Cold War Geographies

The Cold War: A World History

Perspectives on <i>The Soviet Union and the Horn of Africa during the Cold War</i>

This book should command the attention of all Cold War historians. It is a book of prodigious research and immense erudition. Lorenz Lüthi has visited archives in the United States, England, Russia, China, Australia, India, Germany, France, Switzerland, and Austria, among other places. His aim is noteworthy: to “de-center” the Cold War. He argues that, for the most part, developments in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe had roots not in the global Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union but in “structural” changes in each of these regions that presaged the Cold War's end. He rejects the triumphalist narrative of some U.S. writers, minimizes the role of President Ronald Reagan, and claims that Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader of the Soviet Union, did not want to end the Cold War and instead yearned to win that conflict. Overall, Lüthi stresses the agency of local actors and regional dynamics and claims that the capacity of Moscow and Washington to shape events was circumscribed by “decolonization, Asian-African Internationalism, pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism, Arab-Israeli hostility, and European economic developments” (p. 1).Despite the ambition and learning that inform every page of this tome, the book is beset with interpretive ambiguities and conceptual problems. Lüthi argues that the Cold War was not predetermined but was the collective result of “ideological clashes, unilateral decisions, political disagreements, and misperceptions” (p. 13). Its origins rest in the desires of the USSR to “overthrow the imperialist-capitalist world system and the establishment of a stateless and classless society across the globe” (p. 3). In contrast to Odd Arne Westad's The Cold War: A World History (New York; Basic Books, 2017), Lüthi pays scant attention to the economic contradictions within global capitalism in the late nineteenth century, the cyclical fluctuations of business cycles in the early twentieth century, the rise of the Left, the yearnings for structural change within capitalism, and the disillusionment spawned by two world wars and the Great Depression. Rather, Lüthi's focus is on imperial aspirations and ideological conflict. He elides geostrategic motivations, the underlying dynamics of global capitalism, and the legacy of World War II. He does not explain that controlling German power in Europe and harnessing Japanese power in Asia were key components of the global Cold War as well as the regional Cold Wars in Europe and Asia. He does not show how the perceived structural dynamics of global capitalism impelled policymakers in North American, Europe, and Japan to focus on integrating the core industrial areas of global capitalism with markets and raw materials in the “periphery”; that is, in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Africa. He does not illustrate how socioeconomic unrest and political turmoil stemming from the Great Depression and World War II created perceptions of threat and opportunity in Moscow and Washington that set the conditions for the Cold War.The great attribute of this volume is Lüthi's detailed description of developments in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe. Cold War historians will be surprised by his decision to place developments in the Middle East at the forefront of the volume (chapter two), even while he argues that the Cold War did not come to the Middle East until the Suez crisis (chapters 8–10). The Middle East commands initial attention because Lüthi focuses on the legacy of British imperialism and the desires of officials in London to remake their empire in the aftermath of World War II with the help of the Arab League. In this context, Lüthi luminously describes inter-Arab dynamics, Arab-Israeli hostilities, and the rise of pan-Islamism. He stresses Anwar el-Sadat's desire to expel Soviet influence from Egypt, the complex dynamics spawned by the Palestinian quest for statehood, and the repercussions of the Iranian revolution. By the early 1980s, he writes, “the Cold War ceased to be the critical structure that shaped the regional system in the Middle East” (p. 518). But it is not clear what he means by the “regional system,” or whether the Cold War had ever shaped it. It is also not clear what constituted the regional Cold War in the Middle East when so many of the wars were hot, not cold. The role of oil in shaping the local, regional, and international dynamics of the different versions of Cold War in the region goes totally unexamined.Lüthi's discussion of Asia is central to the overall thesis of his book. “Three countries,” he writes, “played major roles in Asia's Cold War. China, Vietnam, and India all were dynamic agents in the shaping of their own fates and not just passive battlegrounds in the global competition between the United States and the Soviet Union” (p. 115). Lüthi shows how the Sino-Soviet split, the Chinese rapprochement with the United States, the unification of revolutionary Vietnam, and “the collapse of communism as a unifying program for national liberation” (p. 537) reshaped the Asian Cold War during the 1970s. But here again it is not clear precisely what the Asian Cold War was, and why Japan is totally omitted from its discussion. Perhaps Lüthi would argue that Japan lacked agency, but even if that was the case the country was crucial to the trajectory of the Vietnam War and the U.S. role in it. Numerous historians—Howard Schonberger, Michael Schaller, Andrew Rotter, William Borden, and Robert Blum, among others—have shown in great detail how the goal of reconstructing and stabilizing Japan impelled U.S. officials to thwart Communist gains in Southeast Asia, create an independent South Vietnam, establish the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, and support the rightwing military coup, crackdown, and massacres in Indonesia. While ignoring these dimensions of the Asian Cold War, Lüthi presents fascinating chapters on China, Vietnam, and India, on Asian-African internationalism, and on nonalignment. He shows that the Asian Cold War had many manifestations and permutations. At different times, in different ways, these trajectories affected the U.S.-Soviet global conflict and were influenced by that conflict. But Lüthi also acknowledges that “the end of the global Cold War primarily required a strategic rethinking in Moscow which would only come in March 1985 with Mikhail S. Gorbachev's ascent to power” (p. 537).Strategic rethinking was necessitated by developments in Europe. Lüthi incisively describes the successful integrationist initiatives in Western Europe and the concomitant failures in the Soviet-imposed Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. He emphasizes the ability of Western economies to recalibrate, innovate, and adjust to changing economic and monetary conditions, and he highlights the failures of centrally managed systems to do so. He minimizes the role of the United States in the reconstruction of Western Europe, mentioning that it “provided a stable and supportive framework” (p. 380). Ultimately, the failure of Communist economies to compete and modernize contributed to the flagging popular support for Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the end of the Cold War. But Lüthi does not make much of an effort to analyze the basic shortcomings in Communist systems, nor does he examine why and how liberal capitalist and social-democratic market economies were able to adapt successfully. For example, he describes the impact of declining oil prices in the 1980s and the constraints that imposed on Moscow's ability to subsidize the economies of its East European satellites, but he rarely makes an attempt to analyze the dysfunctionality of Soviet agricultural policies or the flawed operations of central planning. He stresses the resilience of West European economies but barely mentions the creation of social welfare states and the role of governments in providing minimal social provision and expanding educational opportunity, access to medical care, and support for basic research.This volume is a monumental attempt to de-center the Cold War and restore agency to middle-level powers and local actors. What it does is de-center international politics. It illuminates that much was going on in the latter half of the twentieth century that was not the product of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War but at times intersected with it and contributed to its denouement. Small powers had their own agendas, and regional dynamics had their own logic. In complicated ways, developments in one region influenced those in another. Thanks to the prodigious research of an author with staggering linguistic skills and breathtaking knowledge of multiple literatures, one comes away much better informed about the complexities of international politics but not equally enlightened about the Cold War itself.

Reviews and Short Notices

After the Second World War, a bipolar world, known as the Cold War Era, has been clearly formed between the Western Bloc and Communist Bloc while the United States and the Soviet Union at the peak on each side. In Eastern Europe, the United States was restrained and felt helpless about Soviet expansion in this area with the perception of Yalta system. On the other hand, in Asia, with the breakdown of talks, an all-out war resumed. A Chinese civil war fought between Kuomintang (also as KMT or Chinese National Party) and Chinese Communist Party (CCP). At the end of 1948, KMT has occupied the inferior position. In the early period of 1949, CCP forces crossed the Yangtze River and successfully captured Nanking, the capital of KMT’s Republic of China (PRC) government. On October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with its capital at Beiping, which was renamed Beijing. Chiang Kai-shek and millions of Nationalist Chinese retreated from mainland China to the island of Taiwan. Confronted with the CCP takeover of mainland China, the United States came to reformulate its China Policy which later marked a turning point in Sino-American relationship during the period of 1949 to the middle 1950. In June 1948, the leader of Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito, was officially denounced and his party, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY), was ejected as a member of the Cominform by the Soviet Union. Since the West branded Tito a Soviet puppet for his loyalty and constancy of faith to Stalinism, the Tito-Stalin Split presented a whole new realm of possibilities to the United States for its dilemma in china—“Chinese Titoism.” With the influence of Stilwell Incident over Sino-American relationship and the facts of Tito-Stalin Split, Truman made an about-face change to U.S. China Policy in 1949. By the early 1949, the Truman Administration has already been making plans to diverge from Chiang and his KMT such as the publication of China White Paper; at the same time, Truman Administration keeping making chances to have conversations with the CCP. By meeting and negotiating with the CCP officials, Truman Administration attempted to disunite Communist China and the Soviet Union, expected Mao to be the “Asian Tito,” and then Communist China can joint forces with the United States to fight against the Soviet Union, especially in the Asia-Pacific region. Until the outbreak of Korean War in June 1950, the United States finally realized that what it faced is hostile china along with the Sino-Soviet partnership. By applying Graham T. Allison’s three decision-making models, namely, the Rational Actor Model (RAM), the Organizational Behavior Model (OBM), and the Governmental Politics Model (GPM) as the theoretical structure and basis, the thesis would step by step explore the decision-making process of Truman Administration in engaging China to counter the threat from the Soviet Union during the period of 1949 to the middle 1950 through the perspectives of the rational assessment and choice on national interest, struggles between/among organizations based on different target and organizational culture, and pulling, hauling and bargaining games among relative bureaucrats. In addition, the thesis also applied the principles from Alexander L. George’s book, Presidential Decision-making in Foreign Policy, to aim at examining how President Truman’s, who has the final say, character, personality, value and world views made effect in the decision-making process of the target case study. In the process of theory confirming, the thesis discovered that by the period of transformation of Chinese regimes in 1949, the Tito-Stalin Split of 1948 presented the United States a new inspiration for the Communist World, that is, the Eastern Bloc is not a rigid “Iron Curtain.” Truman Administration considered that Titoism may set its roots upon China, the Yugoslav-Soviet Conflict could be a replay situation that occurred in mainland China, and both would put the strategic thought—Engaging China to counter the Soviet Threat—into practice. Nevertheless, from the historical perspectives, this kind of strategic thought seemed over-optimistic, which did not conform to fully rational considerations. However, with regard to the background of the early Cold War Era and the suspicion between the Truman Administration and KMT, the alternative that the United States took reflected the principles of “bounded rationality model.” As a result, by examining the decision-making process of Truman Administration in engaging China to counter the threat from the Soviet Union during the period of 1949 to the middle 1950, what the thesis explored not only the facts about the Sino-American relationship in this period, but also the continuity and change of Truman’s China Policy along with its cause and effect.

16 Historically Speaking January/February 2008 whites-only suburbs exemplars of a depoliticized Happy Days? You get the idea. The struggle for racial justice burned across the post-World War II years. And that struggle goes a long way toward explaining how political activism of all kinds became an ever greater presence in the United States from the end of World War II right through the early 1970s. Without the struggle for racial justice and the models of political practice, resistance , and rebellion it produced in its many variants across racial and ethnic lines, the other political movements and modes of contentious politics of the era would have looked very different and likely would never have gained the kind of political and cultural traction they did achieve. Black Americans don't fit the Fifties imagery popular accounts tend to present—or that Whitfield outlines. If black Americans' experiences are taken seriously, the Fifties take on a different hue. And as historians place black Americans' presence in the post-World War II years more centrally, they should have a much easier time understanding how contemporary mass-media notions of the Fifties tell us more about how a certain kind of social order was culturally cast than about how Americans actually lived and experienced the era. Throughout the early Cold War years, black Americans found powerful ways to make their presence felt in die United States. They and their allies were able to break the racial order whites had cast in the decades following Reconstruction . That break had major cultural and social implications and it caused massive changes in American public policy. Americans' domestic struggles over racial justice were given political urgency and new cultural saliency by that other great postwar cause: the battle to address the communist challenge. That battle produced concerns about national identity that made racial injustice a more salient issue for political elites. But it also produced hot wars, internal hunts for subversives and spies, massive increases in the federal government's power and capacity, and a political struggle to define America's role in the world. As people in the United States and in most other nation -states around the world worked their ways through the new international Cold War order, factions in most every nation began to challenge the people, precepts, and policies that maintained and developed that order and the particular form the Cold War state took in their respective societies. Even the Soviet Union, with its barbarous Stalinist and brutal post-Stalinist internal political organization , had its factional disputes and cultural forms of resistance to the obduracy of its Cold War state. Given America's central role in the making, maintaining, and developing of that Cold War international order, Americans' relative unfamiliarity with the demands of a powerful domestic security state, and Americans' freewheeling, democratic political culture, it makes sense that Americans responded passionately and in great numbers to the demands of the Cold War. And those responses, it is worth remembering, did not begin with the Left's challenges to the Vietnam War. The John Birch Society, founded in 1 958, almost surely had more members than SDS ever did. Birchers met in small chapters all over the United States, petitioning, protesting, and organizing to impeach Earl Warren and challenge the patriotism of President Eisenhower and then Kennedy and Johnson. More direcdy, and successfully , they took on school boards and other local officials who failed to attack communism. Birchers were joined in their activism by myriad other selfidentified anticommunist grass roots activists. The Cold War produced an angry, highly organized, grassroots Right in the Fifties, and as numerous recent historians have recognized, those Rightists did not disappear in the Sixties—they regrouped and rethought their political practices (ironically, Leftists would do much the same in the 1970s—a topic for another day). The political ferment created by the frustrations, fears, and hopes of the Cold War clearly took on new shape and politicized new people as the war in Vietnam evolved differendy than had the civil war in China and the UN police action in Korea. And, yes, generational politics fueled by demographics and a host of other critical factors—some of which...

<i>Eisenhower &amp; Cambodia: Diplomacy, Covert Action and the Origins of the Second Indochina War</i> by William J. Rust

This article examines the ways in which race relations and foreign affairs intersected for the United States between 1945 and 1952. It draws on an array of archival and other primary as well as secondary sources to focus on the manner in which the Truman administration responded to pressures for racial reform both in the international sphere (decolonization) and in the domestic sphere (civil rights organizing). It finds that the segregationist backgrounds of elite American policy makers were a crucial element in official U.S. policies regarding civil rights and decolonization. It places postwar struggles over segregation and racial equality at home in the context of similar global struggles. And it argues that there was a surprising malleability to the concept of “race” and to racial designations in these years. It concludes that much, but not all, changed along the color line in the Truman years.

The literature of the Cold War could fill a library. Tarah Brookfield's book, however, represents a very special approach: the reaction of the population, especially women, to Cold War dangers and tensions. The book is also a story of Canada, a country that is “sandwiched in between the Soviet Union and the United States,” (p.30), but was not in the first trenches of the Cold War confrontation. These features make the book both interesting and also somewhat marginal.The discussion is divided into two quite separate parts: the home front and abroad. Canada was involved in wars with its Western allies and shared the Cold War hysteria and even the American anti-Communist crusade of McCarthyism in the 1950s and 1960s. The Canadian government warned the population to be prepared for a nuclear war and possible nuclear attack. The population reacted in various ways. Volunteers accumulated and stored food, even built family bomb shelters, trained nurses, and spread useful information among the population.Postwar Canada, however, like the postwar West in general, was a flourishing place where birthrates steeply increased and an efficient welfare system was created. In a country of 18 million inhabitants, only 3,000 families built bomb shelters. The most important popular reaction was the mobilization of activist women from various layers of the society against war. “One October morning in 1968 Claire Culhane began a ten-day hunger strike and demonstration on Parliament Hill to protest what she considered to be the Canadian government's hypocritical position on the war in Vietnam” (p.161). The popular movement started out in opposition to nuclear war but soon became a movement against the war in Vietnam. A great number of volunteers collected money for the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund to save children and adopted children from war-ridden Vietnam. In 1965, 10,000 homeless children were placed in 36 orphanages in South Vietnam, and their number doubled by 1973. Canadian families, among them the Simpsons, Bronsteins, and Cappucinos, adopted several of them. The reader can learn about their motivations and feelings because Tarah Brookfield's is based heavily on oral history with activists. This strongly personal characteristic is a special value of the work, a major addition to archival sources.The book presents the everyday life and reaction of the Canadian population to the Cold War danger. This reaction, in turn, changed Canadian welfare policy, educational curriculum, and immigration law, as well as several other spheres of life and politics.The book, prepared originally as a Ph.D. dissertation, is Brookfield's first monograph. Although definitely not in the first lines of Cold War studies, it still has a place in that vast literature and offers an interesting, sometimes moving account supported by well-selected photographs.

This study seeks to explore how the French and Italian communist parties responded to the role of the United States in (West) European reconstruction in the wake of the Second World War and during the Cold War, from the mid-1940s to the rise of Eurocommunism in the 1970s. Alessandro Brogi’s study is not, however, a history of French and Italian communism from the perspective of political and social history. Instead, Brogi is interested in delineating intellectual responses in the context of international history. It is an extremely rich and learned survey of forty years of transatlantic relations. It is therefore an important contribution to post-1945 French history and one of the few studies that seek explicitly to explore France’s position in the comparative and transnational context of Cold War politics. This important book, therefore, adds to the studies on attitudes towards the United States in France and other West European countries during the Cold War, such as Rob Kroes’s and Philippe Roger’s work. But it does so on a more pronouncedly diplomatic and intellectual history (as opposed to social and cultural history) footing. Moreover, the comparative perspective helps us understand French developments in the context of broader West European patterns. Brogi argues that, after a more aggressive posture in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the United States followed a more liberal and tolerant path towards dealing with what it regarded as a key threat to the stability of Western Europe: its strategy became one of undermining the appeal of communism by highlighting the soft power of capitalism and modernity. Brogi’s argument is therefore a more positive and affirmative take on what Victoria de Grazia, arguing from the perspective of a socio-cultural historian, has called the United States’s ‘irresistible empire’. Rather problematically, however, this means that the book’s key argument essentially rehashes those of the New Deal liberals on both sides of the Atlantic: namely that the models of society and culture promoted by the United States were, because of their flexibility and tolerance for difference, infinitely better equipped to deal with the problems of modernity – consumer culture, the politics of identity, political representation beyond party political organisation – than the equivalent communist model. We also learn unfortunately little on the processes of policy making within the parties and within the United States, especially about the parties’ relationships to the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, this important and comprehensive study will serve as a standard work not only for those interested in the impact of the Cold War on French politics in a West European and transatlantic context as well as for those keen to learn more about the role of ‘soft power’ during the Cold War.

An image in technicolor. Fifty years of wars in Vietnam 1940-1990 gives a broad and innovative interpretation of the history of Vietnam between 1940 and 1990. Black and white characterisations, one-sided interpretations and prevailing myths are debunked. Instead, a nuanced and multifaceted picture is given in which the United States is less prominent. History is not only written by the victors and, in this case too, the history of Vietnam during this period cannot be attributed solely to Ho Chi Minh and the success of the Communists in 1975. The internal losers, that is, the other political movements and their leaders, must also be given a crucial place in Vietnam’s history. For example, the civil wars that took place between 1940 and 1990 played an unmistakable role. The older, idealised image of North Vietnam is inaccurate. This country was a dictatorial and oppressive police state. After 1954, the North Vietnamese leaders were embroiled in a fierce power struggle and were largely responsible for the war in South Vietnam. The answer to the question of who the legitimate representatives of the Vietnamese nation were also requires a more balanced judgment of non-Communist politicians, such as Bao Dai, Ngo Dinh Diem and Nguyen Van Thieu. As for the role of international players, initially, it was the Cold War that determined the United States’ interference; later, it was American credibility. In the end, it was the support from China and the Soviet Union that was the deciding factor for North Vietnam’s victory. Important new perspectives are given on the role of minorities, the meaning of ‘a third way’, the devastating effects of the strategy, the role of women and girls, and the mental and cultural aspects of the wars.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the United States was abounded with darkened repercussions represented by waging wars such as the cold war, the Vietnam War, and the appearance of various ideologies as materialism, consumerism, sexual freedom, racial struggles and many other examples and consequently, new trends and movements appeared to rebel against the conventional norms that prevailed during that time. The rebellion took an upward trajectory crystalizing itself in diverse forms namely: the religious, political, social and literary ones. Unruly politics and queer activisms defied the commonplace hetero-normative ways of peaceful demonstrations. The beat movement burst out against what was believed as repressive, dehumanized, corrupt, and unjust in the United States of America. Allen Ginsberg's monumental poem "Howl" seems to be the manifesto of the movement. Most striking quality is the use of naked truth as an expression of the poet's own eccentricity. This quality makes the poem a landmark of eccentricity. "Howl" reflects and connotes a deeply celestial interpretation. A celestial reading of the poem will mend its presupposed deformed image, prove the opposite, and support the basic theme of protest which is at the center of the beat movement.

John Mason Hart locates the origin of globalization in the entry of Americans and their capital into Mexico. Porfirian Mexico was the laboratory where “American elites tested a variety of approaches they have since used to extend their power and influence around the globe” (p. 5). In effect, the global capitalist culture embodied in NAFTA, the WTO, and the IMF is a neo-Porfirian hegemony emanating from an imperial United States. As in Revolutionary Mexico, Hart gets the big picture mostly right, even if he gets the occasional detail wrong.Over half of the book deals with the Restored Republic, the Porfiriato, and the Epic Revolution—the same ground Hart trod in Revolutionary Mexico. Hart attributes America’s entry primarily to push factors, specifically “the growing economic strength, technological sophistication, and population of the United States,” pretty much writing off the critical role of Mexican planners (p. 45). Hart recognizes the preeminence of railroads in la invasión pacífica, but his major service is in calling attention to the bankers who created institutions that “gave direction and coordination to this flow of U.S. investment [and] deepened the intermixing of American and Mexican businessmen” (p. 73). Notable is the International Banking Corporation that served “as a conduit for U.S. investments” by employing “strategies [anticipating those] of such multinational institutions as the Import-Export Bank, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund” (pp. 91, 100).With American capital came colonists. In addition to absentee investors, Hart estimates three thousand American boomers, sooners, and settlers immigrated yearly to Mexico. There, the new owners were caught up in long-standing local disputes over land and water at least as frequently as in ones initiated by their arrival, a subtle point Hart makes clear. He also defends his interpretation of the revolution as a “nationalist backlash” against American dominance, and his property-by-property account of attacks, seizures, and interventions on yanqui properties constitutes an extended refutation of Alan Knight’s contention that the revolution was not particularly anti-American (p. 271).In the 1920s, Mexico’s revolutionary government sought to square the circle by reconciling its economic nationalism with demands for compensation from dispossessed American banks, petroleum companies, and property owners. At the same time, there filtered into Mexico a different sort of yanqui—artists, intellectuals, and bohemians sympathetic to the revolution—whose published accounts restored Americans’ positive perspective on Mexico at the same time that expropriations of American properties peaked under President Lázaro Cárdenas. Thus Hart finds that, although American investment had withered to 300 million by 1940, “the two countries would merge even more intimately than before” in “cooperation and accommodation” (p. 399).Hart disconcertingly omits the years from 1950 through the 1970s, save a few paragraphs on the Cuban Missile Crisis, popular culture, and the origin of Mexico’s debt crisis. Mexico, he explains, was a “minor consideration” for Washington during the cold war and Vietnam War (p. 458). But in the 1980s, “neo-liberal economics and the War of Drugs” again focused Washington’s attention on Mexico (p. 432). American capital and businesses returned to Mexico in the form of McDonalds and maquiladoras, oil prices collapsed, and the national debt ballooned, creating a long-term crisis that led the last three PRI presidents to undo the revolution’s state-centered economy and produce the current neo-Porfirian system. Washing-ton’s response was NAFTA, initiated by “the American elite to stabilize a large and potentially chaotic neighbor caught in a state of rapid population growth and economic stagnation” (p. 438). But NAFTA did not reduce Mexican poverty or instability—instead, quite the reverse: real wages fell and a neo-Zapatista insurgency emerged in opposition. Hart outlines how drugs replaced oil as the major source of foreign exchange and how the war against them replaced the war against communism as Washington’s excuse for intervention in the form of military assistance. He also traces the reach of narco-corruption into the highest levels of Mexico’s government, which makes his neglect of Luis Donaldo Colosio’s assassination puzzling.Finally, Hart stresses the importance of the “almost invisible deeds of individuals” in defining the Mexican-American relationship (p. 505). Immigration is key: once confined to the borderlands, Mexican-American syncretism is now emerging in the heartlands of both nations. Almost every city and town in Mexico has a “visible American presence” (p. 499), while regions of the United States where Mexicans were unknown a decade ago have rapidly growing Mexican populations. Whereas Mexicans spoke of la invasión pacífica by yanquis in Díaz’s day, today American alarmists, notably Samuel [Clash of Civilizations] Huntington, warn of dangers to American civilization posed by Mexican immigration, legal and illegal.This book, while important and valuable, is also frustrating. Revolutionary Mexico described a revolution arising from the American-led Porfirian modernization program, part of a global process that generated almost simultaneous nationalist revolutions in China, Russia, and Iran. Empire and Revolution, in contrast, presents a bold thesis on the Porfirian origins of modern globalism, but by rarely lifting his eyes from the particular, Hart fails to provide the worldview and context that made his earlier book a classic. Instead, he shows us the forest one tree at a time. Even so, I predict we will also see a tenth-anniversary edition of Empire and Revolution.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Presented in 1961 at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, March–April; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, May–September; the Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek, Denmark, September–October. 2. Billy Klüver and Robert Rauschenberg, Art in Motion – A Combined Memory, 1961, published in English for the first time in this issue. 3. The illicit act suggested by the title of work is open to interpretation. Branden Joseph provides an analysis of the work in his entry in the Combines catalogue, relating how the work connects to other of the artist's works and providing a reading of the various elements of the piece. He suggests that the incorporation of new objects into Black Market functioned as a »means of smuggling unauthorized objects … into the art museum«. »Rauschenberg's Refusal«, Robert Rauschenberg: Combines, exh. cat., Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2005, pp. 267–275. 4. Even after his Combine phase, Rauschenberg continued to produce innovative solutions, such as Mud Muse (1968–71), which would forge a way for sculpture away from static shapes to elements of constant varied movement and sound in a manner much more organic and variable than even Jean Tinguely had envisioned. 5. Alan R. Solomon, Robert Rauschenberg, exh. cat., Jewish Museum, New York, 1963, p. 3. 6. Solomon, 1963, pp. 1–2. 7. »The basis of Rauschenberg's position lies extraordinarily close to the aesthetic of Picasso, especially in the sense that both are involved in the tension between the illusionism of paint and the impinging presence of fragments of reality«. Solomon, 1963, p. 2. In 1965, for the show of Rauschenberg's work at the Walker Art Center, Dean Swanson repeatedly stressed the lack of social comment in Rauschenberg's art, for example: »He avoids exploiting topical references for the sake of social comment. Even the powerful image of President Kennedy that appears in several of the silk-screen paintings was chosen because it was comparatively uncontroversial«. »Robert Rauschenberg Paintings 1953–1964«, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 3 May-6 June, 1965. 8. Branden Joseph notes that efforts to assign specific iconographies to Rauschenberg's works have generally been in vain: »nearly three decades of such analyses (which at their most reductive condense a work's evident heterogeneity into a single sentence or illustration of a mythic event) have yielded only partial and unsatisfactory results. Indeed, those relatively few of Rauschenberg's pieces that seem to invite such readings are far outweighed by the majority that do not«. Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2003, p. 11. 9. See Rauschenberg's interview with Dorothy Seckler, 21 December 1965, made for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, available at http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/rausch65.htm. Branden Joseph discusses this work in his book, 2003, pp. 172–177. 10. Quoted in Joan Young and Susan Davidson, »Chronology«, in Walter Hopps and Susan Davidson (eds), Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1997, p. 559. Reprinted in Joseph, 2003, p. 177. 11. A Time magazine article from 1964 noted: »Juxtaposed in Tracer [1963] are army helicopters, a Rubens nude, a bald eagle, a street scene, all balanced in colorful harmonies and anchored by skeletal perspective boxes. As pure forms in relation, they make amusing pictorial sense … .«, »Most Happy Fella«, Time, 18 September 1964, p. 94. Thomas Crow, in his essay in the Combines catalogue, discusses the historiography behind formal interpretations superceding iconographic ones: »Rise and Fall: Theme and Idea in the Combines of Robert Rauschenberg«, Robert Rauschenberg: Combines, 2005, pp. 244–245. 12. Solomon, 1963, p. 3. 13. Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Seeds of the Sixties, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1995, p. 2. 14. Eyerman and Jamison, 1995, pp. 5, 7. 15. The »Why We Fight Series« included a total of seven films: Prelude to War, The Nazis Strike, Divide and Conquer, The Battle of Britain, The Battle of Russia, The Battle of China, and War Comes to America. Prelude to War was first released to the Armed Forces in the fall of 1942, then to personnel in munitions factories in April 1943, and to the public at large in May 1943. It won best documentary film at the Academy Awards in 1943. 16. Quote by Gen. George C. Wallace, 1942, attributed in the film to Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson. 17. Vice-President Henry A. Wallace, May 8, 1942. 18. Declaration of Independence, 1776. 19. Prelude to War, 1942. 20. »I do take a stance in questions like race issues and atrocities of all sorts. . . If you feel strongly [about political issues], it's going to show there. I mean, that's the only way it can come into my work. And I believe it's there … I think cultivated protest is just as dreamlike as idealism«. Seckler interview with Rauschenberg, 1965 (see note 9 above). 21. In the Truman Doctrine, at the beginning of the Cold War, Harry Truman stated, »I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure«, 28 April 1947. During the Berlin Blockade, in 1948, General Lucius D. Clay, US military governor in Berlin, stated on 24 June, »If we mean that we are to hold Europe against communism, we must not budge. I believe the future of democracy requires us to stay here until forced out«. 22. In the United States in the 1950s, 80% of 15- to 19-year-olds were in enrolled in school, versus less than 30% of Europeans; between 1940 and 1950, the increase in college enrollment in the United States grew by nearly 80%. National Center for Education Statistics: Thomas D. Snyder (ed.), »120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait«, 1993, pp. 6, 65. Available at: http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=93442 (accessed 15 November 2006). 23. Not the least of which was the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 24. Alan Solomon, »Four Germinal Painters, Four Younger Artists«, in XXXII International Biennial Exhibition of Art, Venice 1964, United States of America, exhibition brochure/catalogue, 1964. 25. In 1964, the United States Information Agency (USIA) had charge of the American entry at the Venice Biennale. The USIA, under the auspices of Edward R. Murrow and Lois Bingham, selected Alan Solomon as the commissioner for the American section, allowing him free rein in selecting the artists and works that would be included. The USIA's participation was limited to funding, facilitating the transportation of works, and other administrative duties, such as helping with printed material. See my »Political Promotion and Institutional Patronage: How New York Displaced Paris as the Center of Contemporary Art, ca. 1955–1968«, UMI, Ann Arbor, MI, 1995, pp. 184–203. 26. USIA Memorandum, 6 April 1964. USIA Inter-office Miscellaneous Memos file – 73, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, DC. For a discussion of the relevance of Cold War politics and the promotion and exhibition of American art in general and Rauschenberg's art in particular, see Boyer, 1995. Not only did the US government want to juxtapose American art and issues of freedom and democracy, it wanted to combat the (Soviet-encouraged) view of the United States as a cultural wasteland, competent merely in the areas of technology. 27. I discuss Solomon's statement regarding New York replacing Paris as the center of art, reaction to the statement, as well as the importance of American cultural success within a Cold War context (Boyer, 1995, p. 191). 28. Boyer, 1995, p.190. See, for example, D. C., »Pop'art & dollars, ou la semaine de Venise«, No. 18, Vol. II, July–August 1964, La Côte des peintres, pp. 24–27. 29. The 1947 exhibition »Advancing American Art« serves as one excellent example. Some US congressmen, who were upset by the representation of the United States by art they found incomprehensible and ugly, forced the cancellation of the international schedule of the show as well and the wholesale unloading of the artworks, which had been government property. See Advancing American Art: Politics and Aesthetics in the State Department Exhibition, 1946–48, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama, 1984. 30. Robert Sivard, Memorandum to Mr Harris, »The Venice Biennale Art Exhibit«, 14 August 1964, Record Unit 321, Box no. 9, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington, D.C. 31. »[Rauschenberg] … is the artist of American democracy, yearningly faithful to its clamor, its contradictions, its hope and its enormous demotic freedom, all of which find shape in his work. Other American artists have had this ambition – one thinks of Robert Henri and the Ashcan painters at the turn of the century – but none fulfilled it so well«, Robert Hughes, »The Great Permitter«, Time, 3 November 1997, p. 57. 32. Calvin Tomkins, »Master of Invention«, New Yorker, 13 October 1997, pp. 92–96. 33. It should be also noted that Rauschenberg's biography and later professional career reveal a distinct liberal bias that argues that he was aware of liberal causes early on. Rauschenberg's 1965 interview with Dorothy Seckler reveals this. And note that Rauschenberg gave the work Election as a gift to the Kennedys. He supported the space program and championed environmental causes. Evidence of his later professional allegiance to liberal causes is found in the current Smithsonian Institution traveling exhibition of Rauschenberg's art, Robert Rauschenberg, Artist-Citizen. The promotional information from the SI website states that the exhibition includes prints from 1970 to 1996 »that reverberate with Rauschenberg's commitment to making the world a better place«.

Covering many aspects of the Vietnam War that have not been addressed before, this book supplies new perspectives from academics as well as Vietnam veterans that explore how this key conflict of the 20th century has influenced everyday life and popular culture during the war as well as for the past 50 years. How did the experience of the Vietnam War change the United States, not just in the 1950s through the 1970s, but through to today? What role do popular music and movies play in how we think of the Vietnam War? How similar are the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—and now Syria—to the Vietnam War in terms of duration, cost, success and failure rates, and veteran issues? This two-volume set addresses these questions and many more, examining how the Vietnam War has been represented in media, music, and film, and how American popular culture changed because of the war. Accessibly written and appropriate for students and general readers, this work documents how the war that occurred on the other side of the globe in the jungles of Vietnam impacted everyday life in the United States and influenced various entertainment modes. It not only covers the impact of the counterculture revolution, popular music about Vietnam recorded while the war was being fought (and after), and films made immediately following the end of the war in the 1970s, but also draws connections to more modern events and popular culture expressions, such as films made in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Attention is paid to the impact of social movements like the environmental movement and the civil rights movement and their relationships to the Vietnam War. The set will also highlight how the experiences and events of the Vietnam War are still impacting current generations through television shows such asMad Men.