España Libre and Its Editors

Author(s):  
Montse Feu

España Libre’s editors invigorated the periodical’s proletarian counterculture to both fascism and elitism and sustained an ongoing resistance through times of harsh repression in Spain and Cold War political tensions in the United States. In the 1940s editorials focused on alerting readers about the spread of fascism to the Americas and encouraged fundraising for refugees. By the 1950s, the increasing international diplomatic recognition of the Franco dictatorship disquieted members and the editorials published during that decade were heavily focused on denouncing that recognition. However, by the 1960s the periodical concentrated its efforts on supporting the weakened underground labor opposition in Spain and in coordinating efforts with other political forces. In the 1970s, España Libre published homages to exiles for the antifascist resistance they put forth.

Author(s):  
Uta A. Balbier

This book provides a transnational history of Billy Graham’s revival work in the 1950s, zooming in on his revival meetings in London (1954), Berlin (1954/1960), and New York (1957). It shows how Graham’s international ministry took shape in the context of transatlantic debates about the place and future of religion in public life after the experiences of war and at the onset of the Cold War, and through a constant exchange of people, ideas, and practices. It explores the transnational nature of debates about the religious underpinnings of the “Free World” and sheds new light on the contested relationship between business, consumerism, and religion. In the context of Graham’s revival meetings, ordinary Christians, theologians, ministers, and church leaders in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom discussed, experienced, and came to terms with religious modernization and secular anxieties, Cold War culture, and the rise of consumerism. The transnational connectedness of their political, economic, and spiritual hopes and fears brings a narrative to life that complicates our understanding of the different secularization paths the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany embarked on in the 1950s. During Graham’s altar call in Europe, the contours of a transatlantic revival become visible, even if in the long run it was unable to develop a dynamism that could have sustained this moment in these different national and religious contexts.


2020 ◽  
pp. 15-31
Author(s):  
Sit Tsui ◽  
Erebus Wong ◽  
Lau Kin Chi ◽  
Wen Tiejun

During the 1960s, China was effectively excluded from the two major camps: the Soviet camp and the U.S. camp. For about a decade, China was obliged to seek development within its own borders and thereby achieved some extent of delinking: a refusal to succumb to U.S.-eurocentric globalization and an embrace of a people's agenda of development. While foreign relations were later normalized and China once again brought in foreign capital, since being explicitly targeted as the primary rival of the United States, however, the situation may again warrant moves toward delinking and searching for alternatives, with ups and downs along the way.


2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 175-207
Author(s):  
Étienne Forestier-Peyrat

Abstract This article shows how official discussions of federal arrangements within the USSR affected Soviet foreign policy from the 1940s through the 1960s, especially on questions of decolonization and relations with the United States and other Western countries. Connecting Soviet domestic history and international developments, the article shows how the federal structure of the USSR was used in transnational debates on composite polities, race, and nationality and also how it was debated internally. Attacks on the highly centralized nature of Soviet federal structures in international arenas and the countermeasures adopted as part of the ideological Cold War had long-term as well as short-term effects on Soviet politics and foreign policy. Within the USSR, such attacks raised questions about the ethnofederal structure of the USSR and provided comparison points for both loyalist and dissident proponents of national rights in the country.


2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 422-445
Author(s):  
MATTHEW J. JONES

AbstractUpon its publication in 1759, Voltaire'sCandide, or The Optimistscandalized Europe. Banned for its blasphemous and politically seditious content, it became asuccès de scandaleand one of the most widely read books of its time. Leonard Bernstein adapted Voltaire's work for the stage in the 1950s. With its emphasis on the improbable, the artificial, and the insouciant,Candidepractically begs for a camp (re)interpretation, and it is just such an analysis I offer here. After outlining camp as social critique, I turn to Cunégonde's aria “Glitter and Be Gay” and trace its path through camp's causeways in two different decades: first, in the United States of the 1950s, a period marked by McCarthy's witch-hunts, Cold War anxieties, intense homophobia, and the composer's personal struggle to accept his homosexuality, and second, in the late 1980s, when singer, songwriter, and AIDS activist Michael Callen (1955–1993) recorded his own camped-up version of “Glitter and Be Gay” for what would become his last musical project, a posthumous double album entitledLegacy(1996). By following Cunégonde's sparkling trail of glitter and gemstones through two historical moments, I demonstrate how camp functions as a tool of queer resistance across the last half of the twentieth century.


2000 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 69-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Middeke

The Anglo-American summit at Nassau in December 1962 did not strictly separate Britain's deterrent from the proposed Multilateral Force (MLF). As a result, Conservative governments in the 1960s tried to safeguard maximum British independence in nuclear relations with the United States. The British tried to thwart American initiatives on the mixed-manned MLF; some British officials even hoped to preserve an “independent British deterrent” through nuclear cooperation with France. For the United States, the British deterrent had political value in an intra-alliance or East-West context, but no military or political significance in itself. The MLF idea of bilateral nuclear cooperation with Britain and France was a means to contain French and German nuclear ambitions and to settle Cold War disputes with the Soviet Union. In London, however, leading officials believed that Britain's future as a great power was inextricably linked to the possession of an independent nuclear deterrent. When nuclear independence was lost, the appearance of independence became more important.


2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 6-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald H. Chilcote

The Cold War assumptions of mainstream Latin American studies in the United States were challenged in the 1960s by a new generation of academics that opened up the field to progressive thinking, including Marxism. West Coast intellectuals played a major role in this transformation. These new Latin Americanists rejected the university-government-foundation nexus in the field and emphasized field research that brought them into close relationships with Latin Americans struggling for change and engaging with radical alternatives to mainstream thinking. In the course of this work, they confronted efforts to co-opt them and to discourage and even prevent their field research. Despite this they managed to transform Latin American studies into a field that was intellectually and politically vibrant both in theory and in practice. Los supuestos de la Guerra Fría dominantes en los estudios latinoamericanos en los Estados Unidos fueron cuestionados en la década de 1960 por una nueva generación de académicos que abrió el campo al pensamiento progresista, incluso el Marxismo. Los intelectuales de la costa oeste jugaron un papel importante en esta transformación. Estos nuevos latinoamericanistas rechazaron el nexo universidad-gobierno-fundación que caracterizó el campo y enfatizaron la investigación en el terreno que los ubicó en una estrecha relación con los latinoamericanos que luchan por el cambio y se enfrentan con alternativas radicales al pensamiento dominante. En el curso de este trabajo, confrontaron esfuerzos para cooptarlos y desalentar e incluso prevenir su investigación en el terreno. A pesar de esto, lograron transformar los estudios latinoamericanos en un campo que era intelectualmente y políticamente vibrante tanto en la teoría como en la práctica.


PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (3) ◽  
pp. 701-710
Author(s):  
Arturo Arias

The Cuban Revolution Generated a New Communist Paranoia in the United States. Interest in Latin America Grew Dramatically after Castro's rise to power in 1959 and was partly responsible for the explosive growth in the number of scholars specializing in hemispheric issues during the 1960s. Latin Americans, in turn, saw this phase of the Cold War as a furthering of imperial aggression by the United States. The Eisenhower administration's authoritarian diplomatic maneuvers to isolate Guatemala by accusing the country's democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz (1950-54), of being a communist and by pressuring members of the Organization of American States to do likewise had already alarmed intellectuals and artists in Latin America five years before. On 17 June 1954, Carlos Castillo Armas and a band of a few hundred mercenaries invaded the country from Honduras with logistical support from the Central Intelligence Agency in an operation code-named PBSUCCESS, authorized by President Eisenhower in August 1953. By 1 July 1954 the so-called Movement of National Liberation had taken over Guatemala. Angela Fillingim's research evidences how the United States officially viewed Guatemala as “Pre-Western,” according to “pre-established criteria,” because the Latin American country had failed to eliminate its indigenous population (5-6). Implicitly, the model was that of the nineteenth-century American West. As a solution, the State Department proposed “finishing the Conquest.”


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Uta A. Balbier

The introduction embeds the revival meetings American evangelist Billy Graham organized in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany in the 1950s in the existing historiography of religious life in the 1950s, America’s spiritual Cold War, and the interplay between religion, consumers, and business culture. It contends that transnational phenomena such as Cold War culture, white middle-class economic aspiration and increasing prosperity, and religious revivalism blended in Graham’s spiritual and ideological offer and explain its attractiveness on both sides of the Atlantic. By introducing the concepts of everyday and lived religion, the introduction argues for a fresh interpretation of the status of religious life and the process of secularization in the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States. In centering the voices and practices of ministers and ordinary Christians, this new approach makes the contours of a transatlantic revival visible.


Author(s):  
Carol Mason

Examining fiction and nonfiction written explicitly by and for members of right-wing movements provides a deeper understanding of points of affinity as well as contention in the midst of increased polarization in United States political culture. Primary materials include fiction penned by conservative politicians and pundits, fiction written by right-wing agitators, and nonfiction movement literature such as periodicals, advice books, and tactical instruction guides. Since the middle of the 20th century, right-wing literature has sustained and motivated an increasingly formidable political force that undermines democratic ideals and encourages reformatory or revolutionary action. Comparing and contrasting fiction with movement nonfiction written by conservatives of the Cold War era illuminates how right-wing politics shifted away from pessimistic accounts of the supposed decline of Western civilization. In the 1960s, conservative book clubs advertised fiction in which heroes typically were ordinary white businessmen whose love of country led them to fight “un-American” foes, often depicted as sexual deviants, racialized immigrants, or a combination of the two. The fiction, then, presented a means of transcending abstract, erudite discussions of the presumed “suicide of the West” that preoccupied conservative intellectuals. Likewise, more radical nonfiction offered a hopeful, less fatalistic sense of right-wing plight. While an urgent tone characterized both fiction and nonfiction in the Cold War era, the fiction and some smaller political publications illuminated a difference between using doomsday rhetoric and deploying an apocalyptic narrative in which readers could see themselves taking action in social dramas and political conflicts. This rejection of fatalistic passivity corresponded with the postwar persistence of American anti-Semitism that coded communism as Jewish, with anti-integration efforts that framed racial concerns as parental ones, and with the rise of the New Right, which de-emphasized economic imperatives to thwart the supposed anticommunist evil that plagued America. Instead of economic concerns, the New Right began politicizing social issues to inaugurate a cultural conservatism, which went beyond conserving and defending a right-wing version of the American way of life and went on the offensive in the 1970s and 1980s. Right-wing fiction of the Culture Wars not only reflected this shift but also ushered it in. In the midst of and after the Reagan Revolution, male protagonists in right-wing fiction were more socially outcast and persecuted than their Cold War counterparts and therefore more action-oriented from the start. Macho serial fiction and novels penned by right-wing provocateurs in the anti-abortion and white supremacist movements fomented militant insurgency and revolution. Meanwhile, mainstream publishers created imprints specifically designed to cater to conservative readership, especially women. An industry boom in conservative Christian fiction emerged with orchestrated efforts to challenge educational curricula and with increased popularity in homeschooling. The trajectory of influential conservative women’s writing went from atheistic free-market novels and prim advice books on how to negotiate assertiveness and subservience in holy matrimony to political conspiracy books and increasingly vicious attacks on particular liberals presumed to be agents (not dupes) of the antichrist. In recent years, women and right-wing pundits have published commercially successful young adult and children’s literature expressly with conservative themes. In the post-9/11 era, narrating state power involved capitalizing on a sense of trauma by integrating feelings of imminent conflict with the daily rhythms of society. Right-wing literature in the United States reflected and promoted this disjointed temporality.


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