Reference
- Cold WarA state of tension or hostility between states that stops short of military action or a ‘hot’ war. The term is most frequently used to describe the relationship between the USSR and the major Western powers, especially the USA, following World War II. Tension was particularly high in the 1960s when the nuclear ‘arms race’ intensified. The process of détente, begun in the late 1960s, led through two decades of arms reduction and control negotiations to the ‘end’ of the Cold War in 1990, mainly as a result of a dramatic change in the Soviet attitude under Mikhail Gorbachev.
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Credo Reference is an easy-to-use tool for starting research. Gather background information on your topic from hundreds of full-text encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri, quotations, and subject-specific titles, as well as 500,000+ images and audio files and over 1,000 videos.
Databases
- American History, 1493-1945 This link opens in a new window
American History, 1493-1945 is a unique collection of American history documents from the earliest settlers to the mid-twentieth century. This database includes primary source documents, including images, chronologies, and documents, from 1493 to 1945.
- Britannica Original Sources This link opens in a new window
Britannica Original Sources proves your access to primary source documents from history, literature, science, law, politics, religion, and more. Original Sources gives you instant access to an extensive, continually increasing collection of thousands of classic, primary reference sources in 12 subject areas.
- Military and Government Collection This link opens in a new window
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The Military and Government Collection offers current literature for military members, analysts, policymakers, students and researchers. You will find full-text journals and periodicals pertaining to all branches of the military and government.
Streaming Media
- The Cold War Part Two 1962 - 1991For 13 days during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the world faced the threat of nuclear holocaust. The following year the Sino-Soviet Split reached its lowest ebb, and the Vietnam War escalated after the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. Political and military tension diminished in the late 1960s, during the period of Détente, lasting until 1979. Disarmament agreements were signed by the superpowers, but flash points threatened to destabilise any move towards stability. The Red Army's intervention in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring of 1968, demonstrated that the Soviets were intent on keeping Eastern Europe firmly under control. The Yom Kippor War of 1973 in the Middle East saw the USA and the Soviet Union again supporting opposing nations at war. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 signalled the end of Détente. Ronald Reagan was elected as the American president in 1981, and his policies were extremely anti-Soviet. However, upon forming a friendly relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev, US-Soviet relations improved dramatically. A change was sweeping throughout Eastern Europe and, in 1989, communism collapsed in this region. The Soviet Union eventually disintegrated into fifteen independent republics. The Cold War was finally over.
- The Cold War Part One 1945-1961The division of Europe following World War II, and the ideological differences between capitalism and communism which alienated former allies, initiated the Cold War. The Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the Berlin Blockade created even greater distrust between the communist bloc and the USA and its allies. A communist victory in China and the subsequent Korean War moved the focus of the Cold War to Asia, and with it the fear of the domino effect. Added to these conflicts were the Space and Arms Races, as the superpowers vied for nuclear supremacy. The nuclear deterrent prevented open conflict, although each side exerted influence worldwide. When the Berlin Wall was erected in 1961, it seemed the threat of a world war would remain.
- The Cold War: Crash CourseIn which John Green teaches you about the Cold War, the decades long conflict between the USA and the USSR. The Cold War was called cold because of the lack of actual fighting, but this is inaccurate. There was plenty of fighting, from Korea to Viet Nam to Afghanistan, but we'll get into that stuff next week. This week we'll talk about how the Cold War started. In short it grew out of World War II. Basically, the Soviets occupied eastern Europe, and the US supported western Europe. This setup would spill across the world, with client states on both sides. It's all in the video. You should just watch it.
Perspectives
Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy
"A tour de force of investigative history." --Steve Coll The Dead Hand is the suspense-filled story of the people who sought to brake the speeding locomotive of the arms race, then rushed to secure the nuclear and biological weapons left behind by the collapse of the Soviet Union--a dangerous legacy that haunts us even today. The Cold War was an epoch of massive overkill. In the last half of the twentieth century the two superpowers had perfected the science of mass destruction and possessed nuclear weapons with the combined power of a million Hiroshimas. What's more, a Soviet biological warfare machine was ready to produce bacteria and viruses to sicken and kill millions. In The Dead Hand, a thrilling narrative history drawing on new archives and original research and interviews, David E. Hoffman reveals how presidents, scientists, diplomats, soldiers, and spies confronted the danger and changed the course of history. The Dead Hand captures the inside story in both the United States and the Soviet Union, giving us an urgent and intimate account of the last decade of the arms race. With access to secret Kremlin documents, Hoffman chronicles Soviet internal deliberations that have long been hidden. He reveals that weapons designers in 1985 laid a massive "Star Wars" program on the desk of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to compete with President Reagan, but Gorbachev refused to build it. He unmasks the cover-up of the Soviet biological weapons program. He tells the exclusive story of one Soviet microbiologist's quest to build a genetically engineered super-germ--it would cause a mild illness, a deceptive recovery, then a second, fatal attack. And he details the frightening history of the Doomsday Machine, known as the Dead Hand, which would launch a retaliatory nuclear strike if the Soviet leaders were wiped out. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the dangers remained. Soon rickety trains were hauling unsecured nuclear warheads across the Russian steppe; tons of highly-enriched uranium and plutonium lay unguarded in warehouses; and microbiologists and bomb designers were scavenging for food to feed their families. The Dead Hand offers fresh and startling insights into Reagan and Gorbachev, the two key figures of the end of the Cold War, and draws colorful, unforgettable portraits of many others who struggled, often valiantly, to save the world from the most terrifying weapons known to man.
Cold War: An International History
In this accessible, comprehensive retelling, Carole K. Fink provides new insights and perspectives on key events with an emphasis on people, power, and ideas, along with cultural coverage "from the Beetle to the Beatles." Cold War goes beyond US-USSR relations to explore the Cold War from an international perspective, including key events and developments in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Uncertain Empire: American History and the Idea of the Cold War
Historians have long understood that the notion of "the cold war" is richly metaphorical, if not paradoxical. The conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union was a war that fell ambiguously short of war, an armed truce that produced considerable bloodshed. Yet scholars in the rapidly expanding field of Cold War studies have seldom paused to consider the conceptual and chronological foundations of the idea of the Cold War itself. In Uncertain Empire, a group of leading scholars takes up the challenge of making sense of the idea of the Cold War and its application to the writing of American history. They interrogate the concept from a wide range of disciplinary vantage points--diplomatic history, the history of science, literary criticism, cultural history, and the history of religion--highlighting the diversity of methods and approaches in contemporary Cold War studies. Animating the volume as a whole is a question about the extent to which the Cold War was an American invention. Uncertain Empire brings debates over national, global, and transnational history into focus and offers students of the Cold War a new framework for considering recent developments in the field.
The Cold War: A New History
In 1950, when Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh and Kim Il-Sung met in Moscow to discuss the future, they had reason to feel optimistic. International communism seemed everywhere on the offensive: Stalin was at the height of his power; all of Eastern Europe was securely in the Soviet camp; America's monopoly on nuclear weapons was a thing of the past; and Mao's forces had assumed control over the world's most populous country. Everywhere on the globe, colonialism left the West morally compromised. The story of the previous five decades, which saw severe economic depression, two world wars, a nearly successful attempt to wipe out the Jews, and the invention of weapons capable of wiping out everyone, was one of worst fears confirmed, and there seemed as of 1950 little sign, at least to the West, that the next fifty years would be any less dark. In fact, of course, the century's end brought the widespread triumph of political and economic freedom over its ideological enemies. How did this happen? How did fear become hope? In The Cold War, John Lewis Gaddis makes a major contribution to our understanding of this epochal story. Beginning with World War II and ending with the collapse of the Soviet Union, he provides a thrilling account of the strategic dynamics that drove the age, rich with illuminating portraits of its major personalities and much fresh insight into its most crucial events. The first significant distillation of cold war scholarship for a general readership, The Cold Warcontains much new and often startling information drawn from newly opened Soviet, East European, and Chinese archives. Now, as America once again finds itself in a global confrontation with an implacable ideological enemy, The Cold Wartells a story whose lessons it is vitally necessary to understand.
The Cold War: a Very Short Introduction
The massive disorder and economic ruin following the Second World War inevitably predetermined the scope and intensity of the Cold War. But why did it last so long? And what impact did it have on the United States, the Soviet Union, Europe, and the Third World? Finally, how did it affect thebroader history of the second half of the twentieth century - what were the human and financial costs? This Very Short Introduction provides a clear and stimulating interpretive overview of the Cold War, one that will both invite debate and encourage deeper investigation.
The Devil We Knew
In the late 1950s, Washington was driven by its fear of communist subversion: it saw the hand of Kremlin behind developments at home and across the globe. The FBI was obsessed with the threat posed by American communist party--yet party membership had sunk so low, writes H.W. Brands, that itcould have fit "inside a high-school gymnasium," and it was so heavily infiltrated that J. Edgar Hoover actually contemplated using his informers as a voting bloc to take over the party. Abroad, the preoccupation with communism drove the White House to help overthrow democratically electedgovernments in Guatemala and Iran, and replace them with dictatorships. But by then the Cold War had long since blinded Americans to the ironies of their battle against communism.In The Devil We Knew, Brands provides a witty, perceptive history of the American experience of the Cold War, from Truman's creation of the CIA to Ronald Reagan's creation of SDI.
Turncoats, Traitors, and Fellow Travelers
The Cold War was unique in the way films, books, television shows, colleges and universities, and practices of everyday life were enlisted to create American political consensus. This coercion fostered a seemingly hegemonic, nationally unified perspective devoted to spreading a capitalist, socially conservative notion of freedom throughout the world to fight Communism. In Turncoats, Traitors, and Fellow Travelers: Culture and Politics of the Early Cold War, Arthur Redding traces the historical contours of this manufactured consent by considering the ways in which authors, playwrights, and directors participated in, responded to, and resisted the construction of Cold War discourses. The book argues that a fugitive resistance to the status quo emerged as writers and activists variously fled into exile, went underground, or grudgingly accommodated themselves to the new spirit of the times. To this end, Redding examines work by a wide swath of creators, including essayists (W. E. B. Du Bois and F. O. Matthiessen), novelists (Ralph Ellison, Patricia Highsmith, Jane Bowles, and Paul Bowles), playwrights (Arthur Miller), poets (Sylvia Plath), and filmmakers (Elia Kazan and John Ford). The book explores how writers and artists created works that went against mainstream notions of liberty and offered alternatives to the false dichotomy between capitalist freedom and totalitarian tyranny. These complex responses and the era they reflect had and continue to have profound effects on American and international cultural and intellectual life, as can be seen in the connections Redding makes between past and present.
The Spiritual-Industrial Complex
In his farewell address, Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the nation of the perils of the military-industrial complex. But as Jonathan Herzog shows in this insightful history, Eisenhower had spent his presidency contributing to another, lesser known, Cold War collaboration: the spiritual-industrial complex.This fascinating volume shows that American leaders in the early Cold War years considered the conflict to be profoundly religious; they saw Communism not only as godless but also as a sinister form of religion. Fighting faith with faith, they deliberately used religious beliefs and institutions as part of the plan to defeat the Soviet enemy. Herzog offers an illuminating account of the resultant spiritual-industrial complex, chronicling the rhetoric, the programs, and the policies that became its hallmarks. He shows that well-known actions like the addition of the words "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance were a small part of a much larger and relatively unexplored program that promoted religion nationwide. Herzog shows how these efforts played out in areas of American life both predictable and unexpected--from pulpits and presidential appeals to national faith drives, military training barracks, public school classrooms, and Hollywood epics. Millions of Americans were bombarded with the message that the religious could not be Communists, just a short step from the all-too-common conclusion that the irreligious could not be true Americans.Though the spiritual-industrial complex declined in the 1960s, its statutes, monuments, and sentiments live on as bulwarks against secularism and as reminders that the nation rests upon the groundwork of religious faith. They continue to serve as valuable allies for those defending the place of religion in American life.