Introduction The ramifications of the Cold War, the infamous ideological conflict between the two world superpowers—the United States and the USSR—that dominated foreign policies and politics for almost half a century, are still felt almost twenty
Working with the Cold War
Types of Knowledge in Swedish and Australian History Textbook Activities
Niklas Ammert and Heather Sharp
In Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2016
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 58–82
Turkish-Israeli Relations during the Cold War
The Myth of a Long ‘Special Relationship’
Kilic Bugra Kanat
An examination of Turkish-Israeli bilateral relations during the Cold War demonstrates that a solid pact between Israel and Turkey never materialized. This was due to both internal and external factors, mainly, Cold War politics and the Arab
Vicos as Cold War Strategy
Anthropology, Peasants and 'Community Development'
Eric B. Ross
This article examines how anthropology's emphasis on the traditional values of peasants reflected the general precepts of 'modernization theory', the dominant development discourse of the Cold War era. It explores how such ideas lent credibility to the U.S. strategy of 'community development' as a central part of its response to radical rural change. Special attention is paid to the Cornell-Peru Project at Vicos in the Peruvian highlands, which attained legendary status as a case of applied anthropology, but is here examined in relationship to the strategies of the U.S. power elite and Cold War government policies.
The Cold War in Swiss Classrooms
History Education as a “Powerful Weapon against Communism“?
Nadine Ritzer
The Cold War had a variety of impacts on Swiss schools. This article focuses on how schools, and especially their history curricula, became the vehicle with which to launch a “National Spiritual Defense“ (Geistige Landesverteidigung) against Communism. During the Cold War era, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, teachers' journals and textbooks analyses revealed tendencies connected to a heroic, teleological master narrative of Switzerland's national history. The “cultural memory“ (Assmann) was seemingly designed to strengthen the “Swiss spirit.“ It also provided patterns from which to explain the ongoing Cold War conflict. In the 1970s, educators and politicians assigned the schools the new task of assisting in national military defense efforts.
In Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2012
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 78–94
Visualizing the Former Cold War "Other"
Images of Eastern Europe in World Regional Geography Textbooks in the United States
Dmitrii Sidorov
This article discusses contemporary western representations of the former Cold War geopolitical "other," Eastern Europe, conveyed by illustrations in contemporary American world regional geography textbooks. I would like to explore certain geopolitical biases in the pictures' general messages, such as tendencies to highlight the transitional, problematic, and marginal at the expense of the essential and centripetal characteristics and landscapes. Images of Eastern Europe tend to marginalize it from the rest of Europe by minimizing visual references to its physical landscape and its role in European history; overemphasizing local problems connotes the need for the supranational assistance of the expanding European Union. Overall, this article attempts to reveal various Cold War legacies and "marginalizing" tendencies in visual representations of Eastern Europe, thus contributing to the visual and popular cultural turns in geography and geopolitical studies.
In Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2009
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 39–58
Communism, Consumerism, and Gender in Early Cold War Film
The Case of Ninotchka and Russkii vopros
Rhiannon Dowling
This article deals with ideologies of domesticity, femininity, and consumerism as they were articulated in two films in the early Cold War. These films, shown in occupied Berlin from the spring of 1948 through the first few months of 1949, were Ernst Lubitsch's Hollywood classic Ninotchka (1939) and the Soviet film Russkiivopros (The Russian Question, 1948). They portrayed competing notions of domestic consumption and the “good life” in the aftermath of the Second World War—issues more commonly understood to have characterized the later, thaw-era, years of the conflict. Though they were shown at a time of heightened political and ideological tensions, neither painted a one-dimensional or demonized portrait of the enemy. Instead, both films employed narratives about the private lives and material desires of women in order to humanize their enemies and yet make a statement about the inhuman nature of the other system.
Women's Political and Social Activism in the Early Cold War Era
The Case of Yugoslavia
Chiara Bonfiglioli
The Cold War era has been mainly represented as a period of gender conservatism in feminist literature, and communist women in Eastern and Western Europe have been often described as manipulated or deprived of agency due to their lack of autonomy from Communist Party politics. On the basis of archival sources and autobiographies, this article explores the Cold War activities of a women's organization founded in Yugoslavia during the Second World War: the Antifašistički Front Žena (Antifascist Women's Front, or AFŽ). The article describes the activities of the AFŽ from its creation until its dissolution in 1953, focusing on its campaigns for women's political, economic, and social rights in the postwar and early Cold War period. By engaging with the pioneering work of Zagreb feminist historian Lydia Sklevicky and with new archival sources, the article aims to shed light on women's political and social agency in Cold War times.
Creative Intelligence and the Cold War
US Military Investments in the Concept of Creativity, 1945–1965
Bregje F. Van Eekelen
to engage unthinkable Cold War futures, to its attention to the detection of creative ability—shows that our present-day understandings of creative and undisciplined thought are laced with military interests. Summoning the Concept and Its Field of
A Woman Politician in the Cold War Balkans
From Biography to History
Krassimira Daskalova
conventional accounts of the Cold War, and instead use “gendering the Cold War” as a lens to interpret the life experiences and agency of both women and men. 1 Therefore, agency is my major frame of analysis. In addition to exploring the agency of my
Chiara Bonfiglioli
Women's Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War , Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019, 306 pp. $25.35 (paperback), ISBN: 978-1-47800-181-2. Women's and feminist activism in the Cold War era, and particularly transnational encounters