Month: November 2011
Barnes v. Glen Theatre and Kitty Kat Lounge
“Respondents are two establishments in South Bend, Indiana, that wish to provide totally nude dancing as entertainment, and individual dancers who are employed at these establishments. They claim that the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of expression prevents the State of Indiana from enforcing its public indecency law to prevent this form of dancing. We reject their claim.”
Read this Supreme Court decision written by Chief Justice Rehnquist.
Polybius Histories Book 6: Constitution of the Roman Republic
Polybius is our best source on the Roman Constitution. Here he describes and analyzes the Roman political system during the Republic.
The Cold War Home Front
Good resource for propaganda and such.
Victor Navasky, Naming Names
“The social costs of what came to be called McCarthyism have yet to be computed. By conferring its prestige on the red hunt, the state did more than bring misery to the lives of hundreds of thousands of Communists, former Communists, fellow travelers, and unlucky liberals. It weakened American culture and it weakened itself.”
More from this excerpt of Navasky’s Naming Names
Interview with E. Howard Hunt
Hunt discusses his role in the CIA, his perceptions of the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine, etc.
Strange guy. Crazy life.
Interview with Allen Ginsberg
CNN Cold War Interview Transcripts
Some of these interviews are pure gold.
Zinn, A People’s War? (Ch 16)
The victors of World War II were the Soviet Union and the United States (also England, France and Nationalist China, but they were weak). Both these countries now went to work–without swastikas, goose-stepping, or officially declared racism, but under the cover of “socialism” on one side, and “democracy” on the other, to carve out their own empires of influence. They proceeded to share and contest with one another the domination of the world, to build military machines far greater than the Fascist countries had built, to control the destinies of more countries than Hitler, Mussolini, and Japan had been able to do. They also acted to control their own populations, each country with its own techniques-crude in the Soviet Union, sophisticated in the United States–to make their rule secure.
The war not only put the United States in a position to dominate much of the world; it created conditions for effective control at home…
China: The Long March to Capitalism
A four part cartoon series chronicling China’s transition to capitalism. Really interesting.
Vaughn Meader: The First Family
Great Cold War Satire!
George Kennan, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" (1947)
The single document that best illustrated American anti-communism and general suspicion of Soviet aspirations, was George Kennan’s famous Long Telegram of 1946. The Long Telegram was perhaps the most cited and most influential statement of the early years of the Cold War.
George Kennan had been a American diplomat on the Soviet front, beginning his career as an observer of the aftermath of the Russian Civil War. He witnessed collectivization and the terror from close range and sent his telegram after another two years’ service in Moscow from 1944 to 1946 as chief of mission and Ambassador Averell Harriman’s consultant. In 1946, Kennan was 44 years old, fluent in the Russian language and its affairs, and decidedly anti-communist.
The essence of Kennan’s telegram was published in Foreign Affairs in 1947 as The Sources of Soviet Conduct and circulated everywhere. The article was signed by “X” although everyone in the know knew that authorship was Kennan’s. For Kennan, the Cold War gave the United States its historic opportunity to assume leadership of what would eventually be described as the “free world.”
Making the History: The Fall of Communism in Eastern Europe
A very good resource on the collapse of communism in Europe from George Mason University and affiliates. 300 primary sources + interviews with scholars.
Presidential Recordings Program
The White House Tapes offers a unique insiders’ view into the recorded discussions of American Presidents. This section is on US foreign policies.
Ford Freedom – 1950's TV Ad
Russia in Europe missile threat
Dmitry Medvedev has warned that missiles could be deployed on the EU’s borders if the US pursues its missile defence plans.
Washington wants an anti-missile shield ready by 2020 but Moscow considers the idea a threat to its nuclear forces.
George F. Kennan’s Cold War
When historians discuss American actions in the Cold War, usually the first texts they cite are the Long Telegram, which Kennan composed in February, 1946, and the so-called X article, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” which he published, in Foreign Affairs, a year and a half later. Vietnam seems the lineal offspring of those pieces. Was Kennan misunderstood? The question is at the heart of any assessment of his career.
Read Menand’s review of Gaddis’ bio of Kennan
OAH October 2010
Cold War Edition. Contents:
7. A Literature So Immense: The Historiography of Anticommunism
Marc J. Selverstone
13. The Cold War and the Struggle for Civil Rights
Jeff Woods
19. History and Haggar Pants: the Cold War on Tape
Mitchell Lerner
25. “I am too young to die”
Donna Alvah
The Paradox of the New Elite
It’s a puzzle: one dispossessed group after another — blacks, women, Hispanics and gays — has been gradually accepted in the United States, granted equal rights and brought into the mainstream.
At the same time, in economic terms, the United States has gone from being a comparatively egalitarian society to one of the most unequal democracies in the world.
The two shifts are each huge and hugely important: one shows a steady march toward democratic inclusion, the other toward a tolerance of economic stratification that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.
It’s a surprising contradiction. Is the confluence of these two movements a mere historical accident? Or are the two trends related?
China's Communist party: Searching for its softer side
In the past several days, China has been doing much soul-searching. More than 300 of the Communist Party’s most powerful leaders met in Beijing and discussed ways of boosting the nation’s “cultural soft power”: an admission that for all the country’s economic prowess it lacks the magnetic draw of a country like America. Ordinary Chinese, however, have been more preoccupied with a hit-and-run accident that caused the death of a two-year-old girl. A dearth of what one Chinese newspaper commentary called “moral soft power” has been widely blamed for her demise and the seeming cold-heartedness of passersby.