Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York by Samuel Zipp (2010)
In the 1970s the United Nations complex and the public housing projects of East Harlem projected two disparate images of New York City. If the UN displayed the city’s position as a global capital of culture, politics, and economics, the deteriorating housing projects showed the city’s struggles with overcrowding, high crime rates, and poverty.
The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War by Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko (2008)
Any work of history that attributes the start of the Cold War to a single factor will surely invite criticism, but Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko’s The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War makes a compelling case for running that risk.
Latin America’s Cold War by Hal Brands (2010)
In this new book, covering the entire period of the Cold War in Latin America, Hal Brands restores agency and initiative to Latin American actors, in the process demolishing many of the platitudes that have governed much of the U.S.foreign policy literature.image Based on prodigious research in a dizzying array of U.S., Latin American, and even East German archives, Brands’s work advances a trenchant interpretation that cannot be ignored.
Historical Perspectives on Isao Takahata’s Grave of Fireflies
Episode 40: Developing the Amazon
Seth Garfield on the Brazilian Amazon
During World War II, the governments of Brazil and the United States made an unprecedented level of joint investment in the economy and infrastructure of the Amazon region. The dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas (1937-45) trumpeted the colonization and development of the Amazon (christened the “March to the West”) as a nationalist imperative to defend a sparsely settled frontier covering some sixty percent of Brazilian territory.
Stirring the Hornet’s Nest: How the USS Hornet CV-8 Paved the Way to Victory at Midway
When the United States entered World War II in 1942, the Japanese fleet, led by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, dominated the Pacific.
Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte (1944)
Hannah Adams: Historian of American Jews
After World War II, American Jewish history emerged as a significant field of study. Historian Hasia Diner has argued that the subfield actually began to emerge as early 1892, but if we consider pioneering texts about Jews composed by American writers during the nineteenth century, the work of Hannah Adams suggests that it began far earlier.