Cold War Crucible

Masuda Hajimu

ISBN 10: 0674598474 / ISBN 13: 9780674598478

Published by HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Feb 2015, 2015

About this Item

Neuware - After World War II, the major powers faced social upheaval at home and anticolonial wars around the globe. Alarmed by conflict in Korea that could change U.S.¿Soviet relations from chilly to nuclear, ordinary people and policymakers created a fantasy of a bipolar Cold War world in which global and domestic order was paramount, Masuda Hajimu shows.

Seller Inventory # 9780674598478

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Cold War Crucible
• Publisher: HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Feb 2015
• Publication Date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674598474
• ISBN 13: 9780674598478
• Binding: Buch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 241W x 165H x 30D millimeters 241 millimeters width by 165 millimeters height by 30 millimeters depth
• Weight: 726 grams

About this title

Synopsis

What was the Cold War? A simple definition might be: a 20th century international confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States, which involved, first, Europe, and then Asia, Africa, and Latin America, eventually dividing the world into two camps. The key players in this global conflict are generally identified as a number of high-ranking policymakers, including Harry S. Truman, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin. We know this story. However, the full story is not so simple. It is time to change our ways of thinking about the Cold War.

Masuda Hajimu's Cold War Crucible is an inquiry into this peculiar nature of the Cold War. It examines not only centers of policymaking, but seeming aftereffects of Cold War politics during the Korean War: Suppression of counterrevolutionaries in China, the White Terror in Taiwan, the Red Purge in Japan, and McCarthyism in the United States. Such purges were not merely end results of the Cold War, Masuda argues, but forces that brought the Cold War into being, as ordinary people throughout the world strove to silence disagreements and restore social order in the chaotic post-WWII era under the mantle of an imagined global confrontation. Revealing social functions and popular participation, Cold War Crucible highlights ordinary people's roles in making and maintaining the "reality" of the Cold War, raising the question of what the Cold War really was.

About the Author

Masuda Hajimu is Associate Professor of History at the National University of Singapore (NUS).