Campaigning Culture and the Global Cold War

Campaigning Culture and the Global Cold War
Author: Giles Scott-Smith
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2017-07-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1137598670

This book explores the lasting legacy of the controversial project by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, funded by the CIA, to promote Western culture and liberal values in the battle of ideas with global Communism during the Cold War. One of the most important elements of this campaign was a series of journals published around the world: Encounter, Preuves, Quest, Mundo Nuevo, and many others, involving many of the most famous intellectuals to promote a global intellectual community. Some of them, such as Minerva and China Quarterly, are still going to this day. This study examines when and why these journals were founded, who ran them, and how we should understand their cultural message in relation to the secret patron that paid the bills.

The Culture of the Cold War

The Culture of the Cold War
Author: Stephen J. Whitfield
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 1996-05-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780801851957

In a new epilogue to this second edition, he extends his analysis from the McCarthyism of the 1950s, including its effects on the American and European intelligensia, to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and beyond.

Rethinking Cold War Culture

Rethinking Cold War Culture
Author: Peter J. Kuznick
Publisher: Smithsonian Institution
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2013-04-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1588344150

This anthology of essays questions many widespread assumptions about the culture of postwar America. Illuminating the origins and development of the many threads that constituted American culture during the Cold War, the contributors challenge the existence of a monolithic culture during the 1950s and thereafter. They demonstrate instead that there was more to American society than conformity, political conservatism, consumerism, and middle-class values. By examining popular culture, politics, economics, gender relations, and civil rights, the contributors contend that, while there was little fundamentally new about American culture in the Cold War era, the Cold War shaped and distorted virtually every aspect of American life. Interacting with long-term historical trends related to demographics, technological change, and economic cycles, four new elements dramatically influenced American politics and culture: the threat of nuclear annihilation, the use of surrogate and covert warfare, the intensification of anticommunist ideology, and the rise of a powerful military-industrial complex. This provocative dialogue by leading historians promises to reshape readers' understanding of America during the Cold War, revealing a complex interplay of historical norms and political influences.

The Cultural Cold War and the Global South

The Cultural Cold War and the Global South
Author: Kerry Bystrom
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2021-07-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000399478

This volume investigates the cultural sites where the global Cold War played out. It brings to view unpredictable encounters that arose as writers, artists, filmmakers, and intellectuals from or aligned with the Third World navigated the ideological and material constraints set by superpowers and emerging regional powers. Often these encounters generated communitas and solidarity, while at times they fed old and new conflicts. Pushing forward recent scholarship that tracks the Cold War in the Global South and draws on postcolonial approaches, our contributors use archival, secondary, and ethnographic sources to trace the afterlives and memories of key figures and to explore meetings that performed cultural diplomacy. Our focus on sites of encounter or exchange underscores the situated, interpersonal, and embodied dimensions through which much of the cultural Cold War was experienced. While the global conflict divided citizens along ideological fault lines, it also linked people through circulating media—novels, film, posters, journals, and theatre—and multinational conferences that brought artists, intellectuals, and political activists together. Such contacts introduced new axes of solidarity and hierarchies of exclusion. Examining these connections and disjunctures, this new and necessary mapping of the cultural Cold War highlights under-addressed locations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Across the Blocs

Across the Blocs
Author: Patrick Major
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2004-08-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1135755671

This book asks the reader to reassess the Cold War not just as superpower conflict and high diplomacy, but as social and cultural history. It makes cross-cultural comparisons of the socio cultural aspects of the Cold War across the East/West block divide, dealing with issues including broadcasting, public opinion, and the production and consumption of popular culture.

The Making of the Cold War Enemy

The Making of the Cold War Enemy
Author: Ron Theodore Robin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2003-01-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691114552

He reveals how the academics' intolerance for complexity ultimately reduced the nation's adversaries to borderline psychotics, ignored revolutionary social shifts in post-World War II Asia, and promoted the notion of a maniacal threat facing the United States.".

The US Government, Citizen Groups and the Cold War

The US Government, Citizen Groups and the Cold War
Author: Helen Laville
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2006-11-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1134251890

This new book examines the construction, activities and impact of the network of US state and private groups in the Cold War. By moving beyond state-dominated, ‘top-down’ interpretations of international relations and exploring instead the engagement and mobilization of whole societies and cultures, it presents a radical new approach to the study of propaganda and American foreign policy and redefines the relationship between the state and private groups in the pursuit and projection of American foreign relations. In a series of valuable case studies, examining relationships between the state and women’s groups, religious bodies, labour, internationalist groups, intellectuals, media and students, this volume explores the construction of a state-private network not only as a practical method of communication and dissemination of information or propaganda, but also as an ideological construction, drawing upon specifically American ideologies of freedom and voluntarism. The case studies also analyze the power-relationship between the state and private groups, assessing the extent to which the state was in control of the relationship, and the extent to which private organizations exerted their independence. This book will be of great interest to students of Intelligence Studies, Cold War History and IR/security studies in general.

Dynamics of the Cold War in Asia

Dynamics of the Cold War in Asia
Author: T. Vu
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2009-12-21
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0230101992

This book focuses on the neglected cultural front of the Cold War in Asia to explore the mindsets of Asian actors and untangle the complex cultural alliances that undergirded the security blocs on this continent.

The Politics of Apolitical Culture

The Politics of Apolitical Culture
Author: Giles Scott-Smith
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2003-08-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1134541694

This book analyses a key episode in the cultural Cold War - the formation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Whilst the Congress was established to defend cultural values and freedom of expression in the Cold War Struggle, its close association with the CIA later undermined its claims to intellectual independence or non-political autonomy. By examining the formation of the Congress and its early years of existence in relation to broader issues of US-European relations, Giles Scott-Smith reveals a more complex interpretation of the story. The Politics of Apolitical Culture provides an in-depth picture of the various links between the political, economic and cultural realms which led to the Congress.

Divided Dreamworlds?

Divided Dreamworlds?
Author: Peter Romijn
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Total Pages: 498
Release: 2012
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9089644369

With its unique focus on how culture contributed to the blurring of ideological boundaries between the East and the West, this important volume offers fascinating insights into the tensions, rivalries and occasional cooperation between the two blocs. Encompassing developments in both the arts and sciences, the authors analyze focal points, aesthetic preferences and cultural phenomena through topics as wide-ranging as the East- and West German interior design; the Soviet stance on genetics; US cultural diplomacy during and after the Cold War; and the role of popular music as a universal cultural ambassador. Well positioned at the cutting edge of Cold War studies, this important work illuminates some of the striking paradoxes involved in the production and reception of culture in East and West.