In imitation of the Sun

2006 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 345-347
Author(s):  
Travis D. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Film Music ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nuclear Deterrence ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Peace Movements ◽  
History Of ◽  
Technological History

Accessible and thought-provoking, DeGroot's history of nuclear weaponry from its theoretical origins through its Cold War escalations makes a diverse cast of characters seem familiar and a tale of earthshaking proportions unfold in a relatively sensible fashion. Written for interested nonexperts, the book does not engage scholarly debates directly. It covers the race to beat the Germans to the bomb through to the entrenchment of nuclear deterrence. Disarmament treaties and peace movements concern DeGroot only long enough to discount them. He adds color to the political and technological history of the bomb by supplementing it with considerations of its social repercussions and its representations in literature, film, music, and consumer items.

Prologue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter D. McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
Intangible Heritage ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Print Literacy

The section introduces Part II, which spans the period 1946 to 2014, by tracing the history of the debates about culture within UNESCO from 1947 to 2009. It considers the central part print literacy played in the early decades, and the gradual emergence of what came to be called ‘intangible heritage’; the political divisions of the Cold War that had a bearing not just on questions of the state and its role as a guardian of culture but on the idea of cultural expression as a commodity; the slow shift away from an exclusively intellectualist definition of culture to a more broadly anthropological one; and the realpolitik surrounding the debates about cultural diversity since the 1990s. The section concludes by showing how at the turn of the new millennium UNESCO caught up with the radical ways in which Tagore and Joyce thought about linguistic and cultural diversity.

The Homeland Debate, Redux: The Political–Cultural Impact of the 1946–1949 Repatriation to Soviet Armenia

2020 ◽  
pp. 84-125
Author(s):  
Tsolin Nalbantian
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Impact ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Armenian Identity ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Heating Up

Chapter 2 deals with the 1946-1949 Soviet repatriation drive to collect all worldwide Armenians and “return” them to the ASSR and, specifically, the Lebanese Armenian political-cultural understandings of it. I explore how that initiative formed a chapter of Lebanese (and other Middle Eastern) Armenians’ renegotiation of national belonging in early post-colonial times. And although about a third of all Armenian repatriates travelled via Beirut, I also look at those who remained in Lebanon and in other countries in the Middle East. The emerging Cold War was more than a backdrop to this story. Heating up, the Cold War – and the very divergent readings of, and responses to, the repatriation initiative among Lebanese Armenians – reinforced tensions between Armenian rightists and leftists. Armenians’ response to repatriation did not simply reflect their extant political-cultural positions. Rather, repatriation sharpened those positions. Responses to repatriation echoed issues on the changing Lebanese/Syrian/Armenian identity complex at the dawn of the post-colonial nation-state. The responses to repatriation included a retelling and a reconstitution of the history of the tragedy of the genocide. They also automatically triggered questions about the location and nature of the Armenian homeland, adding fuel to the division between Dashnaks and Armenian leftists.

Latin America between the Second World War and the Cold War: Some Reflections on the 1945–8 Conjuncture

1988 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie Bethell ◽  
Ian Roxborough
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Second World

The importance of the years of political and social upheaval immediately following the end of the Second World War and coinciding with the beginnings of the Cold War, that is to say, the period from 1944 or 1945 to 1948 or 1949, for the history of Europe (East and West), the Near and Middle East, Asia (Japan, China, South and East Asia), even Africa (certainly South Africa) in the second half of the twentieth century has long been generally recognised. In recent years historians of the United States, which had not, of course, been a theatre of war and which alone among the major belligerents emerged from the Second World War stronger and more prosperous, have begun to focus attention on the political, social and ideological conflict there in the postwar period – and the long term significance for the United States of the basis on which it was resolved. In contrast, except for Argentina, where Perón's rise to power has always attracted the interest of historians, the immediate postwar years in Latin America, which had been relatively untouched by, and had played a relatively minor role in, the Second World War, remain to a large extent neglected. It is our view that these years constituted a critical conjuncture in the political and social history of Latin America just as they did for much of the rest of the world. In a forthcoming collection of case studies, which we are currently editing, the main features of the immediate postwar period in Latin America, and especially the role played by labour and the Left, will be explored in some detail, country by country.1In this article, somewhat speculative and intentionally polemical, we present the broad outlines of our thesis.

Hansberry, Lorraine (1930–65)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Soyica Colbert
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Cold War ◽  
American Dream ◽  
African American Woman ◽  
American Woman ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lorraine Hansberry ◽  
The Cold War

Born in Chicago in 1930, Lorraine Hansberry made history when her play A Raisin in the Sun premièred on Broadway in 1959 as the first work by an African-American woman to appear on the Great White Way. Realist in style, A Raisin in the Sun engaged with modern American drama’s investigation of the salience of the American Dream in the context of the Cold War, situating the deferred dreaming of the Younger family within a long history of foreclosed desire and possibility. Hansberry remains best-known for A Raisin in the Sun, but the play both exemplifies and overshadows her other accomplishments as a black lesbian artist-activist, only gesturing toward the expansive political vision of her work as a whole, including her exploration of slavery in The Drinking Gourd (1960), her treatment of apocalypse in What Use Are Flowers (1962), and her consideration of black freedom movements in Les Blancs (1964) and The Movement: A Documentary of a Struggle for Equality (1964).

Nuclear Weapons

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph M. Siracusa
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Nuclear Deterrence ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

Nuclear Weapons: A Very Short Introduction explains the history and politics of the bomb, from the technology of nuclear weapons, to the revolutionary implications of the H-bomb, and the politics of nuclear deterrence. The issues are set against a backdrop of the changing international landscape, from the early days of development through the Cold War. Despite not having been used in anger since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Bomb is still the biggest threat that faces us in the 21st century. But what significant lessons can be learnt from the history of the nuclear weapons era?

Introduction: In Search of PRC History

2006 ◽  
Vol 188 ◽  
pp. 855-869 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Strauss
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
The Political ◽  
Henry Kissinger ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
History Of ◽  
Near Future

In a perhaps apocryphal exchange in 1972, when, Henry Kissinger asked Zhou Enlai what he thought the outcome of the French revolution had been, Zhou responded that it was too early to say. This remark has taken on a life of its own precisely because it rings so true. The big, messy, contested phenomena that are revolutions inspire passionate reactions – both for and against – and each generation has a strong tendency to filter its perception of a given revolution through the political, social and epistemological concerns of its own time. This offers both paradox and opportunity. At present, the great politicalsocial revolutions are largely out of favour. Their animating grand ideologies, teleological imperatives, frank human rights abuses and consequent historical narratives have become historically and epistemologically at least suspect if not downright discredited in a post-Cold War world of globalization and market triumphalism. However, now is an enormously vibrant time for the study of the history of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in its phase of active revolution between 1949 and 1976. In addition to the collection here, there are two other edited volumes on PRC history that have either recently been published or are due to be published in the near future.

Walls of Anxiety: The Iconography of Anti-NATO protests in Spain, 1981–6

2020 ◽  
pp. 002200942094000
Author(s):  
Giulia Quaggio
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Final Stage ◽  
Multidisciplinary Approach ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
The Political ◽  
Peace Movements ◽  
Political Iconography ◽  
The Cold War

This article addresses the protest culture of the Spanish anti-NATO movement during the first half of the 1980s. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, it focuses on the collective practice of painting murals and graffiti ( pintadas) on walls in the outskirts of Spanish cities. This was done by neighbourhood associations, together with local artists, in order to display and disseminate the widespread angst regarding entering and remaining in NATO. Murals constituted a grassroots multi-layered phenomenon that emerged through the interaction of different communicative actors, social processes and semiotic forms. The article explores three themes. Firstly, the political iconography of anti-NATO murals in Spain whilst comparing it with the aesthetics of other European peace movements. Secondly, the domestic reframing of anti-war and antinuclear icons as well as anti-American clichés, violence and the army, gender relations, Spanish national sovereignty and, more generally, the process of modernisation and westernisation that was rapidly affecting post-Francoist society. Finally, the analysis of these visual expressions offers a bottom-up picture of the final stage of the Cold War and a better understanding of the role of Spanish civil society during the period of democratic consolidation.

scholarly journals Cold War Psychiatry, Extremism, and Expertise: The “Special Committee on the Political Abuse of Psychiatry”

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Heath-Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Royal College ◽  
Global Mental Health ◽  
Professional Associations ◽  
The Political ◽  
Special Committee ◽  
Security Measures ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many

Abstract Throughout the history of psychiatric ethical professionalization, the question of the “extremist” contextualizes and frames the limits of medical practice. Using archival research at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the article explores how professional committees debated medical ethics after evidence of psychiatric participation in national security measures against dissidents. British, American, and global professional associations organized a prominent struggle against Soviet membership of the World Psychiatric Association in the 1970s and 1980s—reconstituting the field of professional expertise through Cold War geopolitics. The Special Committee on the Political Abuse of Psychiatry was formed in 1978 at the British Royal College of Psychiatry to publicize the medical detention of dissidents in the USSR and to pursue the expulsion of the USSR delegation from global professional fora. In doing so, it constituted an identity for Global Mental Health (vis-à-vis Soviet abusive practice) as impartial, objective, and uncompromised. However, this article explores the many ambiguities that complicate the performative constitution of Western psychiatry as good, and Soviet psychiatry as bad—reflecting on the political dynamics, and philosophy of science, which underwrote the struggle for global expertise.

Doing Moscow’s Bidding in Europe: Populist Political Movements in a Historical Continuum

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 285-305
Author(s):  
David Alenga
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
The Political ◽  
European Politics ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
Best Interest ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Eu

Abstract From the fissures of Brexit and the recent results of pan-national European Union (EU) elections, insurgent political parties are becoming a force to be reckoned with. For all their disparate centers of gravity, nearly all of them converge on the question of Euroscepticism and the liberal international order. The primary consternation, it is routinely said, is not so much their dogged populism, but that most of them are unwittingly setting themselves up to do Moscow’s bidding in Europe. Drawing on Cold War historiography, this article sets out to critique how this thesis evolved along a consistent prism of ideological meta-narratives. Its key focus is highlighting how missing links in some of the seminal moments in the history of Soviet-Western relations continue to filter into explaining contemporary political developments in the EU. This article thus makes two basic conclusions. First, that there is something to be said of the insurgent political movements as committed players in the competition for the balance of power in the political berth of Europe. And in that regard, their rhetorical association with Moscow’s positions is a pragmatic step in the grand strategy of national and pan-European politics. Second, Moscow, contrary to being the adversarial vector of liberal Europe, has historically identified its best interest with cooperating, if not outrightly, aligning with the Western-led postwar international liberal order.

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