COLD WAR

2008

A quarter century has passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the transformation of China into a commu-capitalist hybrid, and the end of apartheid in South Africa. A new generation has come of age with no direct knowledge of the very different world that existed before these sudden transformations of the late 1980s to early 1990s. Though many would agree that it is important for this generation to understand the history that shaped the contemporary world, most education systems fail to teach modern history because the interpretation of it is still too much in contention. The paper that follows suggests a way of studying the component parts of the Cold War so that they can provide a basis for learning about the topic in more depth. This paper outlines this plan with examples of issues that can be covered in each of the sub-topics listed. The discussion makes no attempt to be a comprehensive treatment of the Cold War. Some of the bigger, more well-known chapters, such as Northeast Asia, the numerous conflicts in the Middle East, the fall of the Eastern Bloc, and the Vietnam War, have been deliberately overlooked in favor of some more obscure topics. What I have attempted is to describe a way to set up a few pillars of understanding that learners can use to build their own houses of knowledge.

How We Forgot the Cold War, 2019

In 1991, only a few hours aft er the USSR collapsed, Congress began making plans for organizing the offi cial memory of the Cold War. Th e 1991 Defense Appropriations Act included $10 million for the creation of a "Legacy Resource Management Program" that would "inventory, protect and conserve the physical and literary property" of the Cold War so that future generations could understand and appreciate its meaning and signifi cance. 1 Conservatives dominated the proceedings that followed. Th eir eff ort to shape public memory of the Cold War deployed powerful tools of political and cultural persuasion. Th e ideological apparatus engaged in this eff ort was famously infl uential and eff ective: Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the National Review, the Weekly Standard, the Heritage Foundation, an endless stream of op-eds and opinion pieces, and of course the voices of leading senators and congressmen as well as that of the Republican president. Th eir message: the Cold War was a good war, like World War II. George W. Bush explained it in his 2003 State of the Union address, in which he drew an analogy between defeat of the Soviets and defeat of the Nazis: both the Nazi and Soviet regimes had been led by "small groups of men [who] seized control of great nations, built armies and arsenals, and set out to dominate the weak and intimidate the world. In each case, their ambitions of cruelty and murder had no limit. In each case, the ambitions of Hitlerism, militarism, and communism were defeated by the will of free peoples, by the strength of great alliances, and by the might of the United States of America." 2 Th e history of the twentieth century is thus a history of the battle between freedom and totalitarianism, good and evil, and it has two chapters: in the fi rst, FDR led the Allies to victory over Nazi Germany; in the second, Reagan led the Free World to victory over the Soviet Union.

The Cold War in the Classroom, 2019

Every beginning is hard, yet, as the saying goes, well begun is half done. As regards getting things started, we could use a number of other aphorisms, and almost all of them emphasise the significance of the beginning. That holds true in the context of teaching as well, since here the start of a lesson or topic, in fact, constitutes a key phase and is plannable like no other teaching situation (Gautschi 2012, 114-117). It is particularly difficult to begin teaching the topic of the Cold War, because there does yet not exist any unanimously accepted master narrative about it (Furrer and Gautschi 2017, 16-21). How, then, does history teaching on the Cold War begin? We compare the introductory lessons on the topic of the Cold War in four school classes, one in the former East Germany, one in the former West Germany,

International Affairs, 2011

Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society, 2016

This article presents a comparative analysis of pupils’ activities dealing with the Cold War in Swedish and Australian history textbooks. By focusing on textbook activities to which pupils respond in relation to their learning of a particular topic, this study identifies knowledge types included in a selection of history textbooks. The study also focuses on the question whether, and if so how, social values are evident in activities concerning the Cold War. The authors develop a matrix that makes it possible to examine knowledge types and social values conveyed by activities. By analyzing textbook activities, this article exposes the hidden curriculum present in the textbooks on the basis of underlying and unstated values present in the activities, and at the same time identifies the way in which the selected textbooks incorporate these values.

Waqar Zaidi, “An Historian’s Perspective on Technology and the Cold War”, in Michael R. Fitzgerald and Allen Packwood (eds.), Out of the Cold: The Cold War and Its Legacy (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 78 – 80., 2013

1997

Author: John Lewis Gaddis Format: Paperback Publish Date: July 1998 ISBN-10: 0198780710 ISBN-13: 9780198780717 List Price: $24.95 ... Buy now on sale at Amazon.com ... Page as PDF: We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History PDF Category: History - Russia Tags: ...

War, Peace and International Security, 2016

The Cold War This chapter discusses the four decades of the confl ict which we know as the Cold War. It has three main objectives. First, it aims to provide a proper periodization of this period based on the role of nuclear weapons as the main pillar of strategy. Second, it explains the process of creating a bipolar international order and the nature of the discussion about the inevitability of the Cold War. And last but not least, it aims to evaluate the individual stages of the Cold War in terms of positive and negative peace. 3.1 THREE BASIC FEATURES OF THE COLD WAR 3.1.1 The Heterogeneous Bipolarity After World War II The pillars of bipolarity were erected during World War II. The fi rst of them was symbolized by the "drawing [of] the map of postwar Europe in 1943" (Krieger 2006) and, namely, by the intensive planning to build military bases far to the east of the USA (Joint Chiefs of Staff 1943). Within this framework, the USA was preparing the production of new strategic bombers that were intended to be placed as close to the vital areas of potential enemies as possible (Joint War Planning Committee 1945), thus preparing the postwar strategy of forward bases being close to enemy territory (Leffl er and Painter 2005). The USA played a crucial role in the arrangement of the international system after this (Dockrill and Hughes 2006).