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Among the buildings on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., only the Pan American Union (PAU) houses an international organization. The first of many anticipated “peace palaces”constructed in the early twentieth century, the PAU began with a mission of cultural diplomacy, and after World War II its Visual Arts Section became a leader in the burgeoning hemispheric arts scene, proclaiming Latin America’s entrée into the international community as it forged connections between a growing base of middle-class art consumers on one hand and concepts of supranational citizenship and political and economic liberalism on the other.

Making Art Panamerican situates the ambitious visual arts programs of the PAU within the broader context of hemispheric cultural relations during the cold war. Focusing on the institutional interactions among aesthetic movements, cultural policy, and viewing publics, Claire F. Fox contends that in the postwar years, the PAU Visual Arts Section emerged as a major transfer point of hemispheric American modernist movements and played an important role in the consolidation of Latin American art as a continental object of study.

As it traces the careers of individual cultural policymakers and artists who intersected with the PAU in the two postwar decades—such as Concha Romero James, Charles Seeger, José Gómez Sicre, José Luis Cuevas, and Rafael Squirru—the book also charts the trajectories and displacements of sectors of the U.S. and Latin American intellectual left during a tumultuous interval that spans the Mexican Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the New Deal, and the early cold war. Challenging the U.S. bias of conventional narratives about Panamericanism and the postwar shift in critical values from realism to abstraction, Making Art Panamerican illuminates the institutional dynamics that helped shape aesthetic movements in the critical decades following World War II.

The late historian Marilyn B. Young, a preeminent voice on the history of U.S. military conflict, spent her career reassessing the nature of American global power, its influence on domestic culture and politics, and the consequences felt by those on the receiving end of U.S. military force. At the center of her inquiries was a seeming paradox: How can the United States stay continually at war, yet Americans pay so little attention to this militarism?

Making the Forever War brings Young's articles and essays on American war together for the first time, including never before published works. Moving from the first years of the Cold War to Korea, Vietnam, and more recent "forever" wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Young reveals the ways in which war became ever-present, yet more covert and abstract, particularly as aerial bombings and faceless drone strikes have attained greater strategic value. For Young, U.S. empire persisted because of, not despite, the inattention of most Americans. The collection concludes with an afterword by prominent military historian Andrew Bacevich.

In the Cold War era, media became a central force in the shaping of political life, cultural exchange, and ideas of global order. A rivalry between political systems expanded into a worldwide struggle over who could shape information, control communication infrastructures, and define reality.

Arvind Rajagopal and Rossen Djagalov present essays on the uses of Cold War media. Focusing on the Global South, the contributors illuminate how postcolonial nations and others defied superpower pressure to use media for nation-building and international cooperation. At the same time, communication infrastructures linked global regions in unequal ways that often reinforced the power of the United States. Throughout, the essays show how Cold War media practices like secrecy, propaganda, and cultural diplomacy cemented patterns that still influence global communication systems and international politics today.

Cutting-edge and timely, Media and the Global Cold War reveals the workings of media beyond the superpower rivalry.

In 1951 Gaines Post was a gangly, bespectacled, introspective teenager preparing to spend a year in Paris with his professorial father and older brother; his mother, who suffered from extreme depression, had been absent from the family for some time. Ten years later, now less gangly but no less introspective, he was finishing a two-year stint in the army in West Germany and heading toward Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, having narrowly escaped combat in the Berlin crisis of 1961. His quietly intense coming-of-age story is both self-revealing and reflective of an entire generation of young men who came to adulthood before the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War.

Post's experiences in high school in Madison, Wisconsin, and Paris, his Camus-influenced undergraduate years at Cornell University, and his army service in Germany are set very effectively against the events of the Cold War. McCarthyism and American crackdowns on dissidents, American foreign and military policy in Western Europe in the nuclear age, French and German life and culture, crises in Paris and Berlin that nearly bring the West to war and the Post family to dissolution—these are the larger scenes and subjects of his self-disclosure as a contemplative, conflicted "Cold War agnostic."

His intelligent, talented mother and her fragile health hover over Post's narrative, informing his hesitant relationships with women and his acutely questioning sense of self-worth. His story is strongly academic and historical as well as political and military; his perceptions and judgments lean toward no ideological extreme but remain true to the heroic ideals of his boyhood during the Second World War.

For hundreds of years military intervention was considered taboo and prohibited by international law. Since 1992, intervention has often been described as an international responsibility and efforts have been made to give it legal justification. This represents an extraordinary change in perceptions, and one that has taken place in only the space of a decade.

Military Intervention After the Cold War explores how and why this change took place, looking at how both ideas and actions changed in the post-Cold War period to make military intervention a tool of international security and a defining characteristic of the international system. Although it is often touted as a strategy to rebuild collapsed states, the examples of success are few and far between. Andrea Kathryn Talentino argues that standards of human rights and responsible governance have become part of the definition of international security. She addresses questions that are vital in the post-9/11 world, where weak and collapsed states are recognized as permissive and at times supportive environments for criminal actors.

The specter of terrorism has placed even greater emphasis on the need to understand why military intervention happens and how it could be more effective. With the news full of stories on intervention and nation-building, scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, and readers interested in understanding global interdependence will find Military Intervention After the Cold War an indispensable book.Andrea Kathryn Talentino is an assistant professor of international relations at Tulane University, New Orleans.The author of numerous articles on military intervention and post- conflict rebuilding, she is currently focusing on the link between nation-building and political violence.

As Katherine Verdery observes, "There's nothing like reading your secret police file to make you wonder who you really are." In 1973 Verdery began her doctoral fieldwork in the Transylvanian region of Romania, ruled at the time by communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. She returned several times over the next twenty-five years, during which time the secret police—the Securitate—compiled a massive surveillance file on her. Reading through its 2,781 pages, she learned that she was "actually" a spy, a CIA agent, a Hungarian agitator, and a friend of dissidents: in short, an enemy of Romania. In My Life as a Spy she analyzes her file alongside her original field notes and conversations with Securitate officers. Verdery also talks with some of the informers who were close friends, learning the complex circumstances that led them to report on her, and considers how fieldwork and spying can be easily confused. Part memoir, part detective story, part anthropological analysis, My Life as a Spy offers a personal account of how government surveillance worked during the Cold War and how Verdery experienced living under it.