Archive for the 'USH: Cold War' Category
Friday, February 26th, 2010
Journalist David E. Hoffman’s new book The Dead Hand revisits the high stakes maneuvering that took place during the Cold War arms race and details the inner-workings of the Soviet nuclear program.
Hoffman had access to secret Kremlin documents while researching his book, which chronicles the Soviets’ internal deliberations, offers new insight into the roles of Mikhail Gorbachev and President Reagan, and describes the urgent search for nuclear and biological hazards left behind after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Hoffman, a Washington Post contributing editor, spent six years as the paper’s Moscow bureau chief. He is also the author of The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia.
Listen to his interview with Terry Gross (40 minutes)
Posted in USH: Cold War, World Civ-Cold War in West | No Comments »
Sunday, November 15th, 2009
In this essay, originally published in Harper’s in 1964, Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Richard Hofstadter offers an astute thematic analysis of paranoia in American politics. He examines the paranoid reactions to Masons, Catholics, Jesuits, Communists and others. Sadly, perhaps his perceptions are as timely as ever.
Posted in US GOV: Public Opinion: Ideology & Socialization, USH: Cold War, USH: Introductory Materials | No Comments »
Friday, February 27th, 2009
Opening with a personal anecdote from his experience on the USA Olympic basketball team playing against the Soviet Union, former Senator Bill Bradley provides his thoughts on the past, present, and future of Russia.
Watch Bill Bradley’s assessment of U.S. – Russian relations
Posted in AP Post AP Seminar, AP Russia, USH: Cold War, World Civ-Modern Global Dilemmas | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 16th, 2008
Here is my lecture. It begins with a conceptual analysis of propaganda and then focuses on Stalin’s propaganda campaigns.
Posted in USH: Cold War, USH: The 1950's, World Civ-Age of Anxiety and Totalitarianism, World Civ-Cold War in West | No Comments »
Sunday, June 29th, 2008
The Breakup of the USSR Makes the US the Leader of the World (Elliot Abrams)
The Breakup of the USSR Signals the End of US World Leadership (Zoltan Grossman)
Write a 1-2 page, single-spaced position paper which adheres to the following:
I. Short Intro with a Thesis (specific, complex and refutable)
II. Summarize the ideas of the author with whom you do NOT concur and explain why his ideas are disagreeable (clearly demonstrate that you have read and understood this author’s ideas). Do not feel compelled to disagree with this author entirely as there surely is some truth to his argument.
III. Summarize the ideas of the author with whom you DO concur and explain how his ideas are superior to the other author (clearly demonstrate that you have read and understood this author’s ideas).
IV. Conclude by restating your thesis and exploring the significance thereof.
Please bear in mind that your goal is to illustrate that you have read BOTH documents and that you have thought about them. Be prepared for a healthy debate in class.
Posted in USH: Cold War, USH: Reagan Years, World Civ-Cold War in West, World Civ-Modern Global Dilemmas | No Comments »
Sunday, June 29th, 2008
Reagan’s Presidency DID cause the collapse of the USSR (Edwin Meese III)
Reagan’s Presidency did NOT cause the collapse of the USSR (Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry)
Write a 1-2 page, single-spaced position paper which adheres to the following:
I. Short Intro with a Thesis (specific, complex and refutable)
II. Summarize the ideas of the author with whom you do NOT concur and explain why his ideas are disagreeable (clearly demonstrate that you have read and understood this author’s ideas). Do not feel compelled to disagree with this author entirely as there surely is some truth to his argument.
III. Summarize the ideas of the author with whom you DO concur and explain how his ideas are superior to the other author (clearly demonstrate that you have read and understood this author’s ideas).
IV. Conclude by restating your thesis and exploring the significance thereof.
Please bear in mind that your goal is to illustrate that you have read BOTH documents and that you have thought about them. Be prepared for a healthy debate in class.
Posted in USH: Cold War, USH: Reagan Years, World Civ-Cold War in West | No Comments »
Sunday, June 29th, 2008
1. A Communist Perspective (Ponomaryov)
2. Patterns of Western European Integration (Puchala)
3. The Truman Doctrine
4. The Marshall Plan
5. The Marshall Plan: An Instrument of Peace? (Sweezy)
Read these five documents and respond to these 15 questions
Here is a lesson plan for the ensuing discussion
Posted in USH: Cold War, World Civ-Cold War in West | No Comments »
Thursday, May 1st, 2008
Read “Korea” from Ambrose’s “Rise to Globalism”
Here are the responses. Enjoy!
Stephen Edward Ambrose (January 10, 1936 – October 13, 2002) was an American historian and biographer of U.S. Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon. He received his Ph.D. in 1960 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Ambrose served as a professor of history at several universities from 1960 until his retirement in 1995, having spent the bulk of his time at the University of New Orleans. He was the military adviser on the movie Saving Private Ryan and was an executive producer on the television mini-series that was based on his book, Band of Brothers.
Eisenhower chose Ambrose as his biographer after admiring his work on Halleck: Lincoln’s Chief of Staff, which was based on his doctoral dissertation. The resulting Eisenhower biographies were generally enthusiastic, but contained many criticisms of the former commander in chief.
Ambrose also wrote a highly regarded three-volume biography of Richard Nixon, also generally positive, but his Band of Brothers (1993) and D-Day (1994), about the lives and fates of individual soldiers in the World War II invasion, catapulted him out of the ranks of academic history and into mainstream American culture. The mini-series ‘Band of Brothers’ (2001) lionized American troops and helped sustain the fresh interest in WWII that was stimulated by the 50th anniversary of D-Day in 1994, and the 60th anniversary of D-Day in 2004.
In 2002, Ambrose was found to have plagiarized several passages in his book The Wild Blue. Fred Barnes in The Weekly Standard reported that Ambrose had taken passages from Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II, by Thomas Childers. Ambrose and his publisher, Simon and Schuster, released an apology as a result. Ambrose had only footnoted sources and did not enclose in direct quotes significant passages taken from Childers’ book.
While Ambrose downplayed the incident, stating that only a few sentences in all of his numerous books were the work of other authors, Forbes’ investigation of his work found similar cases of plagiarism involving entire passages in at least six books and found a similar pattern of plagiarism going all the way back to his doctoral thesis.
He offered this defense to the New York Times:
“I tell stories. I don’t discuss my documents. I discuss the story. It almost gets to the point where, how much is the reader going to take? I am not writing a Ph.D. dissertation.”
“I wish I had put the quotation marks in, but I didn’t. I am not out there stealing other people’s writings. If I am writing up a passage and it is a story I want to tell and this story fits and a part of it is from other people’s writing, I just type it up that way and put it in a footnote. I just want to know where the hell it came from.”
The “History News Network” web site of George Mason University, however, in a web article entitled “How the Ambrose story developed”, detailed seven of Ambrose works that had plagiarized at least 12 authors.
[note: I plagiarized this from Wikipedia.]
Posted in USH: Cold War, World Civ-Cold War in East | No Comments »
Thursday, May 1st, 2008
“The Plan is for the United States to rule the world. The overt theme is unilateralism, but it is ultimately a story of domination. It calls for the United States to maintain its overwhelming military superiority and prevent new rivals from rising up to challenge it on the world stage. It calls for dominion over friends and enemies alike. It says not that the United States must be more powerful, or most powerful, but that it must be absolutely powerful.”
Dick Cheney’s Song of America: Drafting a Plan for Global Dominance
Response to Song of America
Socratic Dialogue Questions for class session in response to the reading
Primary Sources: Excerpts from Various Drafts of the DPG from NY Times (1992)
A List of US Military Involvements 1945-2005
Posted in AP Post AP Seminar, USH: Cold War, World Civ-Cold War in West | No Comments »
Sunday, March 2nd, 2008
“The public debate swirls around the firing [of MacArthur] itself. This act, however, is but the symbol of a deep cleavage over American policy. Did MacArthur Meddle In Nonmilitary Matters?”
Read this article from Time Magazine dated 23 April 1951
Posted in USH: Cold War, World Civ-Cold War in West | No Comments »