The Cold War in Museums: Using Artefacts to Tell Twentieth-Century History

Vestnik RFFI ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 43-45
Author(s):  
S. Alberti
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The Cold War

Espionage and Exile

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phyllis Lassner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Crises ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
John Le Carre ◽  
The Cold War

Espionage and Exile demonstrates that from the 1930s through the Cold War, British Writers Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, Pamela Frankau, John le Carré and filmmaker Leslie Howard combined propaganda and popular entertainment to call for resistance to political oppression. Instead of constituting context, the political engagement of these spy fictions bring the historical crises of Fascist and Communist domination to the forefront of twentieth century literary history. They deploy themes of deception and betrayal to warn audiences of the consequences of Nazi Germany's conquests and later, the fusion of Fascist and Communist oppression. Featuring protagonists who are stateless and threatened refugees, abandoned and betrayed secret agents, and politically engaged or entrapped amateurs, all in states of precarious exile, these fictions engage their historical subjects to complicate extant literary meanings of transnational, diaspora and performativity. Unsettling distinctions between villain and victim as well as exile and belonging dramatizes relationships between the ethics of espionage and responses to international crises. With politically charged suspense and narrative experiments, these writers also challenge distinctions between literary, middlebrow, and popular culture.

A Tower of Tangled Histories: The Upper Silesia Tower in Poznań and the Making of an Unromantic Poland, 1911–1955

Slavic Review ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 566-590
Author(s):  
Patryk Babiracki
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Cold War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Material Structure ◽  
World War ◽  
Upper Silesia ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The City ◽  
Over Time

Engaging with regional, international, and spatial histories, this article proposes a new reading of the twentieth-century Polish past by exploring the vicissitudes of a building known as the Upper Silesia Tower. Renowned German architect Hans Poelzig designed the Tower for the 1911 Ostdeutsche Ausstellung in Posen, an ethnically Polish city under Prussian rule. After Poland regained its independence following World War I, the pavilion, standing centrally on the grounds of Poznań’s International Trade Fair, became the fair's symbol, and over time, also evolved into visual shorthand for the city itself. I argue that the Tower's significance extends beyond Posen/Poznań, however. As an embodiment of the conflicts and contradictions of Polish-German historical entanglements, the building, in its changing forms, also concretized various efforts to redefine the dominant Polish national identity away from Romantic ideals toward values such as order, industriousness, and hard work. I also suggest that eventually, as a material structure harnessed into the service of socialism, the Tower, with its complicated past, also brings into relief questions about the regional dimensions of the clashes over the meaning of modernity during the Cold War.

scholarly journals GRANDE ESTRATÉGIA: POLÍTICA EXTERNA E DEFESA EM UM MUNDO EM TRANSFORMAÇÃO

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (7) ◽  
Author(s):  
Celso Amorim
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
World Order ◽  
Defense Policy ◽  
Mixed Structure ◽  
Hard Power ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Brazilian Case

In the last years of the twentieth century, after the end of the Cold War, the world has evolved into a mixed structure, which preserves the characteristics of unipolarity at the same time that approaches to a multipolar world in some ways. In an international reality marked by its fluid nature, the emergence of new actors and the so-called "asymmetric threats" has not eliminated the former agents in the world order. And the conflict between the States has not disappeared from the horizon. In this context, diplomacy must have the permanent support of defense policy. Therefore, in the Brazilian case, the paper presents that the country should adopt a grand strategy that combines foreign policy and defense policy, in which soft power will be enhanced by hard power.

“This Room is Yours, Personal!”: The Rise and Fall of Middle-Class Decoration Expertise in the Bedrooms of America’s Teens, 1900–1985

2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-129
Author(s):  
Jason Reid
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Room Design ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

This article also examines how the decline of teen-oriented room décor expertise reflected significant changes in the way gender and class influenced teen room culture during the tail end of the Cold War. Earlier teen décor strategies were often aimed towards affluent women; by contrast, the child-centric, do-it-yourself approach, as an informal, inexpensive alternative, was better suited to grant boys and working class teens from both sexes a greater role in the room design discourse. This article evaluates how middle-class home décor experts during the early decades of the twentieth century re-envisioned the teen bedroom as a space that was to be designed and maintained almost exclusively by teens rather than parents. However, many of the experts who formulated this advice would eventually become victims of their own success. By the 1960s and 1970s, teens were expected to have near total control over their bedrooms, which, in turn, challenged the validity of top-down forms of expertise.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
James D. Strasburg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Third Way ◽  
Evangelical Protestantism ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
Global Engagement ◽  
Political Commitments ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Second World ◽  
Christian Nationalism

The introduction sketches out the theological, diplomatic, and political commitments of ecumenical and evangelical Protestantism in twentieth century America. It likewise discusses the twentieth-century origins of Christian nationalism and Christian globalism in American Protestant thought, surveying in particular how the two world wars and onset of the Cold War both activated and refined these competing theologies of global engagement. Beyond the American context, it outlines the German Protestant pushback to American efforts to reconstruct Germany on an American basis. Wrestling with the legacy of their own nationalist theologies, German Protestants drew on the devastation of the Second World War to outline a new “third way” theology that positioned Protestant churches as global mediators within the intense ideological landscape of the Cold War. When a growing number of American Protestants found themselves converted to this line of thought, it became clear that their efforts to remake Europe had in fact begun to remake them.

War and strong states, peace and weak states?

1996 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael C. Desch
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Security ◽  
International Politics ◽  
The State ◽  
Weak States ◽  
The Cold War

For most of the twentieth century, international politics were dominated by World Wars I and II and by the cold war. This period of intense international security competition clearly strengthened states, increasing their scope and cohesion. However, the end of the cold war may represent a “threat trough”—a period of significantly reduced international security competition. If so, the scope and cohesion of many states may likewise change. Although this change will not be so great as to end the state or the states system, the state as we know it surely will change. Some states will disintegrate, many will cease growing in scope and may even shrink a little, and few will remain unaffected.

“The Dilemma to a Free People”: Justice Robert Jackson, Walter Bagehot, and the Creation of a Conservative Jurisprudence

2002 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 517-539 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Free Speech ◽  
Constitutional Law ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
High Court ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Free Speech Rights ◽  
Free People ◽  
The U.S

Even today, the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Terminiello v. City of Chicago (1949) strikes students of constitutional law as a vexing factual situation. The problems the case posed for the High Court are all the more daunting considering its historical context, directly following the nation's confrontation with Nazism and standing on the cusp of the Cold War against Communism. In the broader view, most observers would locate the decision within the ascendance of liberal protection for free speech rights occurring over the second half of the twentieth century. But progressive accounts should not be allowed to mask the contemporary momentousness for the justices hearing the case. Indeed, in this constitutional conflict over the speech of a rabble-rousing priest was lodged a sober question about the polity's health at that time and the preferred response to the nation's need.

Southern Literature, Cold War Culture, and the Making of Modern America

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordan J. Dominy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Southern Literature ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Societal Pressure ◽  
The Cold War

The formalized study of southern literature in the mid-twentieth century is an example of scholars formalizing the study of modernist aesthetics in order to suppress leftist politics and sentiments in literature and art. This formalized, institutional study was initiated in a climate in which intellectuals were under societal pressure, created by the Cold War, to praise literary and artistic production representative of American values. This even in southern literary studies occurred roughly at the same time that the United States sought to extoll the virtues of America’s free, democratic society abroad. In this manner, southern studies and American studies become two sides of the same coin. Intellectuals and writers that promoted American exceptionalism dealt with the rising Civil Rights Movement and the nation’s complicated history with race and poverty by casting the issues as moral rather than political problems that were distinctly southern and could therefore be corrected by drawing on “exceptional” southern values, such as tradition and honor. The result of such maneuvering is that over the course of the twentieth century, “south” becomes more than a geographical identity. Ultimately, “south” becomes a socio-political and cultural identity associated with modern conservatism with no geographical boundaries. Rather than a country divided into south and north, the United States is divided in the twenty-first century into red and blue states. The result of using southern literature to present southern values as appropriate, moderate values for the whole nation during the Cold War is to associate these values with nationalism and conservatism today.

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