Cold War: A Global History

Catalog description

This course offers a dynamic and sweeping overview of the Cold War. It is intended for undergraduate students interested in a sharper awareness of today’s world. Providing balanced coverage of the whole era, it takes a strictly global approach, demonstrating how at various times the focus of the West-East conflict shifted to new and surprising venues, from the Belgian Congo to Vietnam, from Angola to Cuba. Big ideas include the conflict of ideologies, nuclear ethics, the space race, and the influence of personality on world affairs. Throughout the course, we emphasize intelligence and public opinion, and highlight specific questions relevant to the present day: the environment, the influence of technology, and forms of authoritarian rule. An array of popular culture examples is used to show how the Cold War crisis was understood and perceived by people across the world. The course includes three ‘snapshot’ lessons, overviews of the state of play at pivotal moments – 1946, 1968, and 1980 – to illuminate the inter-connectedness between seemingly distinct situations. While learning about these topics, students also gain an understanding of the practice of history, especially of the kinds of sources historians use and how they reconstruct and interpret the past. The course provides a fundamental introduction for students studying Cold War, twentieth century or global history.