech, and he refused to respond to a subpoena issued by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. How did such a major international public service media network become intensely politicized by government allies in such a short time, despite having its editorial independence protected by law? What were the effects on news output? And what can we learn from this situation about how to protect media freedom in the future? Capturing News, Capturing Democracy puts these events in historical and international context--and develops a new analytical framework for understanding government capture and its connection to broader processes of democratic backsliding. Drawing from in-depth interviews with network managers and journalists, and analysis of private correspondence and internal documents, Wright, Scott, and Bunce analyze how political appointees, White House officials, and right-wing media influenced VOA changing its reporting of the Black Lives Matter movement, the presidential election, and its contested aftermath. The authors stress that leaving the VOA unprotected opens it and other public media to targeting by authoritarian leadership and poses serious risks to US democracy. Further, they offer practical recommendations for how to protect the network and other international public service media better in the future.

Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of the Cold War written by Artemy M. Kalinovsky and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-05 with total page 613 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new Handbook offers a wide-ranging overview of current scholarship on the Cold War, with essays from many leading scholars. The field of Cold War history has consistently been one of the most vibrant in the field of international studies. Recent scholarship has added to our understanding of familiar Cold War events, such as the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis and superpower détente, and shed new light on the importance of ideology, race, modernization, and transnational movements. The Routledge Handbook of the Cold War draws on the wealth of new Cold War scholarship, bringing together essays on a diverse range of topics such as geopolitics, military power and technology and strategy. The chapters also address the importance of non-state actors, such as scientists, human rights activists and the Catholic Church, and examine the importance of development, foreign aid and overseas assistance. The volume is organised into nine parts: Part I: The Early Cold War Part II: Cracks in the Bloc Part III: Decolonization, Imperialism and its Consequences Part IV: The Cold War in the Third World Part V: The Era of Detente Part VI: Human Rights and Non-State Actors Part VII: Nuclear Weapons, Technology and Intelligence Part VIII: Psychological Warfare, Propaganda and Cold War Culture Part IX: The End of the Cold War This new Handbook will be of great interest to all students of Cold War history, international history, foreign policy, security studies and IR in general.

Download or read book Hearts Minds Voices written by Jason C. Parker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cold War superpowers endeavored mightily to "win hearts and minds" abroad through what came to be called public diplomacy. While many target audiences were on the conflict's original front-lines in Europe, the vast majority resided in areas in the throes of decolonization and experienced the Cold War as public diplomacy- as a media war for their allegiance rather than as violence. In these areas, superpower public diplomacy encountered volatile issues of race, empire, poverty, and decolonization-which intersected with the dynamics of the Cold War and with anti-imperialist currents. The challenge to US public diplomacy was acute. Jim Crow and Washington's European-imperial alliances were inseparable from the image of the United States and put American outreach unavoidably on the defensive. Newly independent voices in the non-European world responded to this media war by launching public-diplomacy campaigns of their own. In addition to validating the strategic importance of public diplomacy, they articulated a different vision of the postwar world. Rejecting the superpowers' Cold War, they forged the "Third World project" around nonalignment, post-imperial economic development, and anti-colonial racial solidarity. In doing so, Jason C. Parker argues, the United States inadvertently helped to nurture the "Third World" as a transnational imagined community on the postwar global landscape. Tracing US public diplomacy during the early years of the Cold War, Hearts, Minds, Voices narrates how US foreign policy engaged with and impacted the Global South and international history more broadly.

Download or read book Winning Women s Hearts and Minds written by Diana Cucuz and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2023-01-31 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the Cold War, Soviet citizens had limited access to US life and culture. Amerika, a glossy Russian-language magazine similar to Life, provided a rare exception. Produced by the United States Information Agency (USIA), America’s first peacetime propaganda organization, Amerika was used to influence the Soviet public and convince women in particular that an American-style consumer culture and conservative gender norms could better their lives. Winning Women’s Hearts and Minds relies on USIA archives, issues of Amerika, and American women’s magazines such as the Ladies’ Home Journal to show how, during the postwar period, USIA officials deployed idealized images of American women as happy, fulfilled, and feminine wives, mothers, and homemakers. This study analyses how Amerika was used to appeal to Sovietwomen. Portrayed in the US media as "babushkas," they were considered unfeminine, overworked, and deprived of consumer goods and services by a repressive regime. Diana Cucuz provides a gendered analysis of the USIA and of Amerika, whose propaganda campaign relied heavily on postwar conservative gender norms and images of domestic contentment to convey positive messages about the American way of life in the hopes of undermining the Soviet regime. Winning Women’s Hearts and Minds sheds light on the significance of women, gender, and consumption to international politics during the Cold War.

Download or read book The Rise and Fall of American Growth written by Robert J. Gordon and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-29 with total page 785 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How America's high standard of living came to be and why future growth is under threat In the century after the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable. Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, motor vehicles, air travel, and television transformed households and workplaces. But has that era of unprecedented growth come to an end? Weaving together a vivid narrative, historical anecdotes, and economic analysis, The Rise and Fall of American Growth challenges the view that economic growth will continue unabated, and demonstrates that the life-altering scale of innovations between 1870 and 1970 cannot be repeated. Gordon contends that the nation's productivity growth will be further held back by the headwinds of rising inequality, stagnating education, an aging population, and the rising debt of college students and the federal government, and that we must find new solutions. A critical voice in the most pressing debates of our time, The Rise and Fall of American Growth is at once a tribute to a century of radical change and a harbinger of tougher times to come.

Download or read book American Diplomacy s Public Dimension written by Bruce Gregory and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2024-01-27 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to frame U.S. public diplomacy in the broad sweep of American diplomatic practice from the early colonial period to the present. It tells the story of how change agents in practitioner communities – foreign service officers, cultural diplomats, broadcasters, citizens, soldiers, covert operatives, democratizers, and presidential aides – revolutionized traditional government-to-government diplomacy and moved diplomacy with the public into the mainstream. This deeply researched study bridges practice and multi-disciplinary scholarship. It challenges the common narrative that U.S. public diplomacy is a Cold War creation that was folded into the State Department in 1999 and briefly found new life after 9/11. It documents historical turning points, analyzes evolving patterns of practice, and examines societal drivers of an American way of diplomacy: a preference for hard power over soft power, episodic commitment to public diplomacy correlated with war and ambition, an information-dominant communication style, and American exceptionalism. It is an account of American diplomacy’s public dimension, the people who shaped it, and the socialization and digitalization that today extends diplomacy well beyond the confines of embassies and foreign ministries.

Download or read book The Cambridge History of America and the World Volume 4 1945 to the Present written by David C. Engerman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-03 with total page 903 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fourth volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World examines the heights of American global power in the mid-twentieth century and how challenges from at home and abroad altered the United States and its role in the world. The second half of the twentieth century marked the pinnacle of American global power in economic, political, and cultural terms, but even as it reached such heights, the United States quickly faced new challenges to its power, originating both domestically and internationally. Highlighting cutting-edge ideas from scholars from all over the world, this volume anatomizes American power as well as the counters and alternatives to 'the American empire.' Topics include US economic and military power, American culture overseas, human rights and humanitarianism, third-world internationalism, immigration, communications technology, and the Anthropocene.

Download or read book Reputational Security written by Nicholas J. Cull and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2023-12-22 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We are living in turbulent times, witnessing renewed international conflict, resurgent nationalism, declining multilateralism, and a torrent of hostile propaganda. How are we to understand these developments and conduct diplomacy in their presence? Nicholas J. Cull, the distinguished historian of propaganda, revisits the international media campaigns of the past in the light of the challenges of the present. His concept of Reputational Security deftly links issues of national image and outreach to the deepest needs of any state, rescuing them from the list of low-priority optional extras to which they are so often consigned in the West. Reputational Security, he argues, comes from being known and appreciated in the world. With clarity and determination, Cull considers core tasks, approaches, and opportunities available for international actors today, including counterpropaganda, media development, diaspora diplomacy, cultural work, and – perhaps most surprisingly of all – media disarmament. This book is crucial for all who care about responding to the threat of malign media disruption, revitalizing international cooperation, and establishing the Reputational Security we and our allies need to survive and flourish. Reputational Security is enlightening reading for students and scholars of public diplomacy, international relations, security studies, communications, and media, as well as practitioners.

Download or read book Public Affairs written by William M. Hammond and published by Government Printing Office. This book was released on 1988 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: United States Army in Vietnam. CMH Pub. 91-13. Draws upon previously unavailable Army and Defense Department records to interpret the part the press played during the Vietnam War. Discusses the roles of the following in the creation of information policy: Military Assistance Command's Office of Information in Saigon; White House; State Department; Defense Department; and the United States Embassy in Saigon.

Download or read book Why America Failed written by Morris Berman and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-09-13 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why America Failed shows how, from its birth as a nation of "hustlers" to its collapse as an empire, the tools of the country's expansion proved to be the instruments of its demise Why America Failed is the third and most engaging volume of Morris Berman's trilogy on the decline of the American empire. In The Twilight of American Culture, Berman examined the internal factors of that decline, showing that they were identical to those of Rome in its late-empire phase. In Dark Ages America, he explored the external factors—e.g., the fact that both empires were ultimately attacked from the outside—and the relationship between the events of 9/11 and the history of U.S. foreign policy. In his most ambitious work to date, Berman looks at the "why" of it all Probes America's commitment to economic liberalism and free enterprise stretching back to the late sixteenth century, and shows how this ideology, along with that of technological progress, rendered any alternative marginal to American history Maintains, more than anything else, that this one-sided vision of the country's purpose finally did our nation in Why America Failed is a controversial work, one that will shock, anger, and transform its readers. The book is a stimulating and provocative explanation of how we managed to wind up in our current situation: economically weak, politically passe, socially divided, and culturally adrift. It is a tour de force, a powerful conclusion to Berman's study of American imperial decline.

Download or read book Science the Endless Frontier written by United States. Office of Scientific Research and Development and published by . This book was released on 1945 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This influential report described science as "a largely unexplored hinterland" that would provide the "essential key" to the economic prosperity of the post World War II years.

Download or read book The Decline and Fall of Public Service Broadcasting written by Michael Tracey and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The central issue of Michael Tracey's study is that public service broadcasting sadly has a limited future and that this is an indication of a real and deep-seated crisis within liberal democratic systems.