Cold War

• 
• 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. 

• 
• 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."

• 
• 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. 

• 
• 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.

• 
• 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.

• 
• 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. 

• 
• 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. 

• 
• 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. 

• 
• 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.

• 
• 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. 

• 
• 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."

• 
• 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. 

• 
• 2/28/2021
  

  George Shultz: The Last Progressive

  by Ron Schatz

  "A steadfast Republican committed to union-management cooperation, peace through treaties, competitive capitalism, and empowerment of African-Americans, George Shultz was the last old-fashioned Progressive."

• 
• SOURCE: New York Review of Books
  2/21/2021
  

  What the FBI Had on Grandpa

  by Molly Jong-Fast

  "I never considered my grandfather to be a danger to the republic, but J. Edgar Hoover disagreed." The FBI surveilled writer Howard Fast extensively, though, as he wrote in his autobiography, "the eleven hundred pages detailed every—or almost every—decent act I had performed in my life."

• 
• SOURCE: TomDispatch
  2/18/2021
  

  The American Century Ends Early

  by Tom Engelhardt

  The American empire is now visibly in a state of rapid decay, the product of three decades of wasting the "peace dividend" of the end of the Cold War. 

• 
• SOURCE: Slate
  2/18/2021
  

  Apocalypse Averted

  "Newly declassified documents reveal that in November 1983, at the height of Cold War tensions, the United States and the Soviet Union came closer to nuclear war than historians—and even many officials at the time—have known until now."

• 
• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  2/18/2021
  

  For Generations, African Americans Have Led Global Antiracist Movements

  by Brenda Gayle Plummer

  International organizations in the 20th century provided space for people from the developing world and African American activists to come together in movements that merged opposition to colonialism with demands for domestic civil rights. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Drift
  2/2/2021
  

  First-Person Shooter Ideology​: The Cultural Contradictions of Call of Duty

  by Daniel Bessner

  "Right now, this one game is teaching millions of young Americans about the epic struggle between their government and the Soviet Union, a century-defining cataclysm that resulted in tens of millions of deaths, reshaped world history, and engendered the ideological struggles that presently bedevil the public sphere." But the lesson is one of cynical resignation to today's state of endless war. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  1/29/2021
  

  What Should Drive Biden’s Foreign Policy?

  Columnist and Humphrey biographer James Traub says the former Senator and VP's interventionist liberalism in foreign policy is a model for Joe Biden's administration to reestablish American preeminence in world affairs.