Product Description
Proceedings of a symposium on the U.S. & British overflight effort conducted between 1950 & the end of 1956. Organized by public historians from the Intelligence Community & DoD, its purpose was to shed light on an important, often misrepresented & little known aspect of the Cold War, & to recognize the veterans of these operations & collect their memoirs for the historic record. The memoirs in Vol. I add significantly to the history of peacetime strategic reconnaissance & dispel popular presumptions of an Air Force or military conspiracy. Appendixes in Vol. II include: biographies of contributors; overflight documents; aircraft characteristics; historical background of overflights in Asia; selected readings; & Eisenhower's legacy.
Book Description
In a substantial new afterword to his classic account of the collapse of American triumphalism in the wake of World War II, Tom Engelhardt carries that story into the twenty-first century. He explores how, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the younger George Bush headed for the Wild West (Osama bin Laden, "Wanted, Dead or Alive"); how his administration brought "victory culture" roaring back as part of its Global War on Terror and its rush to invade Saddam Hussein's Iraq; and how, from its "Mission Accomplished" moment on, its various stories of triumph crashed and burned in that land.
Customer Reviews:
Nice and easy.......2007-08-31
Nice and easy - I was very pleased with the service and timelyness. Plus the book is in great condition
Book Review: "The End of Victory Culture : Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation".......2006-04-10
American "triumphalism" and the American "war story" began its decline after WWII and collapsed completely after Vietnam (or so the author thought). The victory myth is constructed out of an America history that has its roots in the Puritan struggle. The US had always fought against the evil oppressors of freedom, democracy, and the freedom of peaceful worship. The myth of American triumph was part of 1950s "boy culture" and was depicted on screen in the justifiable slaughter of Indians on the western frontier; cowboys and /or Cavalrymen who rescued families and females from savages; science-fiction and vengeance movies, and eventually in galactic villians and Evil Empires. War stories and movies consumed by Baby Boomers vindicated the annihilation of (usually non-white but always non-American) villains.
Central to the maintenance of the victory culture in American is the "war story" a tale in which there is an evil Other who threatens the United States. Contributing to the end of victory culture was the almost immediate reevaluation of the atomic bombing of Japan after WWII; an event that left the United States looking more terrifying than protective . The Cold War followed the euphoric victory of WWII . In the Cold War there was no victory or defeat; and the enemy and self became blurred and threatened to merge. Many of the villains in the Cold War were other Americans; rather than victory, the US sought containment. Then came Korea, a failed police action, better off forgotten. The Vietnam War was a disaster. Even the president lost enthusiasm for a battle where there appeared to be no definable enemy. Even the sacred cowboy was attacked as racist during the d?nouement of the victory culture. New westerns depicted sociopathic bad guys in cowboy hats rampaging around the West hunting down innocent Indians. In the late 1960s, even military toys were transformed into action figures. "Boy culture" was not recaptured until Ronald Reagan appeared on the scene with his Star Wars rhetoric. George H. W. Bush seized on the opportunity to eliminate the evil dictator Saddam Hussein; only to have his efforts to win a "war to re-establish war, American style" and capture the bad guy fail.
Engelhardt is an active journalist and writer who was surprised in 2000 when the United States elected George W. Bush President. Geroge W. Bush, he says, is a man "who had stayed way too long in those dark movie theaters" watching cowboys and Indians; a man who managed to evade both sides of the Vietnam War debate; a man who glories in the victory clture and wants to relive a period in American history when bugles blared, crowds cheered, and flags waved. In The End of Victory Culture Engelhardt failed to predict that 2005 would see a US President whose dream is to "dress up like G.I. Joe, [and] appear in front of massed ranks of soldiers chanting "hoo-rah," and assure the crowd he was going to bring `em back dead or alive (tomdispatch.com). This book's value is in its examination of the impact of popular culture in shaping public perceptions of the US and its place in the world. Sources include popular culture products such as Mad magazine, TV shows, monster movies, and westerns. Tom Engelhardt graduated from Yale University; he is a book editor and a freelance journalist. He maintains a website, www.tomdispatch.com; is co-founder of the American Empire Project; a consulting editor at Metropolitan Books; a fellow of the Nation Institute; and lecturer at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley.
one of my favorites..........2006-03-23
With the outcome in Iraq still uncertain more than 3 years after the U.S. led invasion, many people have blamed the media for not being critical enough at the outset of the war. Additionally, as the war rages on, comparisons to Vietnam are becoming especially noticeable as a growing number of people continue to question our involvement in Iraq.
These two relatively recent phenomena of questioning the media's role in wartime and the tendency for U.S citizens to be skeptical of their government during war took root during the Vietnam war.
According to Tom Englehardt in "The End of Victory Culture," prior to Vietnam the media played a key role in perpetuating the idea of a noble and just United States battling savages of color including Native Americans and Japanese soldiers in World War II.
The public eagerly imbibed this "victory culture," regularly attending movies featuring John Wayne defending America by battling Indians; playing games like "cowboys and indians;" and reading cartoons featuring horribly caricatured Japanese and Chinese soldiers, never questioning the integrity of the government or doubting United States policies.
A seismic shift occured during Vietnam when, for the first time, Americans became especially frustrated over a war that could no longer be justified by statements from the President. Demonstrations raged throughout the country as the once sacred tenants of U.S. heroism and leadership were shattered.
During this time, the media's role transformed as well. Rather than mindlessly trumpeting American nobility, the media worked doggedly to unearth the truth. David Halberstam's coining of the term "quagmire" when referring to war and Morley Saffert's piece revealing the horrible killings of helpless Vietnamese villagers are just two examples that Englehardt cites.
Although accounts from Vietnam and World War II comprise the bulk of Englehardt's thesis, he provides copious examples of the movies and excerpts from television programs when talking about the 1980's in an effort to further demonstrate the dismantling of the "victory culture."
Brilliantly written and extremely well documented, Englehardt has written a gem of a book that remains as relevant today as it was 11 years ago when it was first published.
A different perspective on post-war culture and history.......2006-03-07
Tom Engelhardt's dense but throughly readable cultural history presents the past fifty-six years of American history as an investigation of narrative. A common theme in analysis of nationalism and nationality is the concept of an historical narrative that members of a nationality look to for explaining their present position within their world. Engelhardt investigates a time period that saw, as he argues, a violent uprooting and reconfiguration of the American cultural narrative.
This narrative makes use of a wide ranging set of metpahors and images, such as the frontier and its mythology of American innocence, that have helped Americans understand their position within a complex and ever changing world. World War II provided the last war in which the innocence of America was posited with little debate (although the dropping of the atom bomb indeed challenged this innocence).
The beginning of the cold war and military endeavors in Korea and Viet Nam saw a gradual erroding of this narrative of innocence. As the enemy became harder to identify, at times even looking like ourselves in the case of anti-communism, the moral clarity and absolute innocence of American military actions disolved. Engelhardt takes a sweeping view of the last half-century of American history and tracks the profound shift in narrative and cultural understanding that we are still dealing with. It would be interesting to see what Engelhardt would say about September 11th. I would argue it has restored much of America's innocence, allowing us to attack Iraq with little domestic objection.
Engelhardt writes with an engaging voice helping to make what could be a tedious read quite enjoyable. At times his ideas can be difficult to connect, making this a book to be tackled as quickly as possible so that the plethora of information and full scope of the analysis can be engaged without loosing what was written in earlier pages. Do not expect any sort of 'traditional' work of history. This is for the students of American culture and anyone interested in the intricacies and complexities of the American identity. When you read this book, to a large extent you are learning about yourself.
Good on Media, Bad on History.......2005-09-12
Although he provides an in depth analysis of the modern media's role creating stereotypes of "non-whites", he actually attempts to say that this was the primary motivater to fight our "enemies" for centuries. This, of course, is nonsense. The Revolutionary War, Barbary Wars, War of 1812, World War I, and a large portion of World War II against the Rome-Berlin part of the Axis were against "white" people. And I'm probably missing other major conflicts.
Further, to say that America is unique among countries in using color or ethnicity to denigrate a people it is either at war with or has hostility towards is totally absurd. It's par for the course throughout the history of warfare and culture as a way to motivate its people to carry out and tolerate the acts of war. Unfortunately, he lets his biased political opinions biasedly spill into the pages of his book.
Nevertheless, he does an excellent job describing the power of the media to work as the Government's collective propaganda machine in their portrayal of the "eastern bloc" countries as the Cold War rose from the end of World War II.
Book Description
Based on fieldwork at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory--the facility that designed the neutron bomb and the warhead for the MX missile--Nuclear Rites takes the reader deep inside the top-secret culture of a nuclear weapons lab. Exploring the scientists' world of dark humor, ritualized secrecy, and disciplined emotions, anthropologist Hugh Gusterson uncovers the beliefs and values that animate their work. He discovers that many of the scientists are Christians, deeply convinced of the morality of their work, and a number are liberals who opposed the Vietnam War and the Reagan-Bush agenda. Gusterson also examines the anti-nuclear movement, concluding that the scientists and protesters are alike in surprising ways, with both cultures reflecting the hopes and anxieties of an increasingly threatened middle class.
In a lively, wide-ranging account, Gusterson analyzes the ethics and politics of laboratory employees, the effects of security regulations on the scientists' private lives, and the role of nuclear tests--beyond the obvious scientific one--as rituals of initiation and transcendence. He shows how the scientists learn to identify in an almost romantic way with the power of the machines they design--machines they do not fear.
In the 1980s the "world behind the fence" was thrown into crisis by massive anti-nuclear protests at the gates of the lab and by the end of the Cold War. Linking the emergence of the anti-nuclear movement to shifting gender roles and the development of postindustrial capitalism, Gusterson concludes that the scientists and protesters are alike in surprising ways, and that both cultures reflect the hopes and anxieties of an increasingly threatened middle class.
Customer Reviews:
Armchair Anthropology at its worst.......2003-06-25
Background Info: I majored in Anthropology at college.
This book has 2 main problems. 1) It is horribly boring. Yes, there are some interesting field works here. But too often the narrative is bogged down with explanations of anthropological or postmdern or Focaultian theories, which add absolutely nothing to it. I wanted an ethnography, not a text book.
2) The author did not one observe employees at work. Although this is understandable, it makes it hard to write a believeably ethnography. Obseving the employees at work is fundamental to research. Without that, this is just psychology, and not really true anthropology.
Shows This Small Town!.......2002-07-30
While I enjoyed this book and all it's talk about nuclear weapons, I had to add a side note that I love the way it really does capture this small town.
A Fascinating Look at the Soul of Nuclear Weapons Lab.......2001-08-04
I have been working across the street from Lawrence Livermore National Labs (LLNL) as an intern at Sandia National Labs, and picked this book up in Sandia's library to get a better sense for the community around me.
Hugh Gusterson does a great job at documenting the culture of the LLNL scientists and how they face their jobs and those who protest them. This is a fascinating work by a keen anthropologist who has researched a culture that is foreign in its secrecy.
A Fascinating Look at the Soul of Nuclear Weapons Lab.......2001-08-04
I have been working across the street from Lawrence Livermore National Labs (LLNL) as an intern at Sandia National Labs, and picked this book up in Sandia's library to get a better sense for the community around me.
The culture in a nuclear weapons lab is utterly unique. Coming from a background where most of my friends are against nuclear weapons, it is interesting to work among people who believe with their heart that what they're doing is good for society.
Hugh Gusterson does a great job at documenting the culture of the LLNL and how it fits in with the culture of Livermore, CA, and how it clashes with the culture of anti-nuclear weapons activists. Gusterson's objectivity is refreshing, and the material is fascinating.
If you've worked at a national lab, want to get into the minds of a nuclear weapons scientist, or just want to learn a bit about one of the US's biggest national laboratories, I highly recommend this book.
A phenomenal read.......1999-03-05
An anthropologist looks at a nuclear weapons plant. Instead of making an exotic culture familiar, Gusterson takes apart the social workings of Livermore. In doing so, he shows that scientists aren't always rational, that there are elements of hazing rituals in an FBI background check, and that employees internalize their training to a fundamental level.
Intelligent, thorough, and an 8 out of 10 on the readability scale, this is a must for anyone skeptical that anything in the US is rational - least of all our nuclear weapons program. Five stars.
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Ideas and International Political Change: Soviet/Russian Behavior and the End of the Cold War
Jeffrey T. Checkel
Manufacturer: Yale University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
 General
| Europe
| History
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Russia
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General
| Politics
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Relations
| International
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General
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International Law
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International Disputes
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ASIN: 0300063776 |
Book Description
The peaceful end of the Cold War brought about an amazing transformation of international politics, and at the heart of the change was a struggle over new and old ideas, contends Jeffrey Checkel in this absorbing book. He explores political change in the late Soviet period and in post-Soviet Russia and offers fascinating theoretical insights into the effect of ideas on state behavior.
Customer Reviews:
Dense But Very Worthwhile.......2005-05-06
This is a detailed and carefully documented history of American-Soviet relations during the Reagan and Bush administrations. As such, it covers the period of relative confrontation during Reagan's first term, the re-emergence of a form of detente during his second term, and the expansion of detente under Bush 1 into a form of cooperation with the Soviets in ending the Cold War. Written clearly and organized well, this is a fairly dense read because of the level of detail and documentation. It is also quite long at 800 pages. The organization of the book is interesting. The first 500 pages are a detailed, chronogically ordered account of Soviet-American relations. The remaining 300 pages are a series of more topically oriented chapters beginning with an summary/analytic chapter on Soviet-American relations during this period. Chapters on European-American-Soviet diplomacy, Asian-Soviet-American relations, and American-Soviet competition in the 3rd world follow, with a concluding chapter that gives an overview of the Cold War.
This is an outstanding work. The author's background is unusual. Garthoff was a career diplomat specializing in Soviet and Eastern European affairs who became a scholar after retiring from the Foreign Service. Garthoff brought long personal experience with diplomacy as well as considerable analytic intelligence to this task and the book reflects a tempered and critical approach to a number of contentious issues.
Garthoff's analysis of the Reagan administration is rather critical. While he employs moderate language, he faults the Reagan era policy makers for being unduly alarmist and unecessarily confrontational. He makes a very good case that Reagan's policies towards the Soviet Union were much less consistent than is commonly thought. He shows also that the Reagan administration was internally divided on important issues and that this reduced policy coherence. Reagan himself comes off as well intentioned but frequently out of touch and perhaps even willfully ignorant. Garthoff's most negative comments are directed, though the quality of his language remains neutral at all times, towards the more conservative ideologues with the Reagan administration, particularly those with positions at the Pentagon. Garthoff's depiction of the Soviet leadership during Reagan's first term, whose personnel changed considerably as aged leaders died in serial order, is somewhat surprising. Despite the changes in leadership, Soviet policy makers were in several ways more consistent than the Americans and in a diplomatic context, even somewhat more moderate. Despite oscillations in American policy, the Soviet leadership continued to seek accomodation in important areas like arms control and had a relatively moderate response to the American increases in defense budgets, which they (and others, for example, many European governments) found threatening. Policy realities eventually forced the Reagan administration to embark on a defacto course of detente in his second term.
Of course, the heart of this book are the parts dealing with the end of the Cold War. In Garthoff's view, the key actor was Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev is presented as a transforming figure, determined to change the basic features of Soviet society and international relations. American policies and American policy makers, like Reagan, are presented as playing an essentially reactive role in the events ending the Cold War. This is quite controversial in many circles. Garthoff was actually subjected to vilification by American triumphalists and in particular, by the substantial number of people who see Reagan as the architect of the Cold War victory. Readers interested in an example of attacks on Garthoff should look up Richard Pipes review of this book in the journal Foreign Affairs which contains some unjustified and nasty personal attacks. I can say only that Garthoff makes a compelling case for his conclusions, cites a great deal of evidence, including quite a bit of Soviet documents, and I think his analysis makes sense in the context of the entirety of the Cold War. Some of Garthoff's conclusions may be revised as more documentation emerges, particularly from Soviet archives, but its unlikely that the overall analysis will be shown to be incorrect. A nice feature of this book is that the publisher has placed all footnotes, and they are extensive, on the same page as the intext citations. This has become increasingly uncommon in the publishing industry but really enhances readibility.
This book also has an interesting contemporary resonance. There are clear analogies between some Reagan and Bush 1 era policy positions and those of the present Bush administration. This is not surprising as some of the major actors in the earlier administrations, like Dick Cheney, are also important in the present administration. The emphasis on military force, unilateral American action, obsessive concern with state-sponsored terrorism, and reluctance to test ideological concerns against reality are common themes of both Reagan 1 and Bush II. Even the establishment of the Dept. of Defense as a stronghold of strongly ideological right wing views is similar in these 2 eras. Its a cause for concern when two very different sets of problems evoke a stereotyped policy response.
Book Description
Contains declassified CIA documents of intelligence on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe covering the years 1989-1991. Includes United States national Intelligence Estimates and other intelligence assessments.
Book Description
The Cold War ended with an exhilarating wave of events: the toppling of the Berlin Wall, the rise of the dissident poet Vaclav Havel, the revolution in Romania. Americans rejoiced at the dramatic conclusion of the long struggle. "But victories in wars--hot or cold--tend to unfocus the mind,"
writes John Gaddis. "It can be a dangerous thing to have achieved one's objectives, because one then has to decide what to do next." In The United States and the End of the Cold War, Gaddis provides a sharp focus on the long history of the Cold War, shedding new light on its sudden ending, as well
as on what might come next.
In this provocative, insightful book, Gaddis offers a number of thoughtful essays on the history of international relations during the last half century. His reassessments of important figures and themes from the Cold War are sometimes surprising. For example, he portrays John Foster Dulles
and Ronald Reagan as far more flexible and perceptive statesmen than the missile-toting caricatures depicted in editorial cartoons. And he takes a second look at the importance of espionage and intelligence in Cold War history, a field often left to buffs and spy novelists. Most important, he
focuses on the central elements in superpower relations. In an eloquent account of the American style of foreign policy in the twentieth century, for instance, he explores how Americans (having learned the lesson of Adolf Hitler) consistently equated the forms of foreign governments with their
external behavior, assuming that authoritarian states would be aggressive states. He also analyzes the "tectonics" of Cold War history, demonstrating how long term changes in international affairs and Soviet bloc countries built up pressures that led to the sudden earthquakes of 1989. And along
the way, Gaddis illuminates such topics as the role of morality in American foreign policy, the relevance of nuclear weapons to the balance of power, and the objectives of containment. He even includes (and criticizes) an essay entitled, "How the Cold War Might End," written before the dramatic
events of recent years, to demonstrate how quickly the tide of history can overwhelm contemporary analysis. Gaddis concludes with a thoughtful consideration of the problems and forces at work in the post-Cold War world.
Author of such works as The Long Peace and Strategies of Containment, John Lewis Gaddis is one of the leading authorities on postwar American foreign policy. In these perceptive, highly readable essays, he provides a fresh assessment of the evolution of the Cold War, and insight into the shape
of things to come.
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The End of the Cold War (Cold War International History Project Bulletin, Fall/Winter 2001)
Vladislav M. Zubok ,
Csaba Bekes and Melinda Kalmar ,
Pawel Machcewicz ,
Jordan Baev ,
Jim Hershberg ,
David Wolff ,
Richard K. Herrmann ,
Paul Maddrell ,
Gary Bruce , and
Neb Lebow
Manufacturer: Woodrow Wiilson International Center,DC
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Russia
| History
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: B000KGKHNY |
Product Description
This 2001 softcover 359-page scholarly book (11 x 9 x 1) explores details of the causes and effects of the end of The Cold War from the perspective of many international contributors, including former Russian Soviet Union era writers. Articles include new evidence about The End of the Cold War, 1989, The Fall of the Wall, Sino-Soviet Relations, 1958-59, Soviet Missile Deployments, 1959, The Iran Crisis, 1944-46, and Tito and Khruschev, 1954. Several other in-depth articles concerning arguably the most important event of the 20th century are also included. It is a volume of interest to historians or anyone interested in modern history or, specifically, the fall of the Iron Curtain.
Book Description
Cynthia Enloe's riveting new book looks at the end of the Cold War and places women at the center of international politics. Focusing on the relationship between the politics of sexuality and the politics of militarism, Enloe charts the changing definitions of gender roles, sexuality, and militarism at the end of the twentieth century.
In the gray dawn of this new era, Enloe finds that the politics of sexuality have already shifted irrevocably. Women glimpse the possibilities of democratization and demilitarization within what is still a largely patriarchal world. New opportunities for greater freedom are seen in emerging social movements--gays fighting for their place in the American military, Filipina servants rallying for their rights in Saudi Arabia, Danish women organizing against the European Community's Maastricht treaty. Enloe also documents the ongoing assaults against women as newly emerging nationalist movements serve to reestablish the privileges of masculinity.
The voices of real women are heard in this book. They reach across cultures, showing the interconnections between military networks, jobs, domestic life, and international politics. The Morning After will spark new ways of thinking about the complexities of the post-Cold War period, and it will bring contemporary sexual politics into the clear light of day as no other book has done.
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