Cold War landscapes: towards an environmental history of US development programmes in the 1950s and 1960s

2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 417-441 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S

scholarly journals Argentine and Egyptian History Entangled: From Perón to Nasser

2017 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 549-577
Author(s):  
LILY PEARL BALLOFFET
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Suez Canal ◽  
Egyptian Revolution ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Egyptian History

AbstractThis article presents an entangled history of Argentina and Egypt in the years surrounding the 1952 Egyptian Revolution. It combines diplomatic, migration and anti-imperial activism histories to delineate the intellectual and institutional links between these nations from the late 1940s to the 1950s – from the rise of Peronism through to Nasser's management of the Suez Canal crisis of 1956. Diverse Argentine social and political sectors saw parallels between the anti-imperial struggles in the Arab world and in Latin America. Though with differing and sometimes competing agendas, these groups learned and deployed the language of non-alignment and South–South solidarity in the escalating Cold War.

West Germany and the Iron Curtain

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Astrid M. Eckert
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Landscape Change ◽  
West Germany ◽  
German Reunification ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
Nuclear Facility ◽  
Border Regions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Geographical Space

West Germany and the Iron Curtain takes a fresh look at the history of Cold War Germany and the German reunification process from the spatial perspective of the West German borderlands that emerged along the volatile inter-German border after 1945. These border regions constituted the Federal Republic’s most sensitive geographical space, in which it had to confront partition and engage its socialist neighbor, East Germany, in concrete ways. Each issue that arose in these borderlands—from economic deficiencies to border tourism, environmental pollution, landscape change, and the siting decision for a major nuclear facility—was magnified and mediated by the presence of what became the most militarized border of its day, the Iron Curtain. In topical chapters, the book traces each of these issues across the caesura of 1989–1990, thereby integrating the “long” postwar era with the postunification decades. At the heart of this deeply-researched study stands an environmental history of the Iron Curtain that explores transboundary pollution, landscape change, and a planned nuclear industrial site at Gorleben that was meant to bring jobs into the depressed border regions. As Eckert demonstrates, the borderlands that emerged with partition and disappeared with reunification did not merely mirror larger developments in the Federal Republic’s history but actually helped shape them.

The Nature of Mafia: An Environmental History of the Simeto River Basin, Sicily

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 579-608 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Armiero ◽  
Filippo Gravagno ◽  
Giusy Pappalardo ◽  
Alessia Denise Ferrara
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
River Basin ◽  
Geographical Area ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
Social Facts ◽  
Crucial Feature ◽  
Specific Geographical Area ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S

This article builds upon a rich scholarship that has proposed, though with different shades, the concept of socionatures, meaning by this the inextricable hybrid of ecological and social facts. In this article, we aim to explore how the Mafia produces particular socionatural formations, entering into landscapes, becoming rivers and cities, penetrating into the bodies of humans and non-humans. We will develop our argument by exploring a specific geographical area, the Simeto River, and how the Mafia has become intertwined with its ecologies. We will analyse the appropriation of the river since the 1950s, illustrating various ways in which the Mafia has blended with its ecologies: the control of water, the touristification of the river's mouth and the placement of waste facilities. We argue that one crucial feature of Mafia socionatures is the attack against commons, i.e. the attempt to subdue the (re)productive properties of human and more-than-human communities to Mafia economic interests. Therefore, we will propose the practices of commons and commoning - that is, the making of commons - as one of the possible strategies against the Mafia.

The Ground Observer Corps: Public Relations and the Cold War in the 1950s

2013 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenton Clymer
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Public Relations ◽  
Air Force ◽  
Public Support ◽  
Air Defense ◽  
The Public ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Homeland Defense

This essay examines the development and demise of one of the least studied elements of U.S. homeland defense efforts in the 1950s: the Ground Observer Corps (GOC). The article recounts the history of the GOC from its founding in the mid-1950s until its deactivation in 1959 and concludes that it never came close to achieving its goals for recruitment and effectiveness. Yet, despite the major shortcomings of the GOC, the U.S. Air Force continued to support it, primarily because it was seen as helpful for the public relations interests of the Air Force, continental air defense, and, more generally, U.S. Cold War policies. The lack of widespread public support for the GOC raises questions about the view that Americans were deeply fearful of an imminent Soviet nuclear strike in the 1950s.

Making It Count

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arunabh Ghosh
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Statistical Data ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Great Leap Forward ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Statistics ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Great Leap Forward

In 1949, at the end of a long period of wars, one of the biggest challenges facing leaders of the new People's Republic of China was how much they did not know. The government of one of the world's largest nations was committed to fundamentally reengineering its society and economy via socialist planning while having almost no reliable statistical data about their own country. This book is the history of efforts to resolve this “crisis in counting.” The book explores the choices made by political leaders, statisticians, academics, statistical workers, and even literary figures in attempts to know the nation through numbers. It shows that early reliance on Soviet-inspired methods of exhaustive enumeration became increasingly untenable in China by the mid-1950s. Unprecedented and unexpected exchanges with Indian statisticians followed, as the Chinese sought to learn about the then-exciting new technology of random sampling. These developments were overtaken by the tumult of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961), when probabilistic and exhaustive methods were rejected and statistics was refashioned into an ethnographic enterprise. By acknowledging Soviet and Indian influences, the book not only revises existing models of Cold War science but also globalizes wider developments in the history of statistics and data. Anchored in debates about statistics and its relationship to state building, the book offers fresh perspectives on China's transition to socialism.

Global Development

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Lorenzini
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Organizations ◽  
Development Aid ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Development Projects ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
History Of Development ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

In the Cold War, “development” was a catchphrase that came to signify progress, modernity, and economic growth. Development aid was closely aligned with the security concerns of the great powers, for whom infrastructure and development projects were ideological tools for conquering hearts and minds around the globe, from Europe and Africa to Asia and Latin America. This book provides a global history of development, drawing on a wealth of archival evidence to offer a panoramic and multifaceted portrait of a Cold War phenomenon that transformed the modern world. Taking readers from the aftermath of the Second World War to the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, the book shows how development projects altered local realities, transnational interactions, and even ideas about development itself. The book shines new light on the international organizations behind these projects—examining their strategies and priorities and assessing the actual results on the ground—and it also gives voice to the recipients of development aid. It shows how the Cold War shaped the global ambitions of development on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and how international organizations promoted an unrealistically harmonious vision of development that did not reflect local and international differences. The book presents a global perspective on Cold War development, demonstrating how its impacts are still being felt today.

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