front cover of Daughter of the Cold War
Daughter of the Cold War
Grace Kennan Warnecke
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019
Grace Kennan Warnecke's memoir is about a life lived on the edge of history. Daughter of one of the most influential diplomats of the twentieth century, wife of the scion of a newspaper dynasty and mother of the youngest owner of a major league baseball team, Grace eventually found her way out from under the shadows of others to forge a dynamic career of her own.

Born in Latvia, Grace lived in seven countries and spoke five languages before the age of eleven. As a child, she witnessed Hitler’s march into Prague, attended a Soviet school during World War II, and sailed the seas with her father. In a multi-faceted career, she worked as a professional photographer, television producer, and book editor and critic. Eventually, like her father, she became a Russian specialist, but of a very different kind. She accompanied Ted Kennedy and his family to Russia, escorted Joan Baez to Moscow to meet with dissident Andrei Sakharov, and hosted Josef Stalin’s daughter on the family farm after Svetlana defected to the United States. While running her own consulting company in Russia, she witnessed the breakup of the Soviet Union, and later became director of a women’s economic empowerment project in a newly independent Ukraine.

Daughter of the Cold War is a tale of all these adventures and so much more. This compelling and evocative memoir allows readers to follow Grace's amazing path through life – a whirlwind journey of survival, risk, and self-discovery through a kaleidoscope of many countries, historic events, and fascinating people.
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Dear Unknown Friend
The Remarkable Correspondence between American and Soviet Women
Alexis Peri
Harvard University Press

In the tense years of the early Cold War, American and Soviet women conducted a remarkable pen-pal correspondence that enabled them to see each other as friends rather than enemies.

In a compelling new perspective on the early Cold War, prizewinning historian Alexis Peri explores correspondence between American and Soviet women begun in the last years of World War II and continuing into the 1950s. Previously unexamined, the women’s letters movingly demonstrate the power of the personal, as the pen pals engaged in a “diplomacy of the heart” that led them to question why their countries were so divided.

Both Soviet and American women faced a patriarchal backlash after World War II that marginalized them professionally and politically. The pen pals discussed common challenges they faced, such as unequal pay and the difficulties of balancing motherhood with a career. Each side evinced curiosity about the other’s world, asking questions about family and marriage, work conditions, educational opportunities, and religion. The women advocated peace and cooperation but at times disagreed strongly over social and economic issues, such as racial segregation in the United States and mandatory labor in the Soviet Union. At first both governments saw no risk in the communications, as women were presumed to have little influence and no knowledge of state secrets, but eventually Cold War paranoia set in. Amid the Red Scare, the House Un-American Activities Committee even accused some of the American women of being communist agents.

A rare and poignant tale, Dear Unknown Friend offers a glimpse of the Cold War through the perspectives of women who tried to move beyond the label of “enemy” and understand, even befriend, people across increasingly bitter political divides.

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The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City
Latin America in the Cold War
Jean Franco
Harvard University Press, 2002

The cultural Cold War in Latin America was waged as a war of values--artistic freedom versus communitarianism, Western values versus national cultures, the autonomy of art versus a commitment to liberation struggles--and at a time when the prestige of literature had never been higher. The projects of the historic avant-garde were revitalized by an anti-capitalist ethos and envisaged as the opposite of the republican state. The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City charts the conflicting universals of this period, the clash between avant-garde and political vanguard. This was also a twilight of literature at the threshold of the great cultural revolution of the seventies and eighties, a revolution to which the Cold War indirectly contributed. In the eighties, civil war and military rule, together with the rapid development of mass culture and communication empires, changed the political and cultural map.

A long-awaited work by an eminent Latin Americanist widely read throughout the world, this book will prove indispensable to anyone hoping to understand Latin American literature and society. Jean Franco guides the reader across minefields of cultural debate and histories of highly polarized struggle. Focusing on literary texts by García Marquez, Vargas Llosa, Roa Bastos, and Juan Carlos Onetti, conducting us through this contested history with the authority of an eyewitness, Franco gives us an engaging overview as involving as it is moving.

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Defending the American Way of Life
Sport, Culture, and the Cold War
Toby C. Rider
University of Arkansas Press, 2018
Winner, 2019 NASSH Book Award, Anthology.

The Cold War was fought in every corner of society, including in the sport and entertainment industries. Recognizing the importance of culture in the battle for hearts and minds, the United States, like the Soviet Union, attempted to win the favor of citizens in nonaligned states through the soft power of sport. Athletes became de facto ambassadors of US interests, their wins and losses serving as emblems of broader efforts to shield American culture—both at home and abroad—against communism.

In Defending the American Way of Life, leading sport historians present new perspectives on high-profile issues in this era of sport history alongside research drawn from previously untapped archival sources to highlight the ways that sports influenced and were influenced by Cold War politics. Surveying the significance of sports in Cold War America through lenses of race, gender, diplomacy, cultural infiltration, anti-communist hysteria, doping, state intervention, and more, this collection illustrates how this conflict remains relevant to US sporting institutions, organizations, and ideologies today.
 
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The Democratic Surround
Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties
Fred Turner
University of Chicago Press, 2013
We commonly think of the psychedelic sixties as an explosion of creative energy and freedom that arose in direct revolt against the social restraint and authoritarian hierarchy of the early Cold War years. Yet, as Fred Turner reveals in The Democratic Surround, the decades that brought us the Korean War and communist witch hunts also witnessed an extraordinary turn toward explicitly democratic, open, and inclusive ideas of communication and with them new, flexible models of social order. Surprisingly, he shows that it was this turn that brought us the revolutionary multimedia and wild-eyed individualism of the 1960s counterculture.

In this prequel to his celebrated book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Turner rewrites the history of postwar America, showing how in the 1940s and ’50s American liberalism offered a far more radical social vision than we now remember. Turner tracks the influential mid-century entwining of Bauhaus aesthetics with American social science and psychology. From the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the New Bauhaus in Chicago and Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Turner shows how some of the most well-known artists and intellectuals of the forties developed new models of media, new theories of interpersonal and international collaboration, and new visions of an open, tolerant, and democratic self in direct contrast to the repression and conformity associated with the fascist and communist movements. He then shows how their work shaped some of the most significant media events of the Cold War, including Edward Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition, the multimedia performances of John Cage, and, ultimately, the psychedelic Be-Ins of the sixties. Turner demonstrates that by the end of the 1950s this vision of the democratic self and the media built to promote it would actually become part of the mainstream, even shaping American propaganda efforts in Europe.

Overturning common misconceptions of these transformational years, The Democratic Surround shows just how much the artistic and social radicalism of the sixties owed to the liberal ideals of Cold War America, a democratic vision that still underlies our hopes for digital media today.

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Detroit's Cold War
The Origins of Postwar Conservatism
Colleen Doody
University of Illinois Press, 2017
Detroit's Cold War locates the roots of American conservatism in a city that was a nexus of labor and industry in postwar America. Drawing on meticulous archival research focusing on Detroit, Colleen Doody shows how conflict over business values and opposition to labor, anticommunism, racial animosity, and religion led to the development of a conservative ethos in the aftermath of World War II.
 
Using Detroit--with its large population of African-American and Catholic immigrant workers, strong union presence, and starkly segregated urban landscape--as a case study, Doody articulates a nuanced understanding of anticommunism during the Red Scare. Looking beyond national politics, she focuses on key debates occurring at the local level among a wide variety of common citizens. In examining this city's social and political fabric, Doody illustrates that domestic anticommunism was a cohesive, multifaceted ideology that arose less from Soviet ideological incursion than from tensions within the American public.
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The Dictator Dilemma
The United States and Paraguay in the Cold War
Kirk Tyvela
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019
The Dictator Dilemmatells the story of US bilateral relations with the Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship (1954–1989). Tyvela focuses on how and why that diplomatic relationship changed during the Cold War from cooperation, based on mutual opposition to communism, to conflict, based on clashing expectations concerning democratic reforms and human rights. The policy debates by officials in Washington and in Asunción brought out a tension that has defined US diplomacy for more than a century: how can the United States partner with tyrants while credibly proclaiming to advance a democratic mission in the world? Tyvela argues that the Stroessner regime was symbolic of a broader foreign policy struggle to perpetuate, enforce, and ultimately redefine the importance of friendly dictators to US global and hemispheric interests.
 
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Discipline and Indulgence
College Football, Media, and the American Way of Life during the Cold War
Montez de Oca, Jeffrey
Rutgers University Press, 2013
Winner of the 2014 North American Society for the Sociology of Sport (NASSS) Outstanding Book Award

The early Cold War (1947–1964) was a time of optimism in America. Flushed with confidence by the Second World War, many heralded the American Century and saw postwar affluence as proof that capitalism would solve want and poverty. Yet this period also filled people with anxiety. Beyond the specter of nuclear annihilation, the consumerism and affluence of capitalism’s success were seen as turning the sons of pioneers into couch potatoes.

In Discipline and Indulgence, Jeffrey Montez de Oca demonstrates how popular culture, especially college football, addressed capitalism’s contradictions by integrating men into the economy of the Cold War as workers, warriors, and consumers. In the dawning television age, college football provided a ritual and spectacle of the American way of life that anyone could participate in from the comfort of his own home. College football formed an ethical space of patriotic pageantry where men could produce themselves as citizens of the Cold War state. Based on a theoretically sophisticated analysis of Cold War media, Discipline and Indulgence assesses the period’s institutional linkage of sport, higher education, media, and militarism and finds the connections of contemporary sport media to today’s War on Terror.
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Divided Dreamworlds?
The Cultural Cold War in East and West
Edited by Peter Romijn, Giles Scott-Smith, and Joes Segal
Amsterdam University Press, 2012
While the divide between capitalism and communism, embodied in the image of the Iron Curtain, seemed to be as wide and definitive as any cultural rift, Giles Scott-Smith, Joes Segal, and Peter Romijn have compiled a selection of essays on how culture contributed to the blurring of ideological boundaries between the East and the West. This important and diverse volume presents fascinating insights into the tensions, rivalries, and occasional cooperation between the two blocs, with essays that represent the cutting edge of Cold War Studies and analyze aesthetic preferences and cultural phenomena as various as interior design in East and West Germany; the Soviet stance on genetics; US cultural diplomacy during and after the Cold War; and the role of popular music as the universal cultural ambassador.
An illuminating and wide-ranging survey of interrelated collective dreams from both sides of the Iron Curtain, Divided Dreamworlds? has a place on the bookshelf of any modern historian.
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Don't Act, Just Dance
The Metapolitics of Cold War Culture
Catherine Gunther Kodat
Rutgers University Press, 2014
At some point in their career, nearly all the dancers who worked with George Balanchine were told “don’t act, dear; just dance.” The dancers understood this as a warning against melodramatic over-interpretation and an assurance that they had all the tools they needed to do justice to the steps—but its implication that to dance is already to act in a manner both complete and sufficient resonates beyond stage and studio. 

Drawing on fresh archival material, Don’t Act, Just Dance places dance at the center of the story of the relationship between Cold War art and politics. Catherine Gunther Kodat takes Balanchine’s catch phrase as an invitation to explore the politics of Cold War culture—in particular, to examine the assumptions underlying the role of “apolitical” modernism in U.S. cultural diplomacy. Through close, theoretically informed readings of selected important works—Marianne Moore’s “Combat Cultural,” dances by George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, and Yuri Grigorovich, Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, and John Adams’s Nixon in China—Kodat questions several commonly-held beliefs about the purpose and meaning of modernist cultural productions during the Cold War. 

Rather than read the dance through a received understanding of Cold War culture, Don’t Act, Just Dance reads Cold War culture through the dance, and in doing so establishes a new understanding of the politics of modernism in the arts of the period. 
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