The Global Cold War

Catalog description

Conventional portrayals of the Cold War split the period into two blocs and three worlds, with a clearly marked start and finish. They frame it as a time of peace in nuclear-armed Europe and the United States, and proxy wars at the margins, in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. This course challenges these characterizations by comparing ideologies, diplomacy, technologies, and popular cultures via media from six continents, beginning in the 1920s and ending in the 2020s. We examine the Soviet- and US-led blocs as dynamic rather than monolithic alliances, and compare caricatures of the docile “Third World” to the reality of self-advocacy and struggle across the Global South.