Cold War

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• 6/13/2021
  

  It's Time for a "Don't Trust, Do Verify" US-Russia Cybersecurity Treaty

  by Glenn C. Altschuler and Justin Lifflander

  The Reagan-Gorbachev summit meetings that yielded the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and established mutual weapons monitoring weren't expected to succeed, but offer hope that negotiations between Biden and Putin could advance progress toward needed mutual cybersecurity action. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  6/8/2021
  

  The U.S. War On Drugs Helped Unleash The Violence In Colombia Today

  by Kyle Longley

  Counternarcotics operations have been a pretext for funding a buildup of the Colombian security forces, allowing a US-friendly rightist government to avoid dealing with the economic and social causes of unrest. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  5/22/2021
  

  Risk of Nuclear War Over Taiwan in 1958 Said to Be Greater Than Publicly Known

  Daniel Ellsberg disclosed a page from a 1966 study of the 1958 Taiwan Strait crisis that indicate many military leaders were anticipating the necessity of using nuclear weapons to defend Taiwan against the People's Republic of China. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  5/12/2021
  

  The U.S. Role in the El Mozote Massacre Echoes in Today’s Immigration

  by Nelson Rauda and John Washington

  Renewed efforts to prosecute the perpetrators of the 1981 El Mozote massacre of Salvadoran civilians during the civil war will further demonstrate American involvement in the perpetuation of inequality and violence in Central America and, the authors argue, the hypocrisy of US immigration policy. 

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  5/8/2021
  

  I Want My Mutually Assured Destruction – Teaching the Cold War with Classic Music Videos

  by Tom Nichols

  Rock videos from the early days of MTV are a surprisingly effective tool for explaining the nuclear fear of the Cold War era to students who never experienced it. 

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• SOURCE: BBC
  4/28/2021
  

  France Arrests Ex-Members of Italy Extremist group Red Brigades

  Alleged members of the leftist terror group had been harbored in France under policies of its former Socialist president François Mitterand, with the proviso that such sanctuary was only for those who had not been involved in violence. 

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• SOURCE: Retro Report
  4/26/2021
  

  Lesson: The Cold War and the Nuclear Weapons Threat

  The Cold War may be over, but an arms race continues, even as safeguards once in place have fallen away. Some experts worry that nuclear weapons may pose a greater threat to humanity than ever before.

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• SOURCE: TomDispatch
  4/27/2021
  

  Waiting for the Cyber-Apocalypse

  by John Feffer

  The latest iteration of imperial blowback is coming in the form of cyberwarfare techniques pioneered by US intelligence agencies being turned against the country's patchwork internet security. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  4/20/2021
  

  The Long History of Members of Congress Talking Directly with U.S. Adversaries

  by Richard A. Moss and Sergey Radchenko

  New documents demonstrate that Senator Ted Kennedy had back-channel contact with the Brezhnev regime in the 1970s, which aimed both at resolving sticky diplomatic issues and at elevating Kennedy above Democratic party rivals. It's unclear if Kennedy was acting with or undercutting American intelligence agencies. 

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• SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
  4/19/2021
  

  ‘If We Don’t Adapt, We Will Wither Away’: Louis Menand on the University

  "What we teach in the liberal arts — hermeneutics, history, and theory — are intended to help you do this. Professional schools don’t teach these things. You are not going to learn them anywhere else."

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• SOURCE: The New Republic
  4/16/2021
  

  The Book That Stopped an Outbreak of Nuclear War

  Serhii Plokhy adds new insight to the Cuban Missile Crisis by examining the domestic political context of the Soviet Union and the political incentives toward nuclear brinksmanship. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  4/11/2021
  

  How Should the US Treat Migrants when American Policy Affected the Countries They Fled?

  The Temporary Protected Status designation, which has allowed hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants to remain in the United States, originated because of the massive human rights abuses of the US-supported dictatorship in El Salvador.

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• SOURCE: The New Republic
  4/14/2021
  

  How Americans Lost Their Fervor for Freedom (Review of Louis Menand)

  by Evan Kindley

  Before lamenting the death of "freedom" as the highest social ideal, it's important to reckon seriously with what the term means outside of the context of the Cold War.

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• 4/11/2021
  

  60 Years Later: The Enduring Legacy of the Bay of Pigs Fiasco

  by Stephen F. Knott

  The failed invasion of Cuba by CIA-trained operatives at the Bay of Pigs set the Kennedy administration on a path of increasingly abusive covert operations against the communist regime, with consequences for US-Cuban relations and American foreign policy that still reverberate. 

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• SOURCE: TomDispatch
  4/8/2021
  

  Back to the Future at the Pentagon

  by William Astore

  The Pentagon's shift away from planning for asymmetrical warfare toward "near-peer" conventional conflict is reviving the defense contracting gravy train for big-ticket weapons systems, with a revival of Cold War nuclear danger as a side effect. 

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• 4/4/2021
  

  Teachers, Keep Hope about the Minds You Influence

  by Leslie Kitchen

  For teachers of history, success can be uncertain and hard to measure. One writer calls for hope and faith in the impact teachers make on their students. 

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• SOURCE: Skipped History
  3/24/2021
  

  The 1954 US-Backed Coup in Guatemala

  by Ben Tumin

  Ben Tumin's "Skipped History" video series returns with a discussion of the 1954 Guatemala Coup, drawing on the work of Greg Grandin, Stephen Kinzer and Steven Schleshinger, and Vincent Bevins.

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• 3/28/2021
  

  Red Flags on the Map: What Soviet Kids Learned about the United States

  by David Mould

  One of the author's souvenirs from a research trip to Asia – a Soviet-era classroom map – prompts reflection on the pervasiveness of ideological education. 

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• SOURCE: War on the Rocks
  3/16/2021
  

  The Mythical War Scare of 1983

  by Simon Miles

  "Nuclear weapons are not without danger, to be sure. An overinflation of the risk of Able Archer should not be necessary to remind policymakers of that point."

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• 3/21/2021
  

  Power to Rule the Skies: A Forgotten Innovator of the Strategic Air Command

  by Brent D. Ziarnick

  General Thomas S. Power should emerge from the shadow of his mentor Curtis LeMay as a leader of the United States Strategic Air Command at the critical moment in the dawn of the Cold War.