Gilder Lehrman Summer Seminars: The Cold War
Each summer the Gilder Lehrman Institute holds seminars for public, parochial and independent school teachers "designed to strengthen educators' commitment to high quality history teaching." More than 6,000 teachers have participated in the program through the years. In the summer of 2006 600 participants from 49 states and 6 foreign countries took part. HNN asked participants to write up their reflections, which we will be publishing over the coming months.
“Oh yes, I believed in Communism. Without question.”
When I initially applied for the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History’s summer seminar on the Cold War, I was hoping that I would return with a storehouse of knowledge and new teaching strategies to bring back to my classroom. In this respect, I was in no way disappointed. I did not initially anticipate, however, the opportunity to invigorate my understanding of the Cold War with a profoundly and deeply human perspective.
Olga – one of the seminar participants from the former Eastern Bloc – made the above comment at the end of a long conversation we had about growing up in Soviet Russia. Olga was intelligent, reflective, assertive, and independent: qualities that immediately earned my respect and that of the other American seminar participants. For that reason I found it nothing short of incredible to learn that, as a child and young adult, she had proudly joined the “Young Pioneers” (a youth organization sponsored by the Soviet Communist Party) and accepted without question the Marxist-Leninist principles that guided her education. The more we talked, however, the more her comment made sense. Our conversations made it clear that, in many respects, Russians under Communist rule during the Cold War led refreshingly familiar lives. She and her peers shared countless mundane everyday concerns – friends, family, love, careers – with their counterparts in the West. It became clear that her education and socialization under the Soviet system shaped and molded only certain aspects of her political and social ideology. Our conversations were a vivid reminder of the limitations of any imposed belief system; on a fundamental and simple level, Marxism-Leninism did not alter basic elements of her life as a girl and young adult under the Soviet system.
Conversations with Olga and her colleagues, six participants from Russia and two from Eastern Europe, made this seminar unique--certainly the most memorable of the dozen or so summer programs I have completed in my ten years of teaching. The opportunity to spend a week with teachers from nations of the former Soviet Bloc was an education in itself, but the academic heart of the program – five intense days of lectures and discussions on the history of the Cold War – gave the seminar an intellectual depth that was every bit as extraordinary.
Odd Arne Westad, Professor of history and Co-Director of the Cold War Studies Center (CWSC) at the London School of Economics, led the seminar. His lectures comprised the bulk of the seminar’s formal academic instruction, but we also heard lectures from four other scholars connected with the CWSC: Michael Cox, a Professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, Svetosar Rajak, the Managing Director of the CWSC, and two of Professor Westad’s graduate students. The participants were mailed copies of the syllabus before the seminar began, and the range of lecture topics yielded few surprises: the breakdown of the “Grand Alliance” in the months after the end of the Second World War, the Rise and Fall of Détente, and the End of the Cold War, just to name a few. Much to my surprise, however, the academic portion of the seminar made me rethink the basic Cold War story that I learned, the same Cold War story that is told in one form or another in the textbooks used in American high schools and colleges.
Professor Westad is a professor of “international history:” a term that was unfamiliar to me before the seminar. Like most of the participants in the seminar, I arrived with little formal training in diplomatic history or international relations, but I quickly came to appreciate the importance of Professor Westad’s international approach to the Cold War. As an adolescent in Reagan’s America, my formal and informal education both led me to consider the Cold War as a two-sided conflict: the US and the USSR, Good and Evil, Kennedy and Khrushchev, Rocky Balboa and Ivan Drago. Under Professor Westad’s direction, the seminar demonstrated quite clearly that this simple bipolar framework does not adequately reflect the complexity of the Cold War. Lectures on the Balkans after 1945, the Korean War, the Algerian War for Independence, and the Cuban Missile Crisis illustrated the autonomy and agency wielded by nations as diverse as Yugoslavia, the Koreas, China, Algeria, and Cuba during the Cold War era. I finished the seminar with a clear view of the significance of the so-called “third world” in the Cold War international system. Evidently, the scholarly community agrees with my assessment of Professor Westad’s innovative approach to the Cold War. His most recent book, The Global Cold War, won the Bancroft Prize earlier this year.
Ultimately, the two aspects of the seminar I have described above – the personal interaction with seminar participants from the former Eastern Bloc and the academic content of the seminar presented by Professor Westad and his colleagues – left the American seminar participants with one clear lesson. Professional historians and secondary-level teachers of history alike need to resist the very natural impulse to view history from our own geographical and chronological vantage points. By doing so, we tend to oversimplify the past. My conversations with Olga and Professor Westad’s lectures on the “The Global Cold War” reminded me that historians regularly need to question and reevaluate their perspective on the past in order to avoid the potential dangers of intellectual complacency and the narrow-minded provincialism it creates. Programs like the Gilder Lehrman Summer Seminars are an opportunity to do just that; for this reason, opportunities for intellectual growth like Professor Westad’s seminar on the Cold War are nothing less than indispensable for teachers and students of history at all levels.