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Confronting America: The Cold War between the United States and the Communists in France and Italy

The Sandinista Revolution and its victory against the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua gripped the United States and the world in the 1980s. But as soon as the Sandinistas were voted out of power in 1990 and the Iran Contra affair ceased to make headlines, it became, in Washington at least, a thing of the past.Mateo Jarquin recenters the revolution as a major episode in the history of Latin America, the international left, and the Cold War. Drawing on research in Nicaragua, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, and Costa Rica, he recreates the perspective of Sandinista leaders in Managua and argues that their revolutionary project must be understood in international context. Because struggles over the Revolution unfolded transnationally, the Nicaraguan drama had lasting consequences for Latin American politics at a critical juncture. It also reverberated in Western Europe, among socialists worldwide, and beyond, illuminating global dynamics like the spread of democracy and the demise of a bipolar world dominated by two superpowers.Jarquin offers a sweeping analysis of the last left-wing revolution of the twentieth century, an overview of inter-American affairs in the 1980s, and an incisive look at the making of the post-Cold War order.

Providing new insight on the intellectual and cultural dimensions of the Cold War, Michael Latham reveals how social science theory helped shape American foreign policy during the Kennedy administration. He shows how, in the midst of America's protracted struggle to contain communism in the developing world, the concept of global modernization moved beyond its beginnings in academia to become a motivating ideology behind policy decisions.After tracing the rise of modernization theory in American social science, Latham analyzes the way its core assumptions influenced the Kennedy administration's Alliance for Progress with Latin America, the creation of the Peace Corps, and the strategic hamlet program in Vietnam. But as he demonstrates, modernizers went beyond insisting on the relevance of America's experience to the dilemmas faced by impoverished countries. Seeking to accelerate the movement of foreign societies toward a liberal, democratic, and capitalist modernity, Kennedy and his advisers also reiterated a much deeper sense of their own nation's vital strengths and essential benevolence. At the height of the Cold War, Latham argues, modernization recast older ideologies of Manifest Destiny and imperialism.

Why did the Soviet economy suddenly collapse in the late 1980s, only a few years after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power? In this groundbreaking study, Chris Miller shows that although Gorbachev and his allies sought to learn from China's economic reforms under Deng Xiaoping, their efforts to revitalize Soviet socialism proved much less successful.

The surprise Chinese invasion of Vietnam in 1979 shocked the international community. In this groundbreaking book, Xiaoming Zhang traces the roots of the conflict to the historic relationship between the peoples of China and Vietnam, the ongoing Sino-Soviet dispute, and Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping's desire to modernize his country.

Concentrating on the formative years of the Cold War from 1943 to 1957, Patryk Babiracki reveals little-known Soviet efforts to build a postwar East European empire through culture. Babiracki argues that the Soviets involved in foreign cultural outreach used "soft power" in order to galvanize broad support for the postwar order in the emerging Soviet bloc.

Empowering Revolution: America, Poland, and the End of the Cold War

Sino-Soviet Alliance: An International History

During the final fifteen years of the Cold War, southern Africa underwent a period of upheaval, with dramatic twists and turns in relations between the superpowers. Piero Gleijeses uses archival sources, particularly from the United States, South Africa, and the closed Cuban archives, to provide an unprecedented international history of this important theater of the late Cold War.

Argues that Western interpretations of the Cold War have erred by exaggerating either the Kremlin's pragmatism or its aggressiveness. Explaining the interests, aspirations, illusions, fears, and misperceptions of the Kremlin leaders and Soviet elites, this book covers the Cold War from the Soviet side.

This comprehensive study of China's Cold War experience reveals the crucial role Beijing played in shaping the orientation of the global Cold War and the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. It is based on sources that include recently declassified Chinese documents.

The United States installs a leader in a South American country in the massive US covert intervention in British Guiana between 1953 and 1969. Considering race, gender, religion, and ethnicity along with traditional approaches to diplomatic history, this is an analysis of this Cold War tragedy.

Employing a range of Egyptian, British and American archival sources, this is an account of Eisenhower's efforts to counter President Nasser's appeal throughout the Arab Middle East. It shows how the Eisenhower Doctrine had the unspoken mission of containing Nasser's radical Arab nationalism.

In the quarter century after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Beijing assisted Vietnam in its struggle against France and the USA. This book examines China's conduct towards Vietnam, providing important insights into Mao Zedong's foreign policy and the motives behind it.

Argues that the battle for Chile that ended in 1973 with a right-wing military coup and a brutal dictatorship lasting nearly twenty years was part of a dynamic inter-American Cold War struggle to determine Latin America's future, shaped more by the contest between Cuba, Chile, the United States, and Brazil than by a conflict between Moscow and Washington.

South Koreans tailor American ideas about economic development and democracy. This study examines American nation building in South Korea during the Cold War. It explains why South Korea was one of the few postcolonial nations that achieved rapid economic development and democratization by the end of the twentieth century.

Historians of the Cold War, argues the author of this book, have too often overlooked the part that European nations played in shaping the post-World War II international system. In particular, he contends that France has been given short shrift.

Focusing on American travel in France after World War II, Cold War Holidays shows how both the U.S. and French governments actively cultivated and shaped leisure travel to advance their foreign policy agendas. Endy reveals how consumerism and globalization played a major role in transatlantic affairs.

Using newly available material from both sides of the Iron Curtain, William Glenn Gray explores West Germany's efforts to prevent international acceptance of East Germany as a legitimate state following World War II.

This text offers a comprehensive study detailing the collapse of Soviet control in Eastern Europe between 1968 and 1989, focusing especially on the pivotal Solidarity uprisings in Poland. It contains firsthand testimonies and some fresh archival findings.

Demonstrating the centrality of diplomacy in the Vietnam War, Pierre Asselin traces the secret negotiations that led up to the Paris Agreement of 1973, which ended America's involvement but failed to bring peace to Vietnam.

Explores the origins of the Cold War in Vietnam and postcolonial Vietnam's place in history. The author argues that the global discourse and practices of colonialism, race, modernism and postcolonial state-making were implicated in the dynamics of the Cold War in shaping US-Vietnamese relations.

Going behind the scenes of Cold War Germany during the era of detente, this text studies how East and West tried negotiation instead of confrontation to settle their differences. It reveals how the relationship between centre and periphery functioned in the Cold War Soviet empire.

In the late 1950s, against the unfolding backdrop of the Cold War, American and European leaders began working to reshape Western Europe. Focusing on the four largest Atlantic powers - Britain, France, Germany and the United States - Giauque explores these early stages of European integration.