Historical museums attract millions of visitors each year (or at least did until the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 severely affected operations). At a time when the reading of books has fallen out of favor with young people, museums play an outsize role in shaping popular perceptions of the past. The public role of museums also makes them relevant for conflicting political agendas that spark vocal controversies

Some of the recent literature on negotiations at the end of the Cold War regarding German reunification and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has deflected attention from an important policy problem that arose during subsequent deliberations about whether to enlarge the membership of NATO. Newly released U.S. and Russian archival materials highlight this problem very clearly, namely, how

This article examines the transnational ties between the Italian revolutionary left and Palestinian militants from the mid-1960s through the early 1980s. Some observers have cited these connections to explain the magnitude of Italian terrorism in the 1970s and early 1980s. However, in the absence of empirical research, the issue has remained murky. The archival sources and detailed interviews with

This is the second of two articles exploring efforts at bridging the nuclear weapons gap between France and West Germany during the final decade of the Cold War. This gap existed in various ways: in the two countries’ respective international standing, with the relationship between Paris and Bonn complicated by France's possession of nuclear weapons; in their alliance choices, with their differing

This article explores efforts at bridging the nuclear gap between France and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) during the last decade of the Cold War. It does so by examining the various manifestations of this gap: the two sides’ relative international standing in light of France's possession of nuclear weapons and the FRG's decision to forswear them; the two countries’ different commitments to

Did the Cold War of the 1980s nearly turn hot? Much has been made of the November 1983 Able Archer 83 command-post exercise, which is often described as having nearly precipitated a nuclear war when paranoid Warsaw Pact policymakers suspected that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was using the exercise to launch a preemptive nuclear strike. This article challenges that narrative, using

he provides interesting vignettes, but unfortunately a great deal that is of interest is not examined in detail. Shalikashvili had experience both in command and in Washington, DC. Both types of tours require distinct competencies and styles. A much deeper look at how Shalikashvili operated in both environments would have strengthened the book. It also seems odd that Joan Shalikashvili, married to

Much more so than previous works in the field of U.S. foreign relations, this article explores the relationship between the Helsinki Accords and peace activism in the United States. The article explains how well-known groups such as U.S. Helsinki Watch and lesser-known ones such as Campaign for Peace and Democracy West/East used the Helsinki Final Act when they challenged U.S. peace activists to defend

This article examines the official U.S. reaction to the Soviet government's use of force in the Baltic republics in January 1991, not only showing the complexity of the U.S. position but also demonstrating how reactions in Washington became harsher in the space of a week, eroding the previous “Gorbachev first” attitude. The article identifies the main reasons for this shift, especially West European

In the aftermath of India's first nuclear explosion in 1974, U.S. officials concluded that Brazil posed a growing proliferation risk, and they proposed to target Brazil with a new set of nonproliferation policies that included the denial of fuel-cycle technologies. However, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger expressed doubt that such an approach would curb Brazilian nuclear ambitions. Pushing back

Konrad Adenauer's government in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) engaged in a large-scale media campaign to create political consent for the FRG's integration into the West, a policy that rested to a large extent on rearmament and entry into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. To counter public criticism of rearmament, the West German authorities used Mobilwerbung, a company that maintained

Regardless of whether Captain America stands as the embodiment of his country in its aspirations toward material and symbolic grandeur, each of the periods addressed by Stevens provides elements of reflection concerning the other striking feature of the character: his masculinity, envisaged as “a social construct,” and its endangerment (pp. 198–202). In this respect, perhaps one of the only faults

Historiographic literature on the Second World War in Croatia has focused on the atrocities perpetrated against Jews, Serbs, and Roma by the Axis Powers and their local collaborators—the Ustaše, both Croats and Muslims, and the Volksdeutsche, Yugoslav citizens of German ancestry. The Četniks, a remnant of the Royal Serbian army, primarily hunted the Jews. Historians as well as survivors were eager

Editor’s Note: This forum brings together six experts on Soviet policy toward the Third World to take part in forum about a book recently published in the Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series, The Soviet Union and the Horn of Africa during the Cold War, by Radoslav A. Yordanov. The commentators discuss the significance of the book’s topic, many specific episodes covered by Yordanov, and the book’s

striking color image of a female athlete, rearing back and ready to hurl a javelin, in a packed stadium with flags flying around the top. But it shows a Soviet athlete. The black-and-white rendering also accompanies Lindsay Parks Pieper’s article on gender and sport, where it fits perfectly, but it is an odd choice for the cover of a book titled Defending the American Way of Life. These complaints

origins of Soviet biological weapons research—developments that took place during and after World War II, including scientific and industrial achievements as well as a brief discussion connecting this history to post-Soviet Russian BW activities. Rimmington’s narrative merits a close reading, not least because of the large number of individuals involved, the various and changing names of Soviet research

Using materials from the Russian Foreign Ministry archive in Moscow (combined with previously obtained Brazilian and U.S. sources), this research note presents fresh evidence about Soviet-Brazilian relations and the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, supplementing a detailed, two-part article published in the Journal of Cold War Studies in 2004 exploring Brazil's secret mediation between John F. Kennedy

The origin of the Soviet biological warfare (BW) program was fear. With Stalin’s Secret Weapon, Anthony Rimmington casts a revealing light onto one of the Soviet Union’s most closely guarded secrets—the existence of a program (initially multiple efforts) to develop biological weapons and defenses against such weapons. Rimmington maintains that Soviet leaders’ interest in BW was a direct “response to

Amid the voluminous documentary record of the Alger Hiss case, one document is especially noteworthy: a short memorandum Hiss drafted during the Yalta conference in early 1945 setting forth “Arguments against Inclusion of Any of the Soviet Republics among Initial Members” of the proposed postwar United Nations (UN) organization. Drafted when the Soviet Union was pressing for UN membership for two or

attempt to cleanse the Ustaše past or at least to minimize its destructive impact. Israeli claims that Croatians are “denying or diminishing the fate of Serbians and Jews under the Ustasha [sic] rule, checked against overwhelming evidence . . . [shows an] intention to escape censure and condemnation, . . . and if Croatian deniers had lived in France [which has a law against Holocaust denial] ... they

In Red Globalization, Oscar Sanchez-Sibony offers a thoughtful and thoughtprovoking reinterpretation of Soviet history. Like other scholars in recent years, Sanchez-Sibony is interested in bringing the USSR into a broader global perspective. His approach is fittingly Soviet, with economics (specifically foreign trade) at the center of his historical analysis. The book’s subtitle suggests an exclusive

There has been much debate in recent years about the role of the East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi) in the disinformation campaign launched in the early 1980s by the Soviet State Security Committee (KGB) regarding the origin and nature of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). The KGB's operation, codenamed “Denver” by the Stasi (not “Infektion,” as many online sources now erroneously

This article shows how the United States and the Soviet Union competed technologically in northern Europe during the final decades of the Cold War. The article highlights the U.S. government's ability to enlist neutral countries, and even vulnerable neutral states like Finland, into Western technology embargoes against the Soviet Union. Yet, the Finnish case also demonstrates that determined small

After World War II, Soviet institutions organized many exhibitions of the American artist Rockwell Kent that bypassed the U.S. government. Promotion of Kent's work in the USSR was an exclusively Soviet enterprise. This article sheds new light on the Soviet approach to the representation of U.S. visual art during the Cold War. Drawing on U.S. and Russian archives, the article provides a comprehensive

The post-Cold War era has led to a proliferation of scholarship on U.S. policy toward four neutral European countries—Austria, Finland, Switzerland, and Sweden—during the Cold War. This article provides a survey of the latest literature on U.S. policy toward these four countries as well as general comments about the U.S. government's approach to European neutrality from 1945 to 1991.

A systematic analysis of formerly classified Soviet Politburo documents challenges popular misconceptions about the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. The archival evidence indicates that, far from being a near-complete and chaotic failure, the withdrawal was based on a coherent exit strategy that initially achieved its limited objectives. Moscow's strategy enabled Soviet-trained Afghan forces to

During the Cold War, young people in Eastern Europe were often seen as mere recipients and reproducers of Western popular culture. This article examines the role of musical programming in broadcasts by Radio Free Europe (RFE) to Czechoslovakia, focusing on the content, impact, and audience reactions. The article shows that the audience took an active part in the cultural exchange and helped shape the

Llewellyn Thompson was arguably the most influential figure who ever advised U.S. presidents about policy toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War, yet until 2018 no book-length biography of him had appeared. Fortunately, a stellar biography was published last year, and it is the subject of this book forum. Thompson's two daughters, Jenny and Sherry, wrote the book after carrying out extensive archival

Thomas Tunstall Allcock sets out to assess Lyndon Johnson’s policy toward Latin America by focusing on Thomas Mann, who was given responsibility for U.S. policy in the region as Johnson ascended to the White House in late 1963. Allcock argues that Johnson’s record in dealing with Latin America was “mixed” (p. 4), meaning better than that of most other Cold War presidents, and he says Mann was the reason

This article is the first in-depth study of Cuba's revolutionary news agency, Prensa Latina. Drawing on a wide variety of archival and published sources, including Cuban media and memoirs, declassified intelligence reports, U.S. State Department records, and newspaper articles from across Latin America, the article analyzes the agency's controversial creation, international reception, and significance

This article explores the impact of one of the key non-military events in the U.S. war in Vietnam, at least in the crucial years from 1964 to 1968. During a two-day U.S.–South Vietnamese conference held in Honolulu in early 1966, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk laid out a series of overarching strategic objectives, both military and political, that shaped the

This article explains how Latin American governments responded to the Cuban revolution and how the “Cuban question” played out in the inter-American system in the first five years of Fidel Castro's regime, from 1959 to 1964, when the Organization of American States imposed sanctions against the island. Drawing on recently declassified sources from Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Uruguay, and the United States

After Iosif Stalin's death in 1953, the Soviet Union emerged from its isolation and began to show an interest in traditionally marginalized foreign societies. As the example of the Chilean-Soviet rapprochement under Eduardo Frei's administration (1964–1970) shows, Soviet leaders viewed state-to-state relations with “progressive” Latin American regimes as an appropriate means of undermining U.S. influence

This article discusses the reactions of governments and political leaders around the world to the victory of Salvador Allende in the Chilean presidential election of 1970—reactions that were shaped by a combination of ideological considerations, the diplomatic interests of particular states in the context of the Cold War, and an image of Chilean democratic exceptionalism purveyed by Chilean diplomats

After India's detonation of a nuclear explosive in 1974 publicly demonstrated the proliferation risks from nuclear assistance, the U.S. government increased its efforts to control nuclear exports worldwide. In doing so, U.S. policymakers faced challenges from two major West European allies, France and West Germany, both of which pursued their commercial interests through nuclear exports to countries

The speech delivered by U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara on 16 June 1962 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor is often cited for its significance in the enunciation of U.S. nuclear strategy, but the speech also featured passages decrying the existence of separate, national nuclear forces within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. This article concentrates on the latter dimension

After the failure of the April 1961 Bay of Pigs intervention in Cuba, senior officials from the Kennedy administration, including the president, devoted two days to off-the-record briefings for more than 200 journalists. Although President John F. Kennedy refused to assign blame, other officials were less circumspect, disagreeing about whether the Central Intelligence Agency or another part of the

A generation of scholars has depicted the premiership of Labor Party leader Gough Whitlam as a watershed in Australian foreign policy. According to the prevailing consensus, Whitlam carved out a more independent and progressive role in international affairs without significantly endangering relations with Western-aligned states in East and Southeast Asia or with Australia's traditionally closest allies

made Rusi a scapegoat in the eyes of the wide news-watching audiences if information about it had not been leaked to the media and if the media had not made a scandal out of it. The media worked in favor of the slanderers, either knowingly or out of laziness, presenting the case as if Rusi was assumed to be guilty by default. The Rusi case has been thoroughly sorted out (a court case also found the

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, individuals around the world, particularly those in newly decolonized African countries, called on churches, both Protestant and Catholic, to rethink their mission and the role of Christianity in the world. This article explores these years and how they played out in Angola. A main forum for global discussion was the World Council of Churches (WCC), an ecumenical

does not add anything new to the narrative about or historiography of the Nixon presidency. The book would be of limited use to a student of Cold War history, or the Nixon presidency in particular, but Woodward is writing for a broad audience, and this shows in the book’s functionality. It includes no searchable index, and the individual chapters are not titled in a way that would allow the reader

For nearly a decade, a colonel on the Polish General Staff, Ryszard Kukliński, provided invaluable information about Soviet and Warsaw Pact military activities to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) under the codename “Jack Strong.” Along with Soviet Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, who cooperated with the CIA in the late 1950s and early1960s until he was arrested and executed by the Soviet regime, Kukliński

There is a wide gap between the scholarly literature on East-Central Europe during the Cold War, which was dominated by émigré writers, and the broader scholarship of Cold War history, which was produced largely by Western writers who focused mainly on the great powers. In the first category, Hungarian émigré scholars were amply represented. A partial list would include István Deák, Charles Gati, Peter

Contrary to the expectations of many, the break between Portugal and its former colonies in southern Africa was far from complete after decolonization. This article points to three major reasons. First, the impact on relations with Angola and Mozambique of the fragmentation of Portuguese state power and tense polarization in the Portuguese polity after the military coup of 24 April 1974 has been overstated

The accessibility of the archives of the East German Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit; MfS or Stasi) puts at the disposal of researchers not only a rich and valuable source: about the East German foreign intelligence service and secret police, but also, thanks to records of the Stasi’s foreign espionage activities, a wealth of information about intelligence services elsewhere—information

American historians Orest Subtelny, Paul R. Magocsi, and Serhii Plokhii as it was by Putin’s “little green men” and Russian invading troops in 2014. Contemporary developments in Russian-Ukrainian relations represent the ending of the divorce that began in 1991 when reformist patriots and liberal dissidents questioned the USSR’s relationship to its eastern European “Near Abroad” and since 2014, Ukraine

South Africa had a small, highly classified nuclear weapons program that produced a small but potent nuclear arsenal. At the end of the 1980s, as South Africa was nearing a transition to black majo...

In the mid-1970s, the United States and the Soviet Union decided to export the Cold War to Angola at levels that were unprecedented on the African continent. In the case of the United States, this ...

Based on newly declassified documents from former Yugoslav archives, this article reconstructs the process of material and political assistance that was rendered to the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) by Yugoslavia throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s until the time of Angola's independence and the beginning of the Angolan civil war in 1975. The archival evidence demonstrates

This article explores the escalation of tensions surrounding Angola's independence from Portugal in 1975, when a protracted war of national liberation escalated sharply into an international crisis. Rather than see Angola as merely a proxy war, the article depicts the varied responses to Angolan anti-colonial nationalism as consequences of “internationalization,” or the deliberate and endogenous process

Few historical events over the past 70 years have rivaled the 1956 Hungarian revolution in its domestic and international impact. The research presented in the first part of this article (published in the Fall 2017 issue of the journal), which was based largely on recently declassified archival documents, focused on a specific aspect of the international response to the revolution—namely, the efforts

This article analyzes the landmark deal between the Italian automobile corporation Fiat and the Soviet government to build and operate the Volga Automobile Factory (VAZ). Drawing on formerly closed corporate records and declassified Soviet documents, the article traces how the Cold War helped shape the strategy of a West European multinational corporation in its attempts to manipulate the national

“many of the region’s” problems predated the Cold War and in many cases survived it” (p. xix). The Balkan region remains notoriously averse to cooperation and still comes across as surprisingly quarrelsome, given that all of its countries are at this point either members of the European Union or striving to get there. However, in that process the burden of this region’s past is manifesting in ways

Peter Grose, a gifted New York Times journalist, published a book in 1983 titled Israel in the Mind of America. Covering a 400-year period, his informative and insightful study showed how the roles of Jewish thought, symbols, and historical events had woven their way into American values and culture (and not just into religious ethics and reference points) and how strong leaders, in this case President

the rise of a security-oriented grouping called “neo-conservatives” in support of an assertive U.S. foreign policy, partnering with Israel. In this context, Mitelpunkt graphically portrays a more complex and diverse arrangement of political forces at play in U.S.-Israel relations in the 1980s and 1990s. He does not, however, hide his personal distaste toward rightwing players in Israel, such as the

Walk into any Veterans of Foreign Wars facility about an hour before last call. Three barstools down is an expert on all things political and military; or, as he says, he’s “smarter than any of those damn politicians or the idiots who went to West Point.” With little prompting he will tell you and anyone else within earshot what is wrong with the country and how it can be fixed—“if anyone would listen

For decades, little research on Danish Cold War history was conducted either inside or outside Denmark. The relevant archives were closed, and generations of Danish contemporary historians were primarily interested in what happened during World War II. This is no longer the situation. Over the past 35 years, especially since the end of the Cold War, researchers have scrutinized Danish Cold War history

But with John F. Kennedy and his emphasis on flexible response, that dominance ended—the principal difference being the idea that nuclear war “could not be won.” Nuclear capability was still crucial to U.S. defense, but a