The Politics of Security tells the story of how people experienced the cold war as a war. It is about the impact of the cold war on political cultures. This crucial issue is often forgotten in historical memory. In particular, the book follows British and West German anti-nuclear-weapons activists in their attempts to campaign for and create security after the destruction of the Second World Wa…
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. The success of China's Communist revolution in 1949 set the stage, Chen says. The Korean War, the Taiwan Strait crises, and the Vietnam War--all of which involved China as a cent…
Thoroughly updated in light of new scholarship, including revised sections on President Nixon’s policies in Vietnam and President Reagan’s approach to U.S.-Soviet relations Features six all new "counterparts" sections that juxtapose important historical figures to illustrate the contrasting viewpoints that characterized the Cold War Argues that the success of Western capitalism during th…
The 1940s was probably the most dramatic and decisive decade of the 20th century. This volume explores the Second World War and the origins of the Cold War from the vantage point of two of the great powers of that era, Britain and the USA, and of their wartime leaders, Churchill and Roosevelt. It also looks at their chequered relations with Stalin and at how the Grand Alliance crumbled into an …
Sport in camps unsettles both contemporary witnesses and students of history. It seems impossible that human beings would perform anything like sport within the harsh camp reality of repression, hunger, violence, and possibly even murder. Yet, sport in penal and internment camps is a historical reality and studying this history allows for new insights into the reality of i…
The Second World War was a new type of war; it was a global, mobile and unpredictable war. It was ‘among the most destructive conflicts in human history’, in which over forty-six million people perished, often in the most frightening and inhuman conditions.1 The latter years of the inter-war period witnessed a modernisation of the mili-tary technologies that had been use…
In Februruary 1972, Working in the perpetual Drizzle that shrouds the central coast of Vietnam each winter, soldiers from the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) produced a photographic inventory of two bases newly acquired from the Americans. Just a few weeks before, some thirty thousand US Army and Marine Corps troops removed themselves with thousands of tons of equipment from Ph…
While these displays are all fascinating in their own ways, they do not cover much beyond the defeat of Japan in 1945; no objects related to the JMSDF are on display. “I do think we should display items related to the JMSDF,” said Captain Furush? as he showed us around. “But regrettably, we currently only have displays related to the I…
On August 8, 1942, 302 people arrived by train at Vocation, Wyoming, to become the first Japanese American residents of what the U.S. government called the Relocation Center at Heart Mountain. In the following weeks and months, they would be joined by some 10,000 of the more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent, two-thirds of them U.S. citizens, incarcerated as “domestic enemy aliens” du…
On 3 October 1944 American forces in the Pacific Ocean Areas received a directive to seize positions in the Ryukyu Islands (Nansei Shoto). Okinawa is the most important island of the Ryukyu Group, the threshold of the four main islands of Japan. The decision to invade the Ryukyus signalized the readiness of the United States to penetrate the inner ring of Japanese defenses. For the enemy, fail…