3. International history of the twentieth century

2019 ◽  
pp. 54-69
Author(s):  
Len Scott
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Total War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter focuses on some of the principal developments in world politics from 1900 to 1999: the development of total war, the advent of nuclear weapons, the onset of cold war, and the end of European imperialism. It shows how the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union became the key dynamic in world affairs, replacing the dominance of—and conflict among—European states in the first half of the twentieth century. It also examines the ways that the cold war promoted or prevented global conflict, how decolonization became entangled with East–West conflicts, and how dangerous the nuclear confrontation between East and West was. Finally, the chapter considers the role of nuclear weapons in specific phases of the cold war, notably in détente, and then with the deterioration of Soviet–American relations in the 1980s.

3. International history 1900–99

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Len Scott
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Total War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
East West

This chapter focuses on some of the principal developments in world politics from 1900 to 1999: the development of total war, the advent of nuclear weapons, the onset of cold war, and the end of European imperialism. It shows how the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union became the key dynamic in world affairs, replacing the dominance of — and conflict among — European states in the first half of the twentieth century. It also examines the ways that the cold war promoted or prevented global conflict, how decolonization became entangled with East–West conflicts, and how dangerous the nuclear confrontation between East and West was. Finally, the chapter considers the role of nuclear weapons in specific phases of the cold war, notably in détente, and then with the deterioration of Soviet–American relations in the 1980s.

Ballet in the Cold War

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Searcy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
The United States ◽  
Performing Artists ◽  
Exchange Programs ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

During the Cold War, the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union developed cultural exchange programs, in which they sent performing artists abroad in order to generate goodwill for their countries. Ballet companies were frequently called on to serve in these programs, particularly in the direct Soviet-American exchange. This book analyzes four of the early ballet exchange tours, demonstrating how this series of encounters changed both geopolitical relations and the history of dance. The ballet tours were enormously popular. Performances functioned as an important symbolic meeting point for Soviet and American officials, creating goodwill and normalizing relations between the two countries in an era when nuclear conflict was a real threat. At the same time, Soviet and American audiences did not understand ballet in the same way. As American companies toured in the Soviet Union and vice versa, audiences saw the performances through the lens of their own local aesthetics. Ballet in the Cold War introduces the concept of transliteration to understand this process, showing how much power viewers wielded in the exchange and explaining how the dynamics of the Cold War continue to shape ballet today.

Cold War consumption and the marketing of childhood in the Soviet Union and the United States, 1950-1960

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Peacock
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Usa ◽  
History Of ◽  
Global Discourse ◽  
The Cold War

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the relationship between childhood, consumption and the Cold War in 1950s America and the Soviet Union. The author argues that Soviet and American leaders, businessmen, and politicians worked hard to convince parents that buying things for their children offered the easiest way to raise good American and Soviet kids and to do their part in waging the economic battles of the Cold War. The author explores how consumption became a Cold War battleground in the late 1950s and suggests that the history of childhood and Cold War consumption alters the way we understand the conflict itself. Design/Methodology/Approach – Archival research in the USA and the Russian Federation along with close readings of Soviet and American advertisements offer sources for understanding the global discourse of consumption in the 1950s and 1960s. Findings – Leaders, advertisers, and propagandists in the Soviet Union and the USA used the same images in the same ways to sell the ethos of consumption to their populations. They did this to sell the Cold War, to bolster the status quo, and to make profits. Originality/Value – This paper offers a previously unexplored, transnational perspective on the role that consumption and the image of the child played in shaping the Cold War both domestically and abroad.

Same As It Ever Was: Nuclear Alarmism, Proliferation, and the Cold War

2010 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 7-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis J. Gavin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Proliferation ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nuclear Arms Race ◽  
Nuclear History ◽  
The Cold War

A widely held and largely unchallenged view among many scholars and policymakers is that nuclear proliferation is the gravest threat facing the United States today, that it is more dangerous than ever, and that few meaningful lessons can be drawn from the nuclear history of a supposed simpler and more predictable period, the Cold War. This view, labeled “nuclear alarmism,” is based on four myths about the history of the nuclear age. First, today's nuclear threats are new and more dangerous than those of the past. Second, unlike today, nuclear weapons stabilized international politics during the Cold War, when in fact the record was mixed. The third myth conflates the history of the nuclear arms race with the geopolitical and ideological competition between the Soviet Union and the United States, creating an oversimplified and misguided portrayal of the Cold War. The final myth is that the Cold War bipolar military rivalry was the only force driving nuclear proliferation. A better understanding of this history, and, in particular, of how and why the international community escaped calamity during a far more dangerous time against ruthless and powerful adversaries, can produce more effective U.S. policies than those proposed by the nuclear alarmists.

Engaging the Evil Empire

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Miles
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Political Stability ◽  
Ronald Reagan ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Breathing Room ◽  
Key Events

In a narrative-redefining approach, this book dramatically alters how we look at the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Tracking key events in US–Soviet relations across the years between 1980 and 1985, the book shows that covert engagement gave way to overt conversation as both superpowers determined that open diplomacy was the best means of furthering their own, primarily competitive, goals. The book details the history of these dramatic years, as President Ronald Reagan consistently applied a disciplined carrot-and-stick approach, reaching out to Moscow while at the same time excoriating the Soviet system and building up US military capabilities. The received wisdom in diplomatic circles is that the beginning of the end of the Cold War came from changing policy preferences and that President Reagan, in particular, opted for a more conciliatory and less bellicose diplomatic approach. In reality, the book demonstrates, Reagan and ranking officials in the National Security Council had determined that the United States enjoyed a strategic margin of error that permitted it to engage Moscow overtly. As US grand strategy developed, so did that of the Soviet Union. This book covers five critical years of Cold War history when Soviet leaders tried to reduce tensions between the two nations in order to gain economic breathing room and, to ensure domestic political stability, prioritize expenditures on butter over those on guns. The book shifts the focus of Cold War historians away from exclusive attention on Washington by focusing on the years of back-channel communiqués and internal strategy debates in Moscow as well as Prague and East Berlin.

Gender, Wars of Globalization, and Humanitarian Interventions since the End of the Cold War

2020 ◽  
pp. 766-787
Author(s):  
Kristen P. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
World Politics ◽  
New Era ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Humanitarian Interventions ◽  
New Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

The collapse of the Soviet Union, peaceful revolutions in central and Eastern Europe that ended communist rule, and the reunification of Germany marked the end of the Cold War. Different than originally hoped, this did not usher in a new period of peace and stability around the world. Instead, three decades since the emergence of this new era in world politics, conflicts continue to afflict the international community, predominantly in the form of intrastate, or civil, wars (although interstate wars are also present). Exploring the most recent history of gender, military, and war, this chapter examines to what extent the current era of globalization comes with new types of wars, changes in modes of waging war, and humanitarian intervention and how they are related to gender.

Jazz, Power, and Soviet Youth in the Early Cold War, 1948−1953

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 332-361 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gleb Tsipursky
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Competition ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Impact

Examining the history of jazz in the Soviet Union between 1948 and 1953, this essay sheds light on the role of popular music in the cultural competition of the early Cold War. While the Soviet authorities pursued a tolerant policy toward jazz during World War II because of its wartime alliance with the United States, the outbreak of the Cold War in the late 1940s led to a decisive turn against this music. The Communist Party condemned jazz as the music of the “foreign bourgeoisie,” instead calling for patriotic Soviet music. Building on previous studies of the complex fate of western music in the USSR during the postwar decades, this article highlights a previously unexamined youth counterculture of jazz enthusiasts, exploring the impact of anti-jazz initiatives on grassroots cultural institutions, on the everyday cultural practices of young people, and on the Cold War’s cultural front in the USSR. It relies on sources from central and regional archives, official publications, and memoirs, alongside oral interviews with jazz musicians and cultural officials.

The Hazards of Operations Involving Nuclear Weapons during the Cold War

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 207-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Milton Leitenberg
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
False Alarms ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War

This article provides an overview of the perils of U.S. and Soviet nuclear war planning during the Cold War. In particular, the article discusses instances of false alarms, when one side or the other picked up indications of an imminent attack by the other side and had to take measures to determine whether the indicators were accurate. None of these incidents posed a large danger of an accidental nuclear war, but they illustrate the inherent risks of the war preparations that both the United States and the Soviet Union took for their immense nuclear arsenals.

The Nuclear Revolution

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Campbell Craig
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Atomic Bomb ◽  
The United States ◽  
Arms Races ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter, which examines the role of nuclear weapons in the Cold War and the role of the Cold War in the nuclear revolution, argues that the development of nuclear weapons significantly affected the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union beyond the nuclear crises and arms races. It investigates the role of the atomic bomb in making impossible the postwar cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union, and evaluates the role of nuclear fear in invalidating the Soviet's Marxism-Leninism ideology. The chapter also considers how the mutual assured destruction pushed the superpowers away from direct military confrontation and into senseless weapon overproduction at home.

Introduction: Writing the History of Terrorism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carola Dietze
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
International Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Global History ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter analyzes the most important trends in the writing of the history of terrorism since the beginning of terrorism research in the late nineteenth century up to today. It presents the origins of terrorism studies in Western social sciences and international relations, and it contextualizes the standard narrative of the history of terrorism put forward by the political scientists David C. Rapoport and Walter Laqueur. The chapter traces major developments in the history of terrorism in professional historiography in the Soviet Union or Russia as well as Europe and the United States during and after the Cold War, and especially since the attacks on September 11, 2001, and it outlines the results and effects of that historiography. On the basis of the evaluation of the scholarship available to date, the article maps out the rationale and the contours of the new global history of terrorism pursued in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Terrorism.

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