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Keywords: Cold War
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- Abstract: The 2008 Summer Teachers Conference focused on the year 1948. Lesson plans created by teachers attending the conference and powerpoint presentations delivered by speakers are presented on this site.
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- Abstract: American experience at home and abroad from Pearl Harbor to the end of the Cold War. Topics include: America's role as global superpower, foreign and domestic anticommunism, social movements of left and right, suburbanization, and popular culture.
- Subject:
Humanities, Social Sciences
- Grade Level:
Post-secondary
- Collection:
MIT OpenCourseWare
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- Abstract: Course mission: to explain and evaluate past and present United States policies. What caused the United States' past involvement in foreign wars and interventions? Were the results of U.S. policies good or bad? Would other policies have better served the U.S. and/or the wider world? Were the beliefs that guided U.S. policy true or false? If false, what explains these misperceptions? General theories that bear on the causes and consequences of American policy will be applied to explain and evaluate past and present policies. The history of United States foreign policy in the 20th century is covered in detail. Functional topics are also covered: U.S. military policy, U.S. foreign economic policy, and U.S. policy on human rights and democracy overseas. Finally, we will predict and prescribe for the future. What policies should the U.S. adopt toward current problems and crises? These problems include the war against Al Qaeda and the wider war on terror; Iraq and Saddam Hussein; the Taiwan Straits; the Central African conflicts; and more. What should be the U.S. stance on global environmental and human rights questions?
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- Abstract: Clark Clifford was special counsel to President Harry S. Truman from 1946 to 1950. In this video segment, he recounts the 1948 Berlin blockade-the first major East-West confrontation in which Western policymakers were required to grapple with choices that risked war with the Soviet Union, a power seen as capable of overrunning Western Europe. Clifford recalls assessing the risk of an unexpected escalation of tension if moves made by the West were perceived as provocations. He heralds the decision to airlift supplies to Berlin in order to fracture the Soviet blockade, although at the time, few believed the airlift could fully supply the city. In the interview Clifford conducted for War and Peace in the Nuclear Age: 'The Weapon of Choice,' he looks back at key moments of the Truman presidency. He recalls his role in drafting what became known as the Truman Doctrine, a founding speech of the "containment order" in which the administration generalized its obligations to Greece and Turkey into a commitment to resist Soviet expansionism wherever it occurred. Following his work on the Truman Doctrine, Clifford helped formulate the Marshall Plan speech, which outlined a program to aid in the rebuilding of a devastated post-war Europe. This speech was part of the United States' search for a new economic order at home and abroad. As the president's top policy adviser, Clifford was on hand for Truman's private reactions. They included shock, disappointment, and hopefulness, as well as anxiety about entering the nuclear age as hostilities with the Soviet Union were deepening and the electorate was becoming increasingly war weary.
- Subject:
Humanities, Social Sciences, Science and Technology
- Collection:
WGBH Open Vault
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- Abstract: This lecture course provides students with a comprehensive introduction to the international relations of the People's Republic of China. China's foreign relations during the Cold War as well as contemporary diplomatic, security and economic issues will be examined to identify and explain China's foreign policy goals and their implementation since 1949. Throughout, this course will investigate the sources of conflict and cooperation in China's behavior, assessing competing explanations for key events and policies. Readings will be drawn from political science, history, and international relations theory.
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- Abstract: This site tells the story of a complex, world-class physicist who became the driving force the Soviet Union's race to develop the atomic and hydrogen bomb.
- Subject:
Science and Technology, Humanities
- Grade Level:
Post-secondary
- Collection:
PBS
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- Abstract: This course examines the history and legacy of the Cold War on science, looking predominantly at examples in the United States. It begins by exploring scientists' new political roles after World War II, ranging from elite policy-makers in the nuclear age to victims of domestic anti-Communism. The course next examines the changing institutions in which the physical, biological, and social sciences were conducted during the postwar decades, investigating the links between institutions and epistemology. The course closes by considering the place of science in the post-Cold-War era.
- Subject:
Science and Technology, Social Sciences
- Grade Level:
Post-secondary
- Collection:
MIT OpenCourseWare
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- Abstract: What does it mean to be an American? Far from being a fixed concept, over the past 150 years American identity has been constructed and reconstructed through the conflicts, interchanges, and negotiations between different ethnic, cultural, and religious groups. In this course, we will pay particular attention to two major transformations in American identity: the shift from a conception of citizenship grounded on race to one grounded on shared democratic ideals; and the development of the United States from a colonial backwater to a global superpower. Through a combination of lectures, readings, films and small discussion groups, we will examine the past as both a “foreign country” with its own customs, mores and rituals, and the source of deeply rooted patterns that continue to play out in contemporary society. Beyond covering just facts and figures, this course will focus on how the everyday lives of Americans looked, sounded, smelled, and felt. By the end of the semester, you will have a basic understanding of the major ideas, events, cultures, peoples, and personalities that have shaped the United States from the Civil War to the present day. Perhaps most importantly, through the required weekly discussion section meetings you will learn to question and evaluate historical sources and evidence, in the process becoming informed thinkers and critical readers, rather than passive recipients of conventional wisdom. You will also develop a sense of how historians analyze and interpret the past, and through the writing of a historical research paper, try your hand at the craft of history.
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- Abstract: The world has never come closer to the brink of nuclear war than it did during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, one of the most dramatic episodes in U.S. diplomatic history. Discover the tense sequence of events that took place during the Cuban Missie Crisis.
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- Abstract: This site features a multimedia exhibit of key events and decisions that U.S. presidents faced in the 20th century: the stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the atomic bomb, Little Rock school integration, Gulf of Tonkin, trip to China, Berlin Wall, and more.
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- Abstract: European Civilization from the Renaissance to the Present - Fall 07. This course is a survey of Europe from the Renaissance to the present. An introduction to European history from around 1500 to the present. The central questions that it addresses are how and why Europe--a small, relatively poor, and politically fragmented place--became the motor of globalization and a world civilization in its own right. Put differently how did "western" become an adjective that, for better and often for worse, stands in place of "modern." Our approach will be broadly cultural, and we will consider politics, economics, society, religion, and other aspects of life as interconnected arenas in which men and women give their world meaning.
(Complete Item Description)
- Abstract: This course is an introduction to European history from around 1500 to the present. The central questions that it addresses are how and why Europe--a small, relatively poor, and politically fragmented place--became the motor of globalization and a world civilization in its own right. Put differently how did "western" become an adjective that, for better and often for worse, stands in place of "modern." Our approach will be broadly cultural, and we will consider politics, economics, society, religion, and other aspects of life as interconnected arenas in which men and women give their world meaning. Chief topics of the course include: the Renaissance, the epochal expansion of Europe into the new world, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, the formation of overseas empires and the coming of capitalism, the Scientific Revolution, the French Revolution, liberalism and the industrial revolution, socialism and the rise of labor, modern colonialism, the world wars, communism and capitalism, decolonization, and the Cold War and the European Union. There will be mini lectures on poetry, witches, and campus architecture among other topics.
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- Abstract: General Gerd Schmuckle served in the Federal Republic of Germany's Ministry of Defense from 1956 to 1962 under defense minister Franz Josef Strauss. Strauss was charged with building up the Bundeswehr, the newly formed federal armed forces. In this video segment, Schmuckle describes Germany's reaction to the U.S. doctrine of massive retaliation, which de-emphasized a conventional buildup-one that Germans advocated-and depended on thousands of nuclear warheads deployed on German soil. When French president Charles de Gaulle returned to power in 1958, his main concern-developing an independent national deterrent-halted a preliminary treaty for Franco-German nuclear cooperation. Germany had little choice but to acquiesce to deterrence as formulated by the United States. In the interview he conducted for War and Peace in the Nuclear Age: 'The Education of Robert McNamara,' Schmuckle elaborates on these and other topics. In building up the Bundeswehr, Strauss pushed to have some voice in North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) decision-making, worked to overcome European mistrust of a rearmed Germany, and fought to regain its stature in Europe. Unsure whether exclusive reliance on a U.S. nuclear deterrent would be sustainable in the long term, Schmuckle recaps Germany's efforts to build a pan-European defense force-a proposal that failed to gain traction. He also supported NATO general Lauris Norstad's proposal that NATO become a fourth nuclear power. However, Britain's 1957 white paper Defense: Outline of Future Policy announced the island's intent to build an independent nuclear deterrent and reduce troop levels in Germany, which quashed the notion of NATO as a major nuclear power. The following year, de Gaulle proclaimed developing an independent nuclear force his government's highest priority. As a result, Schmuckle explains, Germans haven't significantly influenced the stationing of nuclear warheads and NATO decision-making. He recalls opposing U.S. secretary of defense Robert McNamara's theories of escalating warfare and preemptive strikes, and he protested against a dramatic increase in conventional forces, which he regarded as totally unrealistic. In the age of nuclear weapons, Schmuckle asserts, 'war does not make any sense any longer in Europe.'
- Subject:
Humanities, Social Sciences, Science and Technology
- Collection:
WGBH Open Vault
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- Abstract: Open to qualified graduate students who would like to pursue special subjects or projects. Please consult graduate administration prior to registration. Description from the course home page: The purpose of this seminar is to examine systematically, and comparatively, great and middle power military interventions into civil wars during the 1990's. These civil wars were high on the policy agenda of western states during the 1990's. Yet, these interventions were usually not motivated by obvious classical vital interests. Given the extraordinary security enjoyed by the great and middle powers of the west in the Cold War's aftermath, these activities are puzzling.
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- Abstract: HPOL is a collection of invaluable audio materials some available for the first time on this website capturing significant political and historical events and personalities of the twentieth century. The materials range from formal addresses delivered in public settings to private telephone conversations conducted from the innermost recesses of the White House. Our aim is to provide an accessible source of audio information to enliven instruction and scholarship in history and politics and to enable easy access for all persons to the rich audio archives of American history and politics.
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- Abstract: At age twenty-seven, physicist Philip Morrison joined the Manhattan Project, the code name given to the U.S. government's covert effort at Los Alamos to develop the first nuclear weapon. The Manhattan Project was also the most expensive single program ever financed by public funds. In this video segment, Morrison describes the charismatic leadership of his mentor, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and the urgency of their mission to manufacture a weapon 'which if we didn't make first would lead to the loss of the war." In the interview Morrison conducted for War and Peace in the Nuclear Age: 'Dawn,' he describes the remote, inaccessible setting of the laboratory that operated in extreme secrecy. It was this physical isolation, he maintains, that allowed scientists extraordinary freedom to exchange ideas with fellow physicists. Morrison also reflects on his wartime fears. Germany had many of the greatest minds in physics and engineering, which created tremendous anxiety among Allied scientists that it would win the atomic race and the war, and Morrison recalls the elaborate schemes he devised to determine that country's atomic progress. At the time that he was helping assemble the world's first atomic bomb, Morrison believed that nuclear weapons 'could be made part of the construction of the peace.' A month after the war, he toured Hiroshima, and for several years thereafter he testified, became a public spokesman, and lobbied for international nuclear cooperation. After leaving Los Alamos, Morrison returned to academia. For the rest of his life he was a forceful voice against nuclear weapons.
- Subject:
Arts, Business, Humanities, Science and Technology, Social Sciences
- Grade Level:
Secondary, Post-secondary
- Collection:
WGBH Open Vault
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- Abstract: To fully grasp the ongoing tensions between the United States and North Korea, it is important to understand the war that ended fifty years ago this summer. John Biewen and Stephen Smith of American RadioWorks examine the often-overlooked war that helped define global politics and American life for the second half of the 20th century.
- Subject:
Social Sciences
- Grade Level:
Primary, Secondary, Post-secondary
- Collection:
American Public Media
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- Abstract: Making the History of 1989 materials were developed because teachers and their students have little access to vivid historical documents in English that convey the epochal events of 1989. Project materials utilize recent advances in our understanding of how historical learning takes place, including complex interaction with sources, recursive reading, and skills used by historians.
The site has three key features: a substantial collection of high quality primary sources; a set of multimedia interviews that make visible the processes by which historians transform events and sources into historical narratives; and lesson plans and document based questions provide historical context, tools, and strategies for teaching the history of 1989 with primary sources in ways that make “history making” visible and vivid.
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- Abstract: Andrei Gromyko served as Soviet foreign minister from 1957 to 1985. Beginning in 1943, when Soviet premier Joseph Stalin appointed the 34-year-old ambassador to Washington, Gromyko was an indispensable formulator of Kremlin policy toward the United States. Ultimately, he dealt with nine U.S. presidents. In this video segment, Gromyko chronicles the arms race, beginning in the 1950s under General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev. At the time, each superpower had the ability to inflict "unacceptable damage" on the other. Still, neither side acted to stop the arms race until General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev opened the new era in the mid eighties. Under the leadership of Gorbachev, Gromyko concludes, Soviets have embraced the "principle of rational sufficiency" and initiated unilateral steps to stop the arms race. The interview Gromyko conducted for War and Peace in the Nuclear Age is a wide-ranging reflection on nuclear strategy, foreign policy, and superpower diplomacy during the four-and-a-half decades since the dawn of the nuclear age. Gromyko begins the interview with a look at the Potsdam Conference, at which U.S. president Harry S. Truman informed Soviet premier Joseph Stalin that an atomic bomb had successfully detonated. Truman was perplexed by the non-reaction of the Soviet leader, who then submitted a private order to accelerate the Russian bomb project. Gromyko remembers how, following the war, it felt, at age 37, to challenge the experienced architects of the Cold War and the policies they conceived: the Baruch Plan, the Truman Doctrine, and the Marshall Plan. He recalls that Soviet proposals to ban all nuclear weapons and to place strict controls on facilities pursuing nuclear energy were "categorically rejected." Western powers, Gromyko asserts, missed the opportunity to stop the arms race before it began. He points to "a drastic hardening" of foreign policy, citing former Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill's 1946 "Iron Curtain" speech as an "open declaration of the Cold War." Gromyko reserves his strongest criticism for the "doctrine of intimidation," the United States' classified National Security Memorandum 68, which marked a dramatic shift in U.S.-Soviet relations. His description of the 1962 Caribbean crisis stands in stark contrast to U.S. officials' accounts of the same episode, known as the Cuban missile crisis. He provides detailed recollections of his conversation with President John F. Kennedy during this period, concluding that it was "probably the most difficult meeting I experienced in all my 48 years of meeting presidents of the United States." Gromyko moves ahead to the period of detente. His retelling of last-minute changes prior to the signing of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) I differs from that of national security adviser Henry Kissinger. Gromyko discusses the key Soviet objection to U.S. proposals during SALT II negotiations: the United States, which targeted the Soviet Union with forward bases around the world, demanded drastic reductions in the Soviet Union's principal deterrent-the heavy intercontinental ballistic missile. At Vladivostok in 1974, the two sides agreed on a basic framework for the SALT II Treaty, which was signed five years later. Reflecting on the trends he has observed during his long career as Soviet foreign minister, Gromyko sees more continuity than difference: each administration has tried to achieve military superiority, and the Soviet Union, always one step behind, has pressed to maintain "virtual parity" to safeguard its national interests. Much was achieved during detente, he recalls. While that term is no longer used, Gromyko sees parallels with-and holds out hope for-the current process of "deepening mutual understand and trust."
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- Abstract: For nearly half a century, Paul Nitze was one of the chief architects of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy appointed Nitze assistant secretary of defense for International Security Affairs. In this video segment, Nitze describes key issues confronting the incoming Kennedy administration. This transition period focused on the goals of the country's nuclear-strategic policy; how to approach crises in every region, from the Middle East to Vietnam; and whether to unify the armed services. Included are Nitze's recommendations regarding a conventional military buildup and a 'no-cities' policy, which would target military forces instead of civilian populations. Nitze's interview conducted for War and Peace in the Nuclear Age: 'At the Brink' moves the viewer through his work with the World War II Strategic Bombing Survey, which placed him in Hiroshima and Nagasaki soon after the atomic bombs were dropped. From 1950 to 1953, Nitze served as director of the State Department's Policy Planning staff, and from 1961 to 1963 he was assistant defense secretary. As his interview reveals, Nitze held key positions during the period after World War II when the United States emerged as a superpower and Cold War strategic policies were being debated and defined. His classified 1950 report, National Security Memorandum 68, remains a seminal document: it was initially designed to persuade President Harry S. Truman that an increasingly menacing world required major increases in spending on defense and foreign military assistance. Nitze was also a major contributor to the Gaither Report, which stressed the need for a survivable nuclear deterrent by citing the vulnerability of the U.S. bomber force. Nitze opposed the doctrine of massive retaliation from the moment John Foster Dulles announced it at a dinner party in 1954. He was involved in crisis contingency planning, including the Berlin blockade and airlift in 1948, construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, and the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. During the missile crisis, Nitze recalls, he worked out the scenarios of increasing military escalation to pressure the Soviets to withdraw the missiles. Finally, he describes his disappointment that, although Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara initially embraced his no-cities strategy, following the Cuban missile crisis McNamara entirely abandoned the notion of winnable nuclear war.
- Subject:
Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences, Science and Technology
- Collection:
WGBH Open Vault
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