Cold War

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• 2/28/2021
  

  George Schultz: The Last Progressive

  by Ron Schatz

  "A steadfast Republican committed to union-management cooperation, peace through treaties, competitive capitalism, and empowerment of African-Americans, George Shultz was the last old-fashioned Progressive."

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• SOURCE: New York Review of Books
  2/21/2021
  

  What the FBI Had on Grandpa

  by Molly Jong-Fast

  "I never considered my grandfather to be a danger to the republic, but J. Edgar Hoover disagreed." The FBI surveilled writer Howard Fast extensively, though, as he wrote in his autobiography, "the eleven hundred pages detailed every—or almost every—decent act I had performed in my life."

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• SOURCE: TomDispatch
  2/18/2021
  

  The American Century Ends Early

  by Tom Engelhardt

  The American empire is now visibly in a state of rapid decay, the product of three decades of wasting the "peace dividend" of the end of the Cold War. 

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• SOURCE: Slate
  2/18/2021
  

  Apocalypse Averted

  "Newly declassified documents reveal that in November 1983, at the height of Cold War tensions, the United States and the Soviet Union came closer to nuclear war than historians—and even many officials at the time—have known until now."

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  2/18/2021
  

  For Generations, African Americans Have Led Global Antiracist Movements

  by Brenda Gayle Plummer

  International organizations in the 20th century provided space for people from the developing world and African American activists to come together in movements that merged opposition to colonialism with demands for domestic civil rights. 

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• SOURCE: The Drift
  2/2/2021
  

  First-Person Shooter Ideology​: The Cultural Contradictions of Call of Duty

  by Daniel Bessner

  "Right now, this one game is teaching millions of young Americans about the epic struggle between their government and the Soviet Union, a century-defining cataclysm that resulted in tens of millions of deaths, reshaped world history, and engendered the ideological struggles that presently bedevil the public sphere." But the lesson is one of cynical resignation to today's state of endless war. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  1/29/2021
  

  What Should Drive Biden’s Foreign Policy?

  Columnist and Humphrey biographer James Traub says the former Senator and VP's interventionist liberalism in foreign policy is a model for Joe Biden's administration to reestablish American preeminence in world affairs. 

• 
• 1/31/2021
  

  The Audacious Escape of George Blake

  by Steve Vogel

  George Blake was the most notorious double agent in Cold War Britain, which makes the story of his amateurish (but successful) escape from prison all the more remarkable. 

• 
• SOURCE: Dissent
  1/15/2021
  

  Legacies of Cold War Liberalism

  by Michael Brenes and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins

  Two historians interrogate the origins of liberal intervention after World War II. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  12/15/2020
  

  Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine

  Facebook isn't exactly like they hypothetical "Doomsday Machine" theorized by Cold War nuclear deterrence experts. But its vast scope and capacity to distribute misinformation faster than in can be detected and corrected mean that lessons from the philosophy of nuclear annihilation are apt for understandign the danger of the social media giants. 

• 
• 12/13/2020
  

  Reflections on Fredrik Logevall's "JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956"

  by Sheldon M. Stern

  Fredrik Logevall's new JFK biography is one of the first by a historian who did not personally experience the Kennedy years. Longtime JFK Library historian says this is all to the good, as Logevall makes extensive use of available primary sources to place Kennedy's political and diplomatic views in the context of his formative experiences in wartime. 

• 
• SOURCE: Medium
  12/9/2020
  

  The Other ‘Mank’: Joe Mankiewicz and the Wildest Night in Hollywood History

  by Greg Mitchell

  The Netflix film "Mank" provides an opportunity to remember the civil liberties stand taken by Frank Mankiewicz's brother Joe, who opposed the imposition of loyalty oaths on the Directors' Guild at the height of the postwar red scare. 

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• SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
  12/5/2020
  

  Performance Anxiety: How Cold War Men’s Adventure Magazines Shaped Soldiers’ (Mis)Understandings of the Vietnam War (Review)

  by Nicholas Utzig

  A consideration of Gregory Daddis's book "Pulp Vietnam: War and Gender in Cold War Men’s Adventure Magazines."

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  11/30/2020
  

  Joe Biden’s Harshest Critics are Likely to be Some of His Fellow Catholics

  by Theresa Keeley

  Abortion is the most divisive issue for liberal and conservative Catholics in America today, but reflects a decades-long division in beliefs about how the Church should engage with the world. It may be tricky for Joe Biden to navigate as a faithful Catholic.

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• SOURCE: Not Even Past
  11/13/2020
  

  Out of the Rubble: Doctors Strikes and State Repression in Guatemala’s Cold War

  by Ilan Palacios Avineri

  An earthquake in Guatemala, and subsequent demands for their labor, shook many medical professionals out of complacency and cooperation with the country's right-wing government at the height of the nation's civil war.

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  11/8/2020
  

  Seymour Topping, Former Times Journalist and Eyewitness to History, Dies at 98

  "For Mr. Topping, known universally to colleagues as Top, the story was always about more than the day’s news developments, intriguing as they might be. It was about their historical significance, too."

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• SOURCE: Made by History at The Washington Post
  10/23/2020
  

  Malcolm X Warned Us about the Pitfalls of Black Celebrities as Leaders

  by Kyle T. Mays

  The media’s overemphasis on the voices of Black celebrities obscures the voices of ordinary Black people, whose lives are vastly different from those who have wealth and visibility.

• 
• 10/18/2020
  

  "The Silent Guns of Two Octobers" Reviewing a New History of the Cuban Missile Crisis

  by Sheldon M. Stern

  Longtime JFK Library historian Sheldon Stern offers a review of a new book on the diplomatic resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

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• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  10/5/2020
  

  The Day Nuclear War Almost Broke Out

  "There should, it seems, be a useful lesson to be learned from that frantic afternoon. But what, in God’s name, is it?"

• 
• SOURCE: Muckrock
  9/16/2020
  

  Dive Into John F. Kennedy’s Daily CIA Updates

  Muckrock invites interested historians and history enthusiasts to participate in a project to make declassified Presidential intelligence briefings more widely accessible.