Understanding and Teaching the Cold War

The genre here is pedagogy, and the object is to aid college instructors in teaching the Cold War. The instrumental aspect is thus paramount. The “how to” takes two related forms: suggestions for ways to engage students for whom the topic is ancient history and accounts of pertinent resources (now chiefly online). Though uneven, the collection is indeed pedagogical in offering advice on pedagogy. The problems arise in the framing of the object itself and the historiography. The brevity of the twenty-one contributions makes this framing difficult, and the topics sometimes similarly so. To say anything probing about the Cold War in continental chunks is difficult. The most useful essays tend to be the more tightly focused ones. Kenneth Osgood does an excellent job with propaganda, a subject that also lends itself to illustration and critical reflection in a manner congenial to the image-laden student of today. Osgood's account appears in a section devoted to the Cold War and American society. The other four sections deal with the Cold War and the classroom; new perspectives on traditional topics (such as origins); the global Cold War; and archival collections. Four of the five articles on American society feature cultural aspects, and the fifth, Brenda Gayle Plummer's bracing reflections on race, includes (rightly) a strong component as well. Perhaps an essay on the Cold War and the economy would not have been amiss

Cold war · Framing (construction · Historiography · Media studies · Object (grammar · Political science · Sociology · Academic Freedom and Politics · American Political and Social Dynamics · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · History · Law · Research, Science, and Academia

• “Reluctant Diplomat”

  Open Access•Alexander Kubyshkin, Иван Курилла•Vestnik Volgogradskogo…•2024

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