The past is never dead. It's not even past
In this accessible and remarkably balanced synthesis, Melvyn Leffler, one of the most distinguished and prominent historians of American foreign relations, offers a refreshing interpretation of Cold War policymaking from the vantage points of both Washington and Moscow.
On September 26, 1983, satellites notified a Soviet watch station south of Moscow of inbound U.S. missiles. Stanislav Petrov, the officer on duty, had ten minutes to determine whether to launch a counterattack.
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.
Fredric Jameson has a new book—his last. Published posthumously in 2024, only a few months after his passing, it offers an idiosyncratic philosophical journey through his own deeply personal engagement with French theory. Just as he has done since 1985 as a Professor at Duke University, in this work Jameson takes the time to reflect […]
It’s a three-hour, ultra-big-screen, deeply-researched box office mega-hit about… J. Robert Oppenheimer, project manager. Leslie Groves, the manager’s manager. Kitty Oppenheimer, the manager’s kids’ manager. Lewis Strauss, the wanna-be manager. Harry Truman, the buck-stops-here manager. James Byrnes, President Truman’s manager. The scientists of the Manhattan Project were thoroughly unmanageable. The bomb? It was everybody’s fault, […]
Guest Dr. Melvyn P. Leffler is the Edward Stettinius Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Virginia. He is one of the leading historians of U.S. foreign policy. Professor Leffler is the author of numerous prize-winning books, including: A Preponderance of Power: National Security, The Truman Administration, and the Cold War; For the Soul […]
From the editors: Historical scholarship is underpinned by rigorous investigation of sources and archives. But historians can also leverage their knowledge of the past to think critically about the present. Jeremi Suri, the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, exemplifies this practice. In October, Dr. […]
My favorite director made a movie about my PhD dissertation topic 70 years before I wrote about it. The problem was that I didn’t find out about it until I was several years into my alt-ac career. Discovering the movie was the catalyst I needed to write a book I never thought I’d write. OK, […]
On 24 February, 2022, Russia shocked the world by dramatically escalating its longstanding war with Ukraine. Since then, numerous experts—including students, faculty, and alumni of the University of Texas at Austin—have performed a vital public service by commenting directly on the Ukraine crisis, unpacking its complicated origins and exposing its devastating impact. Inspired by their […]
History professors often look for ways to use the past to inform present debates. With long-past events, that sometimes requires some acrobatic leaps over centuries or millennia, but in my own courses on violence in American history, the connections are often pretty obvious. Every day, a stream of new or ongoing violent events invite historical […]