scholarly journals The exceptionalism of Romanian socialist television and its implications

Panoptikum ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 168-192
Author(s):  
Alexandru Matei ◽  
Annemarie Sorescu- Marinković
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
Television Studies ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
The Public ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Political Economic

During recent years, the study of European televisions has rediscovered socialist television, and we have witnessed a rapid rise in scholarly interest in a new field of research: socialist television studies. On the whole, this recent body of literaturę presents two main new insights as compared to previous studies in the field of the history of Western television: on the one hand, it shows that European television during the Cold War was less heterogeneous than one may imagine when considering the political, economic and ideological split created by the Iron Curtain; on the other hand, it turns to and capitalizes on archives, mostly video, which have been inaccessible to the public. The interactions between Western and socialist mass culture are highlighted mainly with respect to the most popular TV programs: fiction and entertainment. The authors give us an extraordinary landscape of the Romanian socialist television. Unique in the Eastern part of Europe is the period of the early 1990s. Upon the fall of the communist regime, after almost 15 years of freezing, TVR found itself unable to move forward.

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.

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.

Queer Legal History: A Field Grows Up and Comes Out

2011 ◽  
Vol 36 (02) ◽  
pp. 537-559 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicia Kornbluh
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Legal History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Military Law ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The New Deal

This essay examines recent scholarship on the legal history of sexuality in the United States. It focuses on Margot Canaday's The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Modern America (2009) and Marc Stein's Sexual Injustice: Supreme Court Decisions from Griswold to Roe (2010). It also reviews recent work on the history of marriage, including Sarah Barringer Gordon's The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (2010) and George Chauncey's Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today's Debate Over Gay Equality (2004), and the history of military law Defending America: Military Culture and the Cold‐War Court Martial (2005), by Elizabeth Lutes Hillman. The essay argues that this scholarship is significant because it offers a different view of sex and power than the one derived from the early writing of Michel Foucault. “Queer legal history” treats the liberalism of the 1960s‐1970s as sexually discriminatory as well as liberatory. It underlines the exclusions that were part of public policy under the federal G.I. Bill and the New Deal welfare state.

Latin American Tercermundistas in the Soviet Union

2020 ◽  
pp. 221-240
Author(s):  
Tobias Rupprecht
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Third World ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter complicates conventional understandings of Latin America’s Cold War by looking at the travels of tercermundista intellectuals and activists to all parts of the USSR. Visits of intellectuals from the global South to the Cold War Soviet Union have hardly been studied. Accounts of the history of Cold War Latin America have put the Soviet Union, as a political and intellectual point of reference, aside too readily. The early Cold War was a time of enhanced, and rather successful, Soviet attempts to present their country in a positive light towards the emerging Third World. Those Latin Americans who developed a sense of belonging with the Third World in the 1960s, this chapter demonstrates, were still susceptible to the lures of certain characteristics of the Soviet state and suggested their implementation in their home countries. The reason for the positive perception came, on the one hand, as a result of very lavishly funded and well conducted programmes for Third World visitors in the Soviet Union.

Polish Sovietology in the Lead-up to the Cold War

2011 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-193
Author(s):  
Richard Pipes
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
Soviet Rule ◽  
World War ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

After the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, some of the closest study of the new Communist regime and Soviet state was conducted by Polish scholars, whose country had a long history of troubled relations with Russia. Polish scholars had long been studying the Tsarist regime, but the advent of Soviet rule forced major adjustments. Some of the literature that emerged in Poland about the Soviet Union was perceptive, but other works were warped by anti-Semitism and an obsession with alleged Bolshevik-Judeo conspiracies. By the time of World War II, a substantial body of expertise about the USSR had accumulated in Poland. The war and the subsequent establishment of Soviet hegemony largely brought an end to this tradition, which could not truly be revived until after 1989.

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.

The Cold War and European Security, 1950–1960

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Talbot C. Imlay
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
European Security ◽  
The Public ◽  
German Army ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
European Defence Community

In examining European socialist responses to the issue of post-war European security, this chapter challenges the image of a continent irremediably divided along Cold War lines. Throughout the 1950s European socialists struggled to devise a stable and peaceful security order in a world of nuclear armaments and superpower rivalries. This struggle initially centred on the European Defence Community (EDC). For many socialists, the EDC offered a possible means not only of avoiding an independent German army but also perhaps of overcoming Cold War divisions. Following the EDC’s demise and West Germany’s integration into NATO, European socialists recentred their hopes on ‘disengagement’—the idea of creating a demilitarized and neutralized region in Central and Eastern Europe encompassing countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Indeed, during the late 1950s, European socialists emerged as the leading organized advocates of disengagement, working assiduously to keep the project in the public eye.

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.

Soviet foreign policymaking and the Afghanistan war: from ‘second Mongolia’ to ‘bleeding wound’

1999 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 675-691 ◽  
Author(s):  
FRED HALLIDAY
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Policy Formulation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Afghanistan War ◽  
The West ◽  
Soviet Policy ◽  
Multiple Dimensions ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War

The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, lasting from 1979 to 1989, was one of the major chapters in the Cold War. Analysis of how Soviet policy was made has, hitherto, focused on the decision to intervene, in December 1979. Equally important, however, as an episode in the final stages of the Cold War, and as an example of Soviet policy formulation, was the decision to withdraw. Basing itself on declassified Soviet documents, and on a range of interviews with former Soviet and Afghan officials, this article charts the protracted history of the Soviet decision and sets it in context: as with the decision to invade, the withdrawal reflected assessment of multiple dimensions of policymaking, not only the interests and calculation of Soviet leaders, but also relations within the Afghan communist leadership on the one hand, and strategic negotiation with the West on the other.

scholarly journals Censura y oídos sordos ante la literatura sobre los campos de la muerte en la posguerra europea: Joaquim Amat-Piniella y Primo Levi = Censorship and deaf ears faced with the literature on the death camps in post-war Europe: Joaquim Amat-Piniella and Primo Levi

2019 ◽  
pp. 234
Author(s):  
Alejandro Pérez Vidal
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
Primo Levi ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Cold War

Resumen: Esta comunicación estudia algunos aspectos de la memoria de experiencias concentracionarias en los años inmediatamente posteriores a la II Guerra Mundial. En la primera parte se centra en la historia editorial de K.L. Reich, novela de Joaquim Amat-Piniella, señalando en particular su publicación parcial en una revista del exilio y un proyecto de publicación completa en Barcelona en 1948. La segunda parte intenta explicar el limitado éxito inicial de K.L. Reich por comparación con lo que sucedió con obras parecidas en otros países europeos, y en particular con Se questo è un uomo, de Primo Levi; se intenta mostrar que el anticomunismo de la guerra fría dejaba poco espacio para la memoria pública de los campos de concentración y que fue en los ambientes de la izquierda antifascista en los que ésta tendió a cultivarse.Palabras clave: Joaquim Amat-Piniella, Primo Levi, testimonios de los campos de concentración, recepción, guerra fría.Abstract: The present study considers some aspects of the remembrance of concentration camp experiences in the years immediately following World War II. The first part focuses on the publishing history of K.L. Reich, by Joaquim Amat-Piniella, pointing out specially its partial publication in France in 1945 and a project to publish the whole novel in Barcelona in 1948. The second part seeks to explain the limited success of K.L. Reich when it was first published, by considering what happened to similar works in other European countries and, in particular, Primo Levi's Se questo è un uomo. It argues that the anti-communism of the Cold War left little room for the public remembrance of the concentration camps and that it was the anti-fascist leftists who were most inclined to keep this memory alive. Keywords: Joaquim Amat-Piniella, Primo Levi, concentration camp testimonies, reception, Cold War.

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