Cold War

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• SOURCE: Dissent
  1/15/2021
  

  Legacies of Cold War Liberalism

  by Michael Brenes and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins

  Two historians interrogate the origins of liberal intervention after World War II. 

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  12/15/2020
  

  Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine

  Facebook isn't exactly like they hypothetical "Doomsday Machine" theorized by Cold War nuclear deterrence experts. But its vast scope and capacity to distribute misinformation faster than in can be detected and corrected mean that lessons from the philosophy of nuclear annihilation are apt for understandign the danger of the social media giants. 

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• 12/13/2020
  

  Reflections on Fredrik Logevall's "JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956"

  by Sheldon M. Stern

  Fredrik Logevall's new JFK biography is one of the first by a historian who did not personally experience the Kennedy years. Longtime JFK Library historian says this is all to the good, as Logevall makes extensive use of available primary sources to place Kennedy's political and diplomatic views in the context of his formative experiences in wartime. 

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• SOURCE: Medium
  12/9/2020
  

  The Other ‘Mank’: Joe Mankiewicz and the Wildest Night in Hollywood History

  by Greg Mitchell

  The Netflix film "Mank" provides an opportunity to remember the civil liberties stand taken by Frank Mankiewicz's brother Joe, who opposed the imposition of loyalty oaths on the Directors' Guild at the height of the postwar red scare. 

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• SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
  12/5/2020
  

  Performance Anxiety: How Cold War Men’s Adventure Magazines Shaped Soldiers’ (Mis)Understandings of the Vietnam War (Review)

  by Nicholas Utzig

  A consideration of Gregory Daddis's book "Pulp Vietnam: War and Gender in Cold War Men’s Adventure Magazines."

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  11/30/2020
  

  Joe Biden’s Harshest Critics are Likely to be Some of His Fellow Catholics

  by Theresa Keeley

  Abortion is the most divisive issue for liberal and conservative Catholics in America today, but reflects a decades-long division in beliefs about how the Church should engage with the world. It may be tricky for Joe Biden to navigate as a faithful Catholic.

• 
• SOURCE: Not Even Past
  11/13/2020
  

  Out of the Rubble: Doctors Strikes and State Repression in Guatemala’s Cold War

  by Ilan Palacios Avineri

  An earthquake in Guatemala, and subsequent demands for their labor, shook many medical professionals out of complacency and cooperation with the country's right-wing government at the height of the nation's civil war.

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  11/8/2020
  

  Seymour Topping, Former Times Journalist and Eyewitness to History, Dies at 98

  "For Mr. Topping, known universally to colleagues as Top, the story was always about more than the day’s news developments, intriguing as they might be. It was about their historical significance, too."

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• SOURCE: Made by History at The Washington Post
  10/23/2020
  

  Malcolm X Warned Us about the Pitfalls of Black Celebrities as Leaders

  by Kyle T. Mays

  The media’s overemphasis on the voices of Black celebrities obscures the voices of ordinary Black people, whose lives are vastly different from those who have wealth and visibility.

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• 10/18/2020
  

  "The Silent Guns of Two Octobers" Reviewing a New History of the Cuban Missile Crisis

  by Sheldon M. Stern

  Longtime JFK Library historian Sheldon Stern offers a review of a new book on the diplomatic resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

• 
• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  10/5/2020
  

  The Day Nuclear War Almost Broke Out

  "There should, it seems, be a useful lesson to be learned from that frantic afternoon. But what, in God’s name, is it?"

• 
• SOURCE: Muckrock
  9/16/2020
  

  Dive Into John F. Kennedy’s Daily CIA Updates

  Muckrock invites interested historians and history enthusiasts to participate in a project to make declassified Presidential intelligence briefings more widely accessible. 

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  9/20/2020
  

  Donald Kendall, Who Built Pepsico into a Soda and Snack-Food Giant, Dies at 99

  The late president of Pepsi-Cola was a leader in bringing American products to the Soviet bloc and Communist China during the cold war and was influential in pushing Richard Nixon to support the CIA's coup against democratically-elected socialist Salvador Allende in Chile.

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• 9/20/2020
  

  Dwight Eisenhower Built up American Intelligence at a Crucial Moment

  by Steve Vogel

  Dwight Eisenhower oversaw an aggressive building of American intelligence capability toward the USSR, moving espionage to a more prominent role in Cold War foreign policy. This included ordering the CIA to tunnel into East Berlin to tap Soviet phone lines. 

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• SOURCE: National Security Archive
  9/11/2020
  

  "GUILTY": Justice for the Jesuits in El Salvador

  Applying the doctrine of Universal Jurisdiction for human rights abuses, a Spanish Court found former El Salvador Colonel Inocente Orlando Montano guilty in the assassination of six Jesuit priests and two Salvadoran women in 1989. The National Security Archive supplied hundreds of declassified documents as evidence. 

• 
• SOURCE: National History Center
  9/10/2020
  

  TODAY: Henry Kissinger and American Power: A Political Biography

  The National History Center and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars host a virtual discussion today featuring Thomas Schwartz, author of "Henry Kissinger: A Political Biography." 

• 
• SOURCE: TomDispatch
  9/8/2020
  

  Fourth World: From the End of History to American Carnage

  by Tom Engelhardt

  A critic of American empire examines the unforeseen path from the triumphal "end of history" moment of the collapse of the Soviet Union to the rise of Donald Trump. How did the nation squander the opportunity? 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  8/25/2020
  

  New Video Shows Largest Hydrogen Bomb Ever Exploded

  Although the Soviet Union succeeded in testing a hydrogen bomb more than three times more powerful than the largest U.S.-tested weapon, most military leaders in the cold war sought to make the weapons smaller for strategic reasons. Recently declassified Soviet video shows the test. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  9/2/2020
  

  We Are Still Living the Legacy of World War II

  by Tom Hanks

  The actor Tom Hanks reflects on the false narrative of closure of World War II. The forces unleashed by war and the struggle to reshape the world resonate today. 

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• 8/23/2020
  

  In Removing Confederate Symbols, US Military Follows German Military’s Example

  by Fred Zilian

  With unification, a fundamental break with the values of the East German Communist Party was necessary. Former East German soldiers would now belong to an army of a democracy, rooted in the concept of the “citizen in uniform."