Uncertain Empire

American History and the Idea of the Cold War

Bibliographic Data

ID5705209
AuthorsHugh Wilford (California State University, Long Beach, corresponding author)
Year2013
Volume100
Issue3
Pages909-910
Publication date2013-12-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of American History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/jahist/jat445
OpenAlexW2333522904
LanguageEN
Citations received13

Recent scholarship about the United States and the Cold War has been invigorated by two broad developments: the cultural turn taken by historians of American foreign relations, who have embraced interdisciplinary concepts and methods with an enthusiasm that belies their reputation for academic traditionalism, and the growing interest shown by historians of the United States in integrating the United States into world history. This thought-provoking, well-edited volume of essays, which emerged from a conference held at the University of Cambridge in 2007, explores key debates generated at the confluence of these currents. An opening section of argumentative and synoptic essays, “Prisms,” sets up two debates in particular. The first, rehearsed in polemical contributions by Anders Stephanson and Odd Arne Westad, is the tension in Cold War studies between those who favor an interpretation of the conflict as basically an American project masking a will to global power in the post–World War II world, and those who posit instead a multipolar scenario, with Third World actors adapting and transforming the rival models of modernity represented by the United States and the communist bloc. The second debate, focused more on domestic American cultural history than international or transnational relations, pits the “Cold War culture” school—scholars who portray the Cold War as the primary factor determining postwar U.S. cultural life—against those who believe that it was American culture that produced the Cold War or at least grant a greater variety of influences on and agency to American cultural producers of the era. The debate is modeled less starkly here by Philip Mirowski and Steven Belletto, the former in an essay arguing for the primacy of the Cold War in shaping the disciplinary boundaries and ontologies of American science, and the latter in a survey of recent literary scholarship that critiques the “Cold War culture” (or “containment culture”) school in favor of more pluralistic interpretations. Both of these debates are then fleshed out in a series of case studies in the second, longer section of the book, “Vistas

American Century · Culture of the United States · Diplomatic history · Economic history · International relations · Modernity · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · History · Law · Twentieth Century Scientific Developments

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