Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 273-280
Author(s):  
Marcel Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Processes Of Change ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Rapid Social Change ◽  
History Of ◽  
Divided Germany ◽  
Local Perspectives

The conclusion revisits the key arguments of the book and highlights the broader implications of its findings for our understanding of Germany’s postwar history. In particular, it emphasizes the need to reconcile what might be described as the opposing bottom-up and top-down histories of the divided Germany. As much as the history of the divided Germany was a history of antagonistic conceptions of society, it was also a history of local attempts to get by in an era of rapid social change. The chapter thus emphasizes the need to include more local perspectives in studies of Cold War societies. It argues that explorations of how larger processes of change played out in the specific local settings of everyday life allow us to complicate traditional narratives of life on both sides of the Iron Curtain and overcome persisting divisions in the historical literature.

scholarly journals Polio and Disability in Cold War Hungary

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dora Vargha
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Physical Health ◽  
Medical Treatment ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
World War ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
Shared Experiences ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

Concerns over children’s physical health and ability were shared experiences across post–World War II societies, and the figure of the child was often used as a tool to reach over the Iron Curtain. However, key differences in how children with polio were perceived, and as a result treated, followed Cold War fault lines. Concepts of an individual’s role in society shaped medical treatment and views of disability, which contributed to the celebrated polio child in one environment and her invisibility in another. Thus, through the lens of disability, new perspectives have emerged on the history of the Cold War, polio, and childhood.

scholarly journals Everyday Life Under Communism: Practices and Objects

2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (02) ◽  
pp. 207-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larissa Zakharova
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social Interaction ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Consumer Goods ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Basic Consumer

Why should we consider the everyday life of ordinary citizens in their countless struggles to obtain basic consumer goods if the priorities of their leaders lay elsewhere? For years, specialists of the Soviet Union and the people's democracies neglected the history of everyday life and, like the so-called “totalitarian” school, focused on political history, seeking to grasp how power was wielded over a society that was considered immobile and subject to the state's authority. Furthermore, studies on the eastern part of Europe were dominated by political scientists who were interested in the geopolitics of the Cold War. The way the field was structured meant that little attention was paid to sociological and anthropological perspectives that sought to understand social interaction.

Is It Transnational? A New Perspective in the Study of Communism

2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 114-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bogdan C. Iacob
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Fundamental Shift ◽  
The Continuum

This article presents a comprehensive review of the transnational perspective in the study of communism and the implications of this methodological turn for the transformation of the field itself. While advancing new topics and interpretative standpoints with a view to expanding the scope of such an initiative in current scholarship, the author argues that the transnational approach is important on several levels. First, it helps to de-localize and de-parochialize national historiographies. Second, it can provide the background to for the Europeanization of the history of the communist period in former Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Third, and most importantly, the transnational approach can reconstruct the international dimension of the communist experience, with its multiple geographies, spaces of entanglement and transfer, and clustered, cross-cultural identity-building processes. The article concludes that the advent of transnationalism in the study of communism allows for the discovery of various forms of historical contiguousness either among state socialisms or beyond the Iron Curtain. In other words, researchers might have a tool to not only know more about less, but also to resituate that “less” in the continuum of the history of communism and in the context of modernity. The transnational approach can generate a fundamental shift in our vantage point on the communist phenomenon in the twentieth century. It can reveal that a world long perceived as mostly turned inward was in fact imbricate in wider contexts of action and imagination and not particularly limited by the ideological segregationism of the Cold War.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah M. Griffith
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Asian Immigration ◽  
Racial Liberalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Important Time

Liberal Protestant resistance to anti-Asian discrimination evolved over the first half of the twentieth century to become a powerful force for social change. Through their various institutions and organizations, liberal Protestants worked to change the way Americans and policy makers thought about racial difference and inclusion. The interracial coalitions that liberal Protestants built during WWII continued to impact the fight for minority civil rights in the early Cold War era. The 1952 McCarran Walter Act embodied the racial liberalism of liberal Protestants when it lifted the decades-long ban on Asian immigration. Understanding the history of liberal Protestant activism comes at an important time as the nation continues to struggle over the meaning of inclusion and searches for ways to achieve racial equality.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Marcel Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Postwar Germany ◽  
Historical Literature ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
East And West ◽  
Divided Germany

This chapter introduces the reader to the two case study villages Neukirch and Ebersbach, explains the methodology of the study, and outlines the structure of the book. It also sets out the central argument that there were parallel histories of responses to social change among villagers in the divided Germany. The chapter then outlines the three major ways in which the book contributes to scholarship on postwar Germany: Firstly, by highlighting similarities between East and West, it complicates persisting Cold War divisions in the historical literature. Secondly, it emphasizes the complex ways in which East and West Germans engaged with large-scale changes through peculiarly local meanings. Thirdly, by focusing on two case study localities which question conventional divides between the urban and the rural, it challenges understandings of the rural as the traditional ‘other’ in modern society.

“SEEING LIKE A STATE”: AN ESSAY ON THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF MODERN IRAN

2010 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 61a-61a
Author(s):  
Cyrus Schayegh
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Reference Point ◽  
The State ◽  
Top Down ◽  
State Action ◽  
History Of ◽  
Iranian State ◽  
Pahlavi Dynasty

This essay argues that with the rise of the autocratic Pahlavi dynasty (1921–79), the state started to cast a long shadow over the historiography of modern Iran. Drawing on dynastic nationalism, modernization policies, and repression, the Pahlavi shahs and their bureaucratic elites produced an image of an all-powerful state completely detached from society. Scholars often reflexively replicated this top-down perspective. The resulting methodological statism, a metanarrative of state action as the inevitable ultimate reference point of all things Iranian, has reified our understanding of the modern Iranian state and, more generally, limited our vision of “the history of Pahlavi Iran.” Fixated on autocratic policymaking, we have ignored routine citizen–government interactions; equally, we lack microhistories of the complex facets of everyday life. By illuminating the politics and history of methodological statism, this essay hopes to prepare the ground for the assimilation of such alternative perspectives into the historiography of modern Iran.

scholarly journals Promoting diversity. The Polonia Book Fund, Ltd Transnational Network, 1958-1963

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pawel Sowinski
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
Joint Effort ◽  
Private Partnership ◽  
East European ◽  
Historical Materials ◽  
Early Stages ◽  
History Of ◽  
The U.S

<p>This article discusses the history of the so-called “book program”—a joint effort by the U.S. government, the East European diaspora, and readers of prohibited books behind the Iron Curtain. Between 1956 and 1989 the program purchased some 10 million copies of publications and delivered them to people in Soviet–dominated Eastern Europe in order to undermine communist rule. Using the historical materials of the Polonia Book Fund, a U.S.–sponsored publishing project for Poland, this article contributes new insights on the transatlantic perspective of the cultural Cold War. This article focuses on the program’s early stages, and describes various elements of the transnational smuggling network. The program’s state-private partnership was a workable solution that helped to foster a diversity of opinions in post-Stalinist Poland.</p>

scholarly journals Las Bienales Interamericanas de México y la Guerra Fría en el hemisferio

2021 ◽  
pp. 249-285
Author(s):  
Fabiola Martínez Rodríguez
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Sao Paulo ◽  
São Paulo ◽  
Cultural Hegemony ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Mexican Government ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Cold War

In 1957 the Mexican government decided to embark on the organization of high profile Interamerican biennials. Although successful in convening a broad representation of countries in the continent, only two biennials successfully opened in 1958 and 1960. By situating these exhibitions, together with the Sao Paulo Biennials and the Bienales Hispanoamericanas in the complex geopolitics created by the Iron Curtain, this essay analyses the role that Mexico’s Biennials played in the hemisphere’s Cultural Cold War. In an effort to challenge US economic and cultural hegemony in the continent, the Interamerican Biennials became one of the last battlefields for Mexico’s famed revolutionary artists, and ultimately an important, if largely neglected, chapter in the history of Latin America’s 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.

RIAS, 1963–1992

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Public Attitudes ◽  
Rock And Roll ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
Unique Case ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

This concluding chapter briefly charts the history of RIAS until the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. By the late 1960s RIAS had undergone three significant changes. First, the station had become a much more thoroughly German institution. Next was RIAS's decision to broadcast more popular music, especially rock-and-roll. The final significant change for RIAS was the introduction of a new format: television. The chapter shows how these changes coincided with political and generational shifts in the last decades of the Cold War, which at the same time highlights the fact that RIAS is a product of the Cold War. Finally, the chapter turns to a discussion of the legacy of RIAS and of how the station's history serves as an important and unique case study for considering the success and limitations of the American efforts to sway public attitudes behind the Iron Curtain.

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