Pictures from an Institution

Author(s):  
George Blaustein

The founding Americanist institution in postwar Europe took place in a baroque, bomb-damaged castle and had only the tenuous approval of the US military government in Austria. Leopoldskron Castle had been owned by the theater impresario Max Reinhardt before the Nazis expropriated it. The Salzburg Seminar in American Civilization, a transnational collaboration of student organizations and Christian relief agencies, repurposed the castle in 1947 to bring American thought and art to occupied Europe. Scholars, novelists, and poets carried the American word abroad and, in turn, were shaped by their encounters in the ruins. This chapter is the story of that institution’s early years, perched between the imaginary geography of Mitteleuropa and the political geography of the Cold War. The Seminar preceded the Marshall Plan, and its previously unexplored archives yield dramas of denazification, displacement, and the bifurcation of Europe.

2006 ◽  
Vol 36 (145) ◽  
pp. 519-532
Author(s):  
Jan Benedix

The Information Revolution has leveraged the attention which the academic discourse is paying to the impacts of information and communication technologies, although aspects of how to conceptualize these impacts theoretically are insufficient. Focusing on the role of IT during the rearmament of the US-military since the end of the Cold War a neogramscian perspective on the genesis and diffusion of IT as “political project” is outlined. IT gives a new model of warfare and contributes to the significant consent which the rearmament of the US-military has gained among US-citizens.


2012 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Andrew Denson

This essay examines the depiction of Native Americans by the US Information Agency (USIA), the bureau charged with explaining American politics to the international public during the Cold War. In the 1950s and 1960s, the USIA broadcast the message that Americans had begun to acknowledge their nation's history of conquest and were working to redress old wrongs through an activist government. That message echoed the agency's depiction of the African American Civil Rights Movement and allowed the USIA to recognize Indian resistance to assimilation. It offered little room for tribal nationhood, however, during these early years of the modern American Indian political revival.


Author(s):  
Christine Rose Ackerley

The Institute for Transpacific Cultural Research is hosting a film screening and discussion of John Junkerman’s film, Okinawa: Afterburn, on the US military occupation of Okinawa. Issues regarding the Cold War, Japanese Imperialism, Japan’s article 9,  and the US military and resistance movements will be highlighted.The event is also hosted by VanCity Office of Community Engagement and the School of Communication along with the Peace Philosophy Centre It will be screened on November 17th at 5PM, room 1530 at Harbour Centre.


1970 ◽  
pp. 32-44
Author(s):  
D. Lakishyk ◽  
D. Puhachova-Lakishyk

The article examines the formation of the main directions of the US foreign policy strategy at the beginning of the Cold War. The focus is on determining the vectors of the United States in relation to the spatial priorities of the US foreign policy, the particular interests in the respective regions, the content of means and methods of influence for the realization of their own geopolitical interests. It is argued that the main regions that the United States identified for itself in the early postwar years were Europe, the Middle and Far East, and the Middle East and North Africa were the peripheral ones (attention was also paid to Latin America). It is stated that the most important priorities of American foreign policy were around the perimeter of the zone of influence of the USSR, which entered the postwar world as an alternative to the US center  of power. Attention is also paid to US foreign policy initiatives such as the Marshall Plan and the 4th Point Program, which have played a pivotal role inshaping American foreign policy in the postwar period.


Author(s):  
Victoria M. Grieve

In the early years of the Cold War, the US government devoted substantial energy and funds to using books as weapons against the Soviet Union. Books and the principles they represented were to counter Soviet accusations of American materialism and spread American ideals around the globe. Founded in 1952, Franklin Books Program, Inc. was a gray propaganda program that operated at the nexus of US public–private cultural diplomacy efforts. USIA bureaucrats believed Franklin successfully carried out diplomatic objectives by highlighting the positive aspects of American culture and those who ran Franklin emphasized the “nonpolitical” aspects of cultural diplomacy, many of which directly targeted children. Franklin’s textbooks and juvenile science books cultivated a literate population friendly to the United States, reaching out to foreign young people through books, which like art, seemed to transcend the written word and represent abstract ideals of freedom and democracy.


2004 ◽  
Vol 65 ◽  
pp. 188-191
Author(s):  
Maria Höhn

Scholars in both the US and Germany have studied the American occupation of Germany extensively. Until recently, however, much of that work focused on the emerging Cold War rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union to explain the rapid shift from an occupation intended to punish the Germans to one that increasingly included West Germans as partners and allies. While not dismissing the importance of the Cold War struggle in shaping US foreign policy, John Willoughby suggests that a more comprehensive understanding of how American power was projected during the Cold War is only possible if attention is shifted from the policy makers in Washington to the players on the ground. By exploring how the American military government dealt with the chaotic social and economic conditions within Germany, the widespread disciplinary problems of American GIs, and the pervasive racism within the military, Willoughby makes a compelling argument that US foreign policy and the “institutions of occupation” were transformed by the “more mundane problems of social control and organizational capability” (3). The American objectives in Germany changed, not because of the Cold War, but because financial pressures, personnel shortages, and economic disarray forced military authorities to hand over power to the Germans much sooner than envisioned by Washington. While Willoughby—by his own admission—does not provide new material to the professional historian of the era, his book nonetheless offers a fresh interpretation that draws on social and cultural history while also paying attention to race and gender.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Dan Stone

Abstract After the Second World War, the International Tracing Service's Child Search Branch (CSB) responded to inquiries for missing children and, until 1950 when funding was stopped, searched for children ‘in the field’. As the Cold War set in, the US military authorities restricted the opportunities for such children, mostly Eastern European, to be removed from their German foster parents and returned to their countries of origin. In the spring of 1948, when tensions between the CSB fieldworkers and the military authorities were at their height, ITS appointed an experienced fieldworker, Charlotte Babinski, to investigate cases of children in German foster homes with a view to streamlining policy regarding child removal. Despite her findings, as monetary and geopolitical pressures increased, the CSB had to accept that many children of Eastern European origin would remain in Germany. Children were thus a battleground in the early Cold War, in which politics triumphed over ethics.


Author(s):  
C. Kaygusuz ◽  
I. V. Ryzhov

The article is devoted to the history of elaboration, adoption and implementation of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan in the context of the Soviet-Turkish Relations. The authors observe these two key US external policy’s initiatives of the beginning of the Cold War for the analysis of the influence of geopolitical confrontation between the superpowers on the state of relations between Moscow and Ankara. The economic aid programs were significant leverages of the US influence on shaping the postwar system of international relations, which impacted decisively on the Turkish postwar foreign policy, especially toward the USSR, and predetermined to a large extent its further policy in the Cold War. The current article considers the reasons for rapprochement between the US and Turkey stands on the relations with the USSR, analyses the process of elaboration and adoption of aid plans for Turkey and the outcomes of their implementation. The article explores the origins of the US-Turkey cooperation based on sharing the common stance on confronting Moscow and can be used as a source of information on the Russian-Turkish relations problem in historical context.


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