A groundbreaking analysis of how culture, class, and gender shaped American foreign policy during the Cold War

In the years after World War II, Georgetown’s leafy streets were home to an unlikely group of Cold Warriors who helped shape American strategy. This coterie of affluent, well-educated, and connected civilians guided the country, for better and worse, from the Marshall Plan through McCarthyism, Watergate, and Vietnam. The Georgetown set included Phil and Kay Graham, husband-and-wife publishers of The Washington Post; Joe and Stewart Alsop, odd-couple brothers who were among the country’s premier political pundits; Frank Wisner, a driven, manic-depressive lawyer in charge of CIA covert operations; and a host of other diplomats, spies, and scholars. Gregg Herken gives us intimate portraits of these dedicated and talented, if deeply flawed, individuals, who navigated the Cold War years (often over cocktails and dinner) with very real consequences reaching into the present day. Throughout, he illuminates the drama and fascination of that noble, congenial, curious old world,” in Joe Alsop’s words, bringing this remarkable roster of men and women not only out into the open but vividly to life.

This book examines international post-9/11 policies by connecting them to the US violations of Japanese Americans’ human rights during World War II. Analysing the policies of the United States, Race, Nation, War illustrates how ideas of race and masculinity shaped the indefinite leave policy which the government used to move Japanese Americans out of camps during the war. With attention to recent American and European policies, the author demonstrates that race, gender, and nation also converge in President Trump’s policies on refugees and human rights, the German and European migrant crises, and related German policies and politics. Assayed from a unique city and regional planning perspective, Race, Nation, War will appeal not only to scholars of planning, but also to those with interests in American Studies, gender studies, race and ethnicity, sociology, history, and public policy.

This volume presents substantially revised and new essays on methodology and approaches in foreign and international relations history.

Gender in general, and masculinity in particular, might not be the first associations the mind produces when presented with the subject matter of the Cold War. More likely contenders would be the arms race or the ideological dichotomy of Communism versus Capitalism. However, recent research has established beyond a doubt that the politics and diplomacy of the superpower conflict were not only strongly influenced by beliefs about gender, but simultaneously also generated them. In fact, in a social climate where gender conformity was considered as crucial as ideological conformity, the conflict gave rise to what might be called distinctive “Cold War masculinities.” At the same time, the socio-historical context of the Cold War markedly shaped the cinemas of one of the main Cold War players, the United States, and of its close ally, Great Britain. Both film industries produced films overtly or covertly depicting the Cold War, characterised by propaganda, coercion and resistance to varying degrees. Integrating these findings from the fields of masculinity studies and (cultural) Cold War studies, this book analyses in what shape the interplay between widespread political and ideological Cold War convictions and Cold War notions of masculinity found its way onto British and American cinema screens of the early Cold War.

Examines how women's histories are explored and explained around the world Making Women's Histories showcases the transformations that the intellectual and political production of women’s history has engendered across time and space. It considers the difference women’s and gender history has made to and within national fields of study, and to what extent the wider historiography has integrated this new knowledge. What are the accomplishments of women’s and gender history? What are its shortcomings? What is its future? The contributors discuss their discovery of women’s histories, the multiple turns the field has taken, and how place affected the course of this scholarship. Noted scholars of women’s and gender history, they stand atop such historiographically-defined vantage points as Tsarist Russia, the British Empire in Egypt and India, Qing-dynasty China, and the U.S. roiling through the 1960s. From these and other peaks they gaze out at the world around them, surveying trajectories in the creation of women’s histories in recent and distant pasts and envisioning their futures.

The dangers of political violence and the possibilities of non-violence were the central themes of three lives which changed the twentieth century--Leo Tolstoy, writer and aristocrat who turned against his class, Mohandas Gandhi who corresponded with Tolstoy and considered him the most important person of the time, and Nelson Mandela, prisoner and statesman, who read War and Peace on Robben Island and who, despite having led a campaign of sabotage, saw himself as a successor to Gandhi. Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mandela tried to create transformed societies to replace the dying forms of colony and empire. They found the inequalities of Russia, India, and South Africa intolerable yet they questioned the wisdom of seizing the power of the state, creating new kinds of political organisation and imagination to replace the old promises of revolution. Their views, along with their ways of leading others, are closely connected, from their insistence on working with their own hands and reforming their individual selves to their acceptance of death. On three continents, in a century of mass mobilization and conflict, they promoted strains of nationalism devoid of antagonism, prepared to take part in a general peace. Looking at Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Mandela in sequence, taking into account their letters and conversations as well as the institutions they created or subverted, placing at the centre their treatment of the primal fantasy of political violence, this volume reveals a vital radical tradition which stands outside the conventional categories of twentieth-century history and politics.

Now available in a completely revised and updated second edition, Vietnam: Explaining America’s Lost War is an award-winning historiography of one of the 20th century’s seminal conflicts. Looks at many facets of Vietnam War, examining central arguments of scholars, journalists, and participants and providing evidence on both sides of controversies around this event Addresses key debates about the Vietnam War, asking whether the war was necessary for US security; whether President Kennedy would have avoided the war had he lived beyond November 1963; whether negotiation would have been a feasible alternative to war; and more Assesses the lessons learned from this war, and how these lessons have affected American national security policy since Written by a well-respected scholar in the field in an accessible style for students and scholars