Essay Reviews and Presentations:    Each of you will be responsible for preparing a total of four Essay Reviews (of roughly 4-5 pages in length) on important Cold War topics. Each week, on the Sunday preceding the Tuesday class, two of you will post essays on the Entire Class Discussion Group.    You will also be responsible for making brief oral presentations based on your essays.   An outline or your presentation should be posted to the Entire Class Discussion Group before class on Tuesday and xeroxed for (hard copy) distribution to the class when you make your presentation.

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Assignment One	Assignment Two	Assignment Three	Assignment Four
Assignment Five	Project One	Assignment Six	Assignment Seven
Assignment Eight	Assignment Nine	Assignment Ten	Project Two

Tuesday, September 5: Assignment One: The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War

Essay One: Read Michael J. Hogan (ed.), Hiroshima In History and Memory (1996), focusing especially on the essays by Walker (2), Bernstein, & Bix, supplemented by the final chapter of Richard Frank, Downfall (1999).

Essay Two: Read Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Englehardt, History Wars (1996), and write an essay on the Enola Gay controversy at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.
 

Tuesday, September 12: Assignment Two:  The United States, The USSR and the Origins of the Cold War in Europe

Michael J. Hogan (ed.), America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941 (1995), 1-155.
John Lewis Gaddis, "The Tragedy of Diplomatic History," Diplomatic History (Winter, 1993), 1-16. (A version of this article, Gaddis' presidential address to the Society for the History of American Foreign Relations, also appears in Foreign Affairs (January/February 1994) and is available through the Library's Periodical Abstracts Database.  See also Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (1997), as well as the many reviews that greeted its publication.
Anna Nelson, "Illuminating the Twilight Struggle: New Interpretations of the Cold War" (Chronicle of Higher Education (June 25, 1999)
Mark Trachtenberg, "Making Grand Strategy: The Early Cold War Experience in Retrospect," SAIS Review (Winter-Spring, 1999), available via Project Muse.

Essays One & Two:  Prepare an essay on the current state of historical scholarship on the early Cold War.  Include a brief description of the evolution of Cold War scholarship (from "orthodox" to "revisionist" to "post revisionist"), but be aware of the limitations of these broad categories.

Tuesday, September 19: Assignment Three:  The Origins of the Cold War In Asia: China, Korea

Essay One: Write a brief essay on the United States response to the Chinese Revolution from the early 1940s (during W.W.II) until the spring of 1950 (just before the Korean War) in which you evaluate arguments for and against the notion that there was a "lost chance" for better relations with the new Chinese regime had the United States pursued policies different than it did.

Essay Two:  Write a brief essay on the Korean War in which you focus on the degree to which the Korean War was the product of a) a civil war among Koreans themselves (see especially the work of Bruce Cummings); or b) a new chapter in the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and/or The People's Republic of China.

Tuesday, September 26: Assignment Four: Cold War Politics

Essay One:  Origins of McCarthyism in which you assess the role played by a) the Cold War; b) the Republican right; c) the Truman Administration and Democratic liberals; and d) American's generally.

Essay Two:  Prepare a brief essay on what I call "McCarthy revisionism"  --  the discovery of new evidence in U.S. and Soviet files on Soviet espionage that has led some historians to revive the idea that the American Communist Party was not a political party but a conspiracy; thus justifying the Party's repression during the Truman and Eisenhower years, if not the extreme positions taken by McCarthy himself.

Tuesday, October 3:  Assignment Five: Cold War Culture  

Essays One-Three:  Read the review essay by Griffith, The Cultural Turn in Cold War Studies.  Then read and prepare a review of at least one of the books listed in the essay's footnotes.  Be sure to place your review in a broad perspective.
 

Tuesday, October 10: Fall Break
 

Tuesday, October 17:  Assignment Six/Project I

The Graduate Student Project:  The graduate students will prepare a new, Guide to Cold War Resources page.  Each of you will take one of the categories of links on the current page: 1) atomic bomb; 2) origins of the cold war;  3) the cold war in Asia (possibly expanded to include other "third world" issues, excluding Latin America and Vietnam); 4) cold war politics and 5) cold war culture.  At the individual level, your task will be to test existing links, to discover new links, and to write better and more complete annotations for both new and existing links.  At the group level, you will share links (e.g., you may come across links that may be relevant to someone else's topic), read and revise one another's annotations, discuss what to link and what not to link (e.g., if you link to a large, "meta-site" that contains many other links, do you or do you not create any links to that material), and -- most importantly -- create a uniform "look" and feel for the final product.  For a general discussion of Cold War resources, see the draft of my article, Un-Tangling the Web of Cold War Studies.

Tuesday, October 24:   Presentation and Discussion of Class Projects (I)
 

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Tuesday, October 31:  Assignment Seven:  The Cold War In Latin America

Essay One:  Prepare an review essay on the U.S. role in Latin America, focusing on Guatemala.

Essay Two:  Prepare an review essay on the U.S. role in Latin America, focusing on Cuba.

Tuesday, November 7:  Assignment Eight:  The United States and Vietnam

Beginning in February, 2000, the H-Diplo List has featured a series of "round tables" on important new books on Vietnam.  These works include: Frederik Logevall, Choosing War; David Kaiser, American Tragedy; Jeffrey Kimball on Nixon's Vietnam War, as well as Robert McNamarra's new book, Argument Without End.  Each of you will select one of these books.  You will read both the book and the debate among historians regarding its merits.  You will then prepare an essay review which summarizes the book as well as its reception.  There will be a panel discussion in class: each of you will make a brief, 5-10 minute presentation, followed by a general Q&A session.

Tuesday, November 14: Assignment Nine:  The Cold War Revival

Essay one:  Prepare an essay review on the "Cold War revival" of the 1980s, focusing on one or more of the following topics: 1) United States policy in Central America; 2) U.S. relations with Iran (including Iran-Contra); 3)  Star Wars; 4) The revival of "patriotic" and cold war rhetoric by Ronald Reagan and other conservatives; 5) "Culture Wars," including debates over the meaning of Vietnam, the 1960s, and the Enola Gay controversy.
Essay two:  Prepare an essay evaluating the claim that the cold war revival led directly to the fall of the Soviet Union (and, thus, to the conclusion that as a result of these policies the U.S. "won" the Cold War).
 

Tuesday, November 21: Assignment Ten:  From Cold War to New World Order

Readings:
Benjamin R. Barber, "Jihad vs. McWorld," The Atlantic Monthly (March, 1992), 53-63.  Available via the Library's Periodical Abstracts Database.
Andrew J Bacevich, "Policing Utopia: The military imperatives of globalization," The National Interest (Summer 1999).  Available via the Periodical Abstracts Database.
Alan Tonelson, "Globalization - The Great Non-Debate," Current History (November, 1997). Available via the Periodical Abstracts Database.
Frederick Buell, "Nationalist Postnationalism: Globalist Discourse in Contemporary American Culture," American Quarterly (1998), 548-591. Available via Project Muse Database.
For additional readings, see Readings on Globalization.  See also,  Guide to Cold War Web Resources (New World Order).



Essays:  Prepare a brief essay comparing and contrasting the Cold War years with the "New Global Era."   In writing your essay, you may wish to focus on one of the following themes:  1) how the U.S. employs armed force abroad; 2) whether or not the world is safer following the Cold War; 3) whether or not the world is better off following the Cold War; 4) whether or not America is an "empire"; 5) whether or not national governments (including the U.S.) are becoming less significant.

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Thanksgiving     
 

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Tuesday, November 28:  Workshop on Class Projects Two
 

The Graduate Student Project:  As during the first half of the class, the graduate students will continue the work of expanding and revising the  Guide to Cold War Resources page.
 

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An Essay Review should usually include the following:

1.  Title of Your Essay
2.  Your name
3.  Bibliographical Citation: Author, Title, Place of publication, publisher, date of publication, etc.
4.  An opening paragraph that establishes the historical context and identifies the issue or issues that the work(s) under review raise (and which you will be addressing in your essay).
5.  Your first mention of the author(s) should include a brief biographical note.  e.g.,   John Smith, who is Huckleberry Hound Professor of American History at Podunk University, has written extensively on the history of.....bla,bla,bla.

6.  The heart of your presentation should be a brief summary of the book's contents and the main issues it raises.  Where appropriate indicate how successfully the author develops the issues under review.

7.  A brief discussion of where this book fits into the historiography of the issue.  To do this well will usually require that you read additional materials, including reviews of the work in question.  Project Muse, JSTOR and Periodical Abstracts are especially good resources, as is (of course) Bender Library.

8.  Suggestions for Additional Reading on the Topic.