
	Top News: First Blood - Fort Sumter to Bull Run Montauban (Battleground Europe) Submarines: The Story of Underwater Craft From the Diving Bell of 300 B.C. to Nuclear-Powered Ships The Last Days of Stonewall Jackson: The Mortal Wounding of the Confederacy's Greatest Icon Early Jesuit Travellers in Central Asia, 1603-1721 Storia di Roma nel Medioevo: Politica, religione, società, cultura, economia e urbanistica della Città Eterna tra l'avvento di Costantino e il saccheggio di Carlo V The Complete Book of U.S. Naval Power The Cambridge medieval history. Vol.4 The Atlanta and Savannah Campaigns, 1864 (The U.S. Army Campaigns of the Civil War) Centenary of Australian Submarines 1914-2014

Contact

30-07-2015, 03:56

The Cold War and the international history of the twentieth century

Much source material for researching the Cold War in its various settings is now available in printed form, on microfilm, or electronically. Many foreign ministries and other executive branches of government have published selections of their papers, as have international organizations; a good overview is M. Trachtenberg, The Craft of International History: A Guide to Method (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univeristy Press, 2006) and its companion website Www. sscnet. ucla. edu/polisci/faculty/trachtenberg/guide.

There are also some very good overviews of research and historiography. For the United States, see M. J. Hogan, America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); R. Schulzinger, A Companion to American Foreign Relations (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003); and the classic J. A. Combs, American Diplomatic History: Two Centuries of Changing Interpretations (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983). For Britain, see J. W. Young, Britain and the World in the Twentieth Century (London: Hodder Arnold, 1997). For the Soviet Union, see G. Gorodetsky, Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917-1991: A Retrospective (London: Routledge, 1994); and N. M. Naimark, "Post-Soviet Russian Historiography on the Emergence of the Soviet Bloc," Kritika, 5, 3 (Summer 2004), 561-80. For China, see Y. Xia, "The Study of Cold War International History in China: A Review of the Last Twenty Years," Journal of Cold War Studies, 10, 1 (Winter 2008), 81-115. For an excellent overview of broader European directions, see M. Mazower, "Changing Trends in the Historiography of Postwar Europe, East and West," International Labor and Working-Class History, 58 (2000), 275-82.

The orthodox approach that came to dominate US Cold War historiography up to the 1970s can be sampled in its early version in T. A. Bailey, America Faces Russia: Russian-American Relations from Early Times to Our Day (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University

Press, 1950), and in its more mature form in H. Feis, From Trust to Terror: The Onset of the Cold War, 1945-1950 (New York: Norton, 1970). A radical populist form of Cold War revisionism, developing from the late 1950s on, can be found in W. A. Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Company, 1959), while a further emphasis on US economic interest is in J. Kolko and G. Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and US Foreign Policy, 1945-1954 (New York: Harper, 1972). An excellent overview from a moderate revisionist perspective is T. J. McCormick, America’s HalfCentury: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War and After (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). The key text linking Cold War history to Realism is J. L. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982; rev. and expanded ed. 2005); see also Gaddis's seminal "The Emerging Post-Revisionist Synthesis on the Origins of the Cold War,” Diplomatic History, 7, 3 (July 1983), 171-90. Another influential version stressing security is M. P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992). Gaddis's We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997) represents a disavowal of Realism and a return to some of the concerns (but not always the conclusions) of Cold War orthodoxy. An overview of where the debate stood in the late 1990s is O. A. Westad (ed.), Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory (London: Cass, 2000).

An assesment of economic issues that effectively places the Cold War in a broader twentieth-century perspective is J. A. Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (New York: Norton, 2006). G. Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (New York: Verso, 1994), provides a more radical view. V. de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), is outstanding on the influence of American products and consumer culture. Views of Cold War politics in a broader twentieth-century Marxist perspective can be found in E. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), and, in a post-1945 overview, in D. Reynolds, One World Divisible: A Global History since 1945 (New York: Norton, 2000). For political thought, see Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (London: Pimlico, 2001), and T. Ball and R. Bellamy (eds.), The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

For overviews of twentieth-century science and technology, see T. I. Williams (ed.), Science: A History of Discovery in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), and G. Piel, The Age of Science: What Scientists Learned in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 2001). For the Soviet Union, see L. R. Graham, What Have We Learned about Science and Technology from the Russian Experience? (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), and for Britain, D. Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920-1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). One key advance is covered in Robert Bud, Penicillin: Triumph and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). For critical views, see K. Moore, Disrupting Science: Social Movements, American Scientists, and the Politics of the Military, 1945-1975 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). See also David Reynolds's chapter in volume III.

For key Soviet ideas, see S. Plaggenborg, Experiment Moderne: der sowjetische Weg (Frankfurt a. M.: Campus, 2006), and A. N. Yakovlev, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). On broader perspectives, see M. Malia, History’s Locomotives: Revolutions and the Making of the Modern World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), and R. Service, Comrades! A History of World Communism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). For the United States in a comparative perspective, see T. Bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), and C. S. Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). For an excellent overview of ideological confrontations in Europe, see M. Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999). R. Mitter, A Bitter Revolution: China’s Struggle with the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), is outstanding. For the Third World, see F. D. Colburn, The Vogue of Revolution in Poor Countries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); B. Badie, The Imported State: The Westernization of the Political Order (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); and V. Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2007).