Economist John Kenneth Galbraith, in a conversation with host Harry Kreisler, looks back and reflects on the art of writing, U.S. policy toward the Third World during the Cold War, political leadership, and on his intellectual contributions. (51 min)

Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes attorney Frederick S. Wyle, a Pentagon official in the Kennedy administration, for a discussion of nuclear weapons policy in Europe during the Cold War. Reflecting on his role as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in the McNamara Pentagon, Wyle also compares threat perception then with the current response to terrorism. He analyzes the delicate balance that must be found under our constitutional system to adjust to exigent circumstances while preserving the rule of law and civil liberties. (55 minutes)

UC Berkeley's Harry Kreisler welcomes Natan Sharansky, a minister in the Israeli government and a leading figure in the human rights movement in the Soviet Union during the last stages of the Cold War. They discuss how he survived imprisonment in the Gulag, the role of human rights in bringing on the demise of communism, and the implications of the global human rights struggle for the search for peace in the Middle East. (51 min)

UC Berkeley's Harry Kreisler welcomes author and columnist William Pfaff for a discussion of U.S. foreign policy, U.S.- European relations and the end of the Cold War. Pfaff reflects on hisĘ intellectual odyssey and comments on the role of the press in shaping U.S.opinion toward world politics. (60 min)

Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Israeli political scientist and peace activist Galia Golan for a discussion of the peace movement in Israel. She reflects on the Israeli domestic situation, compares Israeli occupation policies to South Africa's apartheid, and analyzes Israel"s geopolitical constraints. She also compares the stability of superpower conflict in the Middle East during the Cold War with today's regional geopolitical situation, especially Israel's conflict with Iran. (58 min)

Conversations Host Harry Kreisler welcomes Steve Coll, Pulitzer prize winning author of Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden for a discussion of how the superpower conflict in the last stages of the Cold War, U.S. foreign policy before and after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the political dynamics of South Asia created the setting in which Islamic terrorism took root and flourished. (57 min)

Historian Sir Michael Howard joins Conversations with History host Harry Kreisler for a discussion of the changes in Europe with the end of the Cold War. (53 min)

Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes University of Pennsylvania political scientist Ian Lustick for a discussion of the War on Terror including its erroneous assumptions, its consequences for domestic politics, and its implications for Al Queda's long term strategy. He compares the Bush administration response to 911 to America's response to the Soviet threat during the Cold War. (57 min)

In this 1983 interview, Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes one of America's most distinguished journalists Tom Wicker for a discussion of the Presidency and the media at the height of the Cold War. (58 min)

Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Professor Peter Dale Scott for a discussion of secrecy and its consequences in the making of U.S. foreign policy. Their discussion focuses on CIA interventions, the rise of Al Qaeda, the role of U.S. government in supporting Islamic jihadists to counter Soviet power during the Cold War, and the response of the Bush administration to the 911 attack. (59 minutes)

Most historians agree that the world has never come closer to nuclear war than it did during a thirteen-day period in October 1962, after the revelation that the Soviet Union had stationed several medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. This lesson will examine how this crisis developed, how the Kennedy administration chose to respond, and how the situation was ultimately resolved.

This set of primary source documents is compiled as a DBQ (document based question) assignment. DBQs are used in all AP history courses to get students to group and analyze documents and authors' points of view into an essay. Students should be able to use the provided documents and prompt to group similar documents together and then write a 5 paragraph essay.

Students will research how the development of the atomic bomb affected people in World War II, participate in a debate about the bomb's use, and investigate how it has affected people's lives since 1945.

In this activity students analyze a timeline and official and unofficial documents that reveal the events of the Iran-Contra Affair. This activity also models the types of questions that can help students analyze foreign policy documents from other events. The activity instructions include suggestions for how to differentiate the activity for students with different reading levels.

Economics in U.S. History is comprised of seven lessons and is designed to introduce students to basic economic concepts through analyzing diverse perspectives on the subject. Students will be engaged in a dynamic, interactive, and constructivist process of exploring media representations of economic issues in U.S. history. Such issues include the free market, industrialization, and The Living Wage Campaign. The kit will teach students to identify the Ě_Ě_€ÝlanguageĚ_Ě_ĺ of construction of different media forms and to analyze and evaluate the meaning of mediated messages about economics. This kit was designed for 8th grade U.S. history, but the document-decoding approach can be adapted for and used from middle school through high school.

Esta leccion cubre la historia de los Estados Unidos durante la Guerra Fria en los 1960s.This lesson covers the Cold War in the United States in the 1960s.

 Between 1957 and 1975, the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union motivated each nation to attain firsts in space exploration, which were seen as necessary for national security and symbolic of technological and ideological superiority. The Space Race involved pioneering efforts to launch artificial satellites, sub-orbital and orbitalhuman spaceflight around the Earth, and piloted voyages to the Moon. It effectively began with the Soviet launch of theSputnik 1 artificial satellite on 4 October 1957, and concluded with the co-operative Apollo-Soyuz Test Project human spaceflight mission in July 1975. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project came to symbolize détente, a partial easing of strained relations between the USSR and the US.The Space Race had its origins in the missile-based arms race that occurred just after the end of the World War II, when both the Soviet Union and the United States captured advanced German rocket technology and personnel.The Space Race sparked unprecedented increases in spending on education and pure research, which accelerated scientific advancements and led to beneficial spin-off technologies. An unforeseen effect was that the Space Race contributed to the birth of the environmental movement; the first color pictures of Earth taken from deep space were used as icons by the movement to imply that the planet was a fragile "blue marble" surrounded by the blackness of space.Some famous probes and missions include Sputnik 1, Explorer 1, Vostok 1, Mariner 2, Ranger 7, Luna 9, Alouette 1,Apollo 8, and Apollo 11. Source: Wikipedia: Space Race

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.

Learn about the effects that the Second World War had on jazz music as well as the contributions that jazz musicians made to the war effort. This lesson will help students explore the role of jazz in American society and the ways that jazz functioned as an export of American culture and a means of resistance to the Nazis.