The past is never dead. It's not even past
Hailed as a pioneer of conservatism by some and reviled as an enemy of the middle class and a supporter of dictators by others, Reagan’s legacy has largely been shaped by debate between partisan pundits. Gradually, however, a limited body of more moderate of “Reagan revisionism” has begun to emerge.
Henry Wallace, according to Oliver Stone’s Showtime series, Untold History of the United States, was a true American hero, a lover of peace, and a gentle soul whose leadership could have saved the world from the Cold War. While no one has ever accused Stone of historical accuracy, his past work did not lay claim to documentary status. So how well does Stone’s interpretation comport with the historical record?
What might a future national monument to the Iraq war look like? This month marks 10 years since that conflict began on March 20, 2003. From a decade on, we can only begin to see how future historians and future generations will interpret the war and what questions they will ask. For now, Americans seem inclined to put it behind them.
Before John Dower's Embracing Defeat, many English-language accounts of the United States’ occupation of Japan contextualized the event in terms of American foreign policy and the emerging Cold War. Scholars writing from this Western-centric perspective produced much fine scholarship, and no doubt will continue to do so.
James Mann provides a lively and comprehensive study of the advisers who would guide George W. Bush as he sought to make the world safer for U.S. Mann argues that Bush’s inexperience led him to rely on—as well as greatly empower—a cohort including some of the most experienced and respected members of the conservative foreign policy making community.
A specter is haunting Europe (also the United States and, really, much of the globe)—the specter of a new Cold War. In recent years columnists have been invoking the memory of the global ideological conflict that governed much of the violence and geopolitics of the twentieth-century.
Before 1948, the Cold War was largely confined to Europe and the Middle East, areas that both U.S. and Soviet leaders considered vital to their nations’ core foreign policy objectives after the Second World War. By 1950, however, the Cold War had spread to Asia.
Universities received large amounts of government funding for scientific research during World War II and the early Cold War. Such assistance allowed the University of Texas’s McDonald Observatory to pursue an ambitious research agenda in the field of astronomy
