Soviet Perceptions of the United States
Author: Morton Schwartz
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 1980-01-01
Total Pages: 228
ISBN-13: 9780520040946
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The Cold War
Author: Odd Arne Westad
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2017-09-05
Total Pages: 742
ISBN-13: 0465093132
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe definitive history of the Cold War and its impact around the world We tend to think of the Cold War as a bounded conflict: a clash of two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, born out of the ashes of World War II and coming to a dramatic end with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But in this major new work, Bancroft Prize-winning scholar Odd Arne Westad argues that the Cold War must be understood as a global ideological confrontation, with early roots in the Industrial Revolution and ongoing repercussions around the world. In The Cold War, Westad offers a new perspective on a century when great power rivalry and ideological battle transformed every corner of our globe. From Soweto to Hollywood, Hanoi, and Hamburg, young men and women felt they were fighting for the future of the world. The Cold War may have begun on the perimeters of Europe, but it had its deepest reverberations in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, where nearly every community had to choose sides. And these choices continue to define economies and regimes across the world. Today, many regions are plagued with environmental threats, social divides, and ethnic conflicts that stem from this era. Its ideologies influence China, Russia, and the United States; Iraq and Afghanistan have been destroyed by the faith in purely military solutions that emerged from the Cold War. Stunning in its breadth and revelatory in its perspective, this book expands our understanding of the Cold War both geographically and chronologically and offers an engaging new history of how today's world was created.
Reinventing Collapse
Author: Dmitry Orlov
Publisher: New Society Publishers
Published: 2011-06-01
Total Pages: 209
ISBN-13: 1550924753
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA guide to the decline of the American empire for individuals, families and communities The United States is in steep decline. Plagued by runaway debt, a shrinking economy, and environmental catastrophes to rival Chernobyl, the United States has been retracing the trajectory of the Soviet Union in the early 1980s toward national bankruptcy and political dissolution. By comparing a collapse that has run its course to one that is now unfolding, Dmitry Orlov holds a unique lens up to America's present and future. As Orlov's predictions continue to come true, his writing continues to gain mainstream acceptance. This revised and updated edition of Reinventing Collapse examines the circumstances of the demise of the Soviet superpower and offers clear insights into how we might prepare for the events that are unfolding here. Orlov gives no quarter to prophets of doom and gloom, finding plenty of room for optimism, if only we focus our efforts on personal and cultural transformation instead of trying to perpetuate an impossible status quo. This challenging yet inspiring and surprisingly upbeat work is a must-read for anyone concerned about peak oil, the environment, geopolitics, international relations, and life in a resource-constrained world. Dmitry Orlov is an American engineer who was an eyewitness to the Soviet collapse and has written extensively on the subject of the impending collapse of the United States.
Race and the Totalitarian Century
Author: Vaughn Rasberry
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2016-10-03
Total Pages: 497
ISBN-13: 0674972996
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFew concepts evoke the twentieth century’s record of war, genocide, repression, and extremism more powerfully than the idea of totalitarianism. Today, studies of the subject are usually confined to discussions of Europe’s collapse in World War II or to comparisons between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. In Race and the Totalitarian Century, Vaughn Rasberry parts ways with both proponents and detractors of these normative conceptions in order to tell the strikingly different story of how black American writers manipulated the geopolitical rhetoric of their time. During World War II and the Cold War, the United States government conscripted African Americans into the fight against Nazism and Stalinism. An array of black writers, however, deflected the appeals of liberalism and its antitotalitarian propaganda in the service of decolonization. Richard Wright, W. E. B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham, C. L. R. James, John A. Williams, and others remained skeptical that totalitarian servitude and democratic liberty stood in stark opposition. Their skepticism allowed them to formulate an independent perspective that reimagined the antifascist, anticommunist narrative through the lens of racial injustice, with the United States as a tyrannical force in the Third World but also as an ironic agent of Asian and African independence. Bringing a new interpretation to events such as the Bandung Conference of 1955 and the Suez Canal Crisis of 1956, Rasberry’s bird’s-eye view of black culture and politics offers an alternative history of the totalitarian century.
Revelations from the Russian Archives
Author: Diane P. Koenker
Publisher:
Published: 2011-03-01
Total Pages: 836
ISBN-13: 9781780393803
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCultural Exchange and the Cold War
Author: Yale Richmond
Publisher: Penn State Press
Published: 2003-04-21
Total Pages: 266
ISBN-13: 0271031573
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSome fifty thousand Soviets visited the United States under various exchange programs between 1958 and 1988. They came as scholars and students, scientists and engineers, writers and journalists, government and party officials, musicians, dancers, and athletes—and among them were more than a few KGB officers. They came, they saw, they were conquered, and the Soviet Union would never again be the same. Cultural Exchange and the Cold War describes how these exchange programs (which brought an even larger number of Americans to the Soviet Union) raised the Iron Curtain and fostered changes that prepared the way for Gorbachev's glasnost, perestroika, and the end of the Cold War. This study is based upon interviews with Russian and American participants as well as the personal experiences of the author and others who were involved in or administered such exchanges. Cultural Exchange and the Cold War demonstrates that the best policy to pursue with countries we disagree with is not isolation but engagement.
American Girls in Red Russia
Author: Julia L. Mickenberg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-04-25
Total Pages: 436
ISBN-13: 022625612X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIf you were an independent, adventurous, liberated American woman in the 1920s or 1930s where might you have sought escape from the constraints and compromises of bourgeois living? Paris and the Left Bank quickly come to mind. But would you have ever thought of Russia and the wilds of Siberia? This choice was not as unusual as it seems now. As Julia L. Mickenberg uncovers in American Girls in Red Russia, there is a forgotten counterpoint to the story of the Lost Generation: beginning in the late nineteenth century, Russian revolutionary ideology attracted many women, including suffragists, reformers, educators, journalists, and artists, as well as curious travelers. Some were famous, like Isadora Duncan or Lillian Hellman; some were committed radicals, though more were just intrigued by the “Soviet experiment.” But all came to Russia in search of social arrangements that would be more equitable, just, and satisfying. And most in the end were disillusioned, some by the mundane realities, others by horrifying truths. Mickenberg reveals the complex motives that drew American women to Russia as they sought models for a revolutionary new era in which women would be not merely independent of men, but also equal builders of a new society. Soviet women, after all, earned the right to vote in 1917, and they also had abortion rights, property rights, the right to divorce, maternity benefits, and state-supported childcare. Even women from Soviet national minorities—many recently unveiled—became public figures, as African American and Jewish women noted. Yet as Mickenberg’s collective biography shows, Russia turned out to be as much a grim commune as a utopia of freedom, replete with economic, social, and sexual inequities. American Girls in Red Russia recounts the experiences of women who saved starving children from the Russian famine, worked on rural communes in Siberia, wrote for Moscow or New York newspapers, or performed on Soviet stages. Mickenberg finally tells these forgotten stories, full of hope and grave disappointments.
Russia and the Idea of the West
Author: Robert D. English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2000
Total Pages: 420
ISBN-13: 9780231110594
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn most analyses of the Cold War's end the ideological aspects of Gorbachev's "new thinking" are treated largely as incidental to the broader considerations of power. English demonstrates that Gorbachev's foreign policy was the result of an intellectual revolution. He analyzes the rise of a liberal policy-academic elite and its impact on the Cold War's end.
Interpreting America
Author: John Ryder
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Published: 1999
Total Pages: 374
ISBN-13: 9780826513342
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMore scholarly works on the history of American philosophy have been completed in Russian than in any other language outside of our own; yet most of that body of work has not been translated or studied comprehensively. Consequently, Soviet-era efforts to understand American thought have remained almost entirely unknown to Western scholars. In his pioneering new book Interpreting America John Ryder makes available for the first time to English-speaking readers Russian views of the full range of American philosophical thought: from seventeenth-century Puritanism through the colonial and revolutionary periods, nineteenth- century idealism, pragmatism, naturalism, and other twentieth-century movements and figures. Using his own accurate translations, he clearly reconstructs a chain of core ideas, emphasizes the most essential concepts of each writer's work, and gives a multidimensional reconstruction of the arguments of each author. By taking mainstream Soviet philosophical commentators like Baskin, Bogomolov, Karimsky, Melvil, Pokrovsky, Sidorov, and Yulina seriously and letting them speak for themselves, Ryder shows not only what Soviet philosophers and scholars thought of American philosophy (and why they were so interested in the first place) but also the nuances of the internal disagreements among Soviet thinkers about what American philosophers were saying. He also reveals a strong continuity between contemporary, post-Soviet Russian philosophy and earlier Soviet work. Perhaps no other book has ever explored in such a systematic manner the ways in which one philosophical system has regarded another. Ryder's revealing study of how others have viewed us helps to clarify the depth, richness, and complexity of our own American philosophical heritage.
Mass Communication and American Social Thought
Author: John Durham Peters
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2004-08-03
Total Pages: 547
ISBN-13: 1461640008
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis anthology of hard-to-find primary documents provides a solid overview of the foundations of American media studies. Focusing on mass communication and society and how this research fits into larger patterns of social thought, this valuable collection features key texts covering the media studies traditions of the Chicago school, the effects tradition, the critical theory of the Frankfurt school, and mass society theory. Where possible, articles are reproduced in their entirety to preserve the historical flavor and texture of the original works. Topics include popular theater, yellow journalism, cinema, books, public relations, political and military propaganda, advertising, opinion polling, photography, the avant-garde, popular magazines, comics, the urban press, radio drama, soap opera, popular music, and television drama and news. This text is ideal for upper-level courses in mass communication and media theory, media and society, mass communication effects, and mass media history.
