coldwar's blog

On 6 August 1945 the world was ushered into a new era. However, if the development and use of atomic weapons appeared to open up new horizons of physical destruction towards the end of World War Two, then in the years that followed, and with the attendant constraints on military conflict becoming steadily more evident, US foreign policy-makers, their advisors and non-governmental individuals and institutions began to explore other ways of prosecuting the Cold War and advancing US interests. Students are confident that custom research papers are plagiarized; nevertheless, we deliver only authentic papers. Custom papers are written in accordance to instruction. One of those, the broad and (by its very nature) loosely defined field of ‘political warfare’, is the subject of Scott Lucas' contribution. Read more »

According to Gardner, a series of discussions involving Truman and his advisors between Roosevelt's death in April 1945 and the Potsdam Conference in July show the new President facing difficult decisions concerning the forthcoming meeting with Stalin, military usage of the bomb and its subsequent control, all of which were liable to impinge on or be influenced by the terms of the Japanese surrender. If the desire to know the results of the Alamogordo bomb test, scheduled for mid-July, had prompted Truman to delay the Potsdam meeting in order to improve his negotiating position, the surrender terms added a further complication. On the one hand Truman was publicly committed to the call for Unconditional Surrender inherited from his predecessor, a stance popular with a still-vengeful Congress and American public and one around which he therefore felt compelled to build his foreign policy. If you are looking for someone to "write my essay", you should try our professional essay writing service! We are able to help you with essays! On the other, particularly from May onwards Truman recognized that Unconditional Surrender, insofar as it stiffened Tokyo's determination to resist and thereby prolong the conflict, threatened to leave post-war Japan in chaos. Read more »

Articles on US foreign relations from world war to Cold war are distinguished neither by obvious nor powerful disagreements among its authors nor by explicit common cause in terms of methodology or conclusions. Less homogeneously, certainly less discordantly, they offer instead a variety of revisions of existing knowledge and interpretations: from refinements and qualifications to corrections and additions. Some contributors address well-known subjects – the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Cuban Missile Crisis – from less-familiar angles. Others draw on more-recently developed or revised analytical concepts, notably culture and ideology, to deepen our understanding of a few of the Cold war's less-tangible features. Many make use of newly researched materials stemming from archives and other primary sources in numerous lands (not only the United States and Great Britain, but also the former Soviet Union, China, North Korea and Cuba), at once building on and adding to such initiatives as the Washington-based Cold war International History Project. This aspect of the collection is in keeping with the nature of its authors: American and non-American, based within and beyond the United States, and well-versed in various aspects of international history (not always with the United States as their focal point), they not surprisingly offer a multiplicity of perspectives and readings. Read more »

Insofar as crises or transitions in diplomatic history have been born of academic criticism, however, they are partly self-generated. As Thomas Paterson points out, from at least the 1970s historians of foreign relations have themselves been looking beyond ‘government policy, decision-making, and national power’ to consider many supposedly ‘nonpolitical aspects of the past’ such as culture and gender. They have been drawing on and accommodating concepts, methods and data from a steadily widening intellectual catchment area; investigating the potentials of organization, ‘world-systems’ and dependency theories as well as psychoanalysis, corporatism, and public opinion for the study of foreign relations; drawing on archives in a growing number of countries; and rethinking established terms such as ideology and national security.

In fact, Leffler argues, it is precisely because diplomatic historians have been engaged (and should be prepared to engage) in such labours that their field is not so much in crisis as set to return from its unwarranted and involuntary quarantine: ‘uniquely positioned to deal with many of the issues that other historians deem central to an understanding of the American experience’. It is, he goes on, so long as diplomatic historians can overcome their ‘tendencies to fragment into topical subspecialities and warring schools of interpretation’. Read more »

The past decade and more has witnessed sustained discussions among historians of US foreign relations about the state of their discipline in general and of Cold war history in particular. In books and journals, on web sites and at conferences, leading professionals have interrogated themselves, their resources and tools in order to evaluate their ability to analyze and interpret their subject matter. What is custom essay writing? It is a professional help offered by responsible writers! Try our custom essay writing and obtain custom written papers! In light of such evaluations, they have gone on to review their readings of American diplomacy and many aspects of the Cold war. They have even reconsidered what terms should best be used to identify their scholarly work: whether, for example, to substitute ‘foreign relations’ or ‘international history’ for ‘foreign policy’ or ‘diplomatic history’. Read more »