HISTORY 395:
Seminar in Modern European History:
The Cold War
Spring 2006
David E. Barclay
Dewing 303C or Olds/Upton 305
Office Hours: MW 1:00-2:30 p.m., F 11-12
e-mail:
This syllabus is available and should be consulted on line at:
people.kzoo.edu/~barclay/HIST395.doc
READINGS:
Books:
John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York, 2005);
Melvyn P. Leffler, The Specter of Communism: The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1917-1953 (New York, 1994);
Ernest R. May, American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC 68 (Boston, 1993);
Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, Mass., 1996).
RECOMMENDED FOR BACKGROUND INFORMATION:
John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford, 1997);
Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York, 2005);
Ralph B. Levering, The Cold War: A Post-Cold War History, 2nd ed. (Wheeling, Ill., 2005);
Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York, 1999);
James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (New York, 1996).
Richard Vinen, A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 2000).
Articles:
Some of the articles listed here are required reading for all students in the class. Others will be assigned based on language training and specific interests; still others could be added as the quarter progresses. I shall explain details in class.
Back from the Brink: The Correspondence between President John F. Kennedy and Chairman Nikita S. Khrushchev on the Cuban Missile Crisis of Autumn 1962, special issue of Problems of Communism 41 (Spring 1992), various articles to be assigned in class;
David E. Barclay, “Beyond Cold War Mythmaking: Ernst Reuter and the United States,” in Germany and America: Essays in Honor of Gerald R. Kleinfeld, ed. Wolfgang-Uwe Friedrich (New York and Oxford, 2001), 123-45.
Ian Gambles, “Lost Time: The Forgetting of the Cold War,” The National Interest, No. 41 (Fall 1995): 26-35.
Kenneth M. Jensen, ed., Origins of the Cold War: The Novikov, Kennan, and Roberts ‘Long Telegrams’ of 1946 (Washington, D. C., 1991);
“X” [George F. Kennan], “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs 25, no. 4 (July 1947): 566-82;
J. V. Stalin, “ ‘’,” in idem, , ed. Robert H. McNeal, 3 vols. (Stanford, 1967), 3: 35-43;
J. V. Stalin, “, 9 1946 .,” in idem, , ed. Robert H. McNeal, 3 vols. (Stanford, 1967), 3: 1-22.
On-Line Materials:
This is an interactive syllabus, and we shall be making use of material that is available from the World Wide Web. Among other things, this will give you an opportunity to practice your computer skills, without which you can’t function in the post-Cold War world! More to the point, however, resources that are available on the Web will provide you with an unprecedented opportunity to use primary sources that were previously unavailable to most American college students. They include sound recordings, such as Winston Churchill’s
“Iron Curtain” speech, George Marshall’s Harvard Commencement address that outlined what became known as the “Marshall Plan,” Richard Nixon’s “Kitchen Debate” with Nikita Khrushchev, or John F. Kennedy’s private recordings at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. They also include digitalized versions of primary documents located in repositories such as the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri. If you have little experience using the computer in this way, don’t worry. We’ll have plenty of time to talk about it and work out the details. Required on-line materials will be indicated in blue below, and the on-line version of this syllabus will show them as clickable links.
FILMS AND VIDEOS:
As indicated below, we shall view a number of films and videos in this course. They include the following:
Cold War (CNN documentary, several of the 24 episodes, 1998);
Messengers from Moscow (BBC documentary, 1994);
The Manchurian Candidate (1962);
Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963);
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1966);
Red Dawn (1984).
COURSE REQUIREMENTS:
Performance in this seminar will be evaluated on the basis of several elements. A major research paper (about 20-25 pages) will be prepared in both a first draft (due on Thursday of Week 9) and a final, revised draft form (due during exam week). This paper will be worth 40% of the final grade. In addition, each member of the seminar will prepare a fifteen-minute presentation based on the topic of her/his research paper. Those presentations will take place during the ninth and tenth weeks of the quarter, and will amount to 10% of the final grade in the course. Each member of the seminar is also expected to prepare three papers of three to four pages based on our reading and discussion topics. On the days indicated in the syllabus I shall submit possible topics to you, and the paper will then be due the following Monday or Wednesday so that they can serve as a basis for class discussion the following Tuesday or Thursday. To encourage discussion of controversial issues, not everyone will be writing on the same topic! Accordingly, these papers will serve as the basis for class discussions, beginning with the second week of the seminar and continuing through Tuesday of the sixth week. That is, you will write three short papers, and they will be worth 40% of the final grade in the seminar. Finally, 10% of the final grade will be based upon attendance and regular participation in seminar discussions.
READING AND DISCUSSION SCHEDULE (SUBJECT TO CHANGE):
PART I.INTRODUCTION: THE COLD WAR IN THE CONTEXT OF MODERN HISTORY.
Week 1
Reading:Leffler, vii-x, 3-96; Gaddis, ix-xii, 1-3; Jensen (some but not all of book!).
On-line assignment: 1) Truman meets Stalin, July 1945: 2) Winston Churchill, “The Sinews of Peace” (transcript of “Iron Curtain” speech, Fulton, Missouri, 1946), and recording of the same speech ;3) Interview with George F. Kennan, 1996.
a.Introduction.
PART II: THE COMING OF THE COLD WAR, 1941-1953.
The Conflict Deepens: American Plans for Europe from 1941 to the Division of Germany.
Week 2
Reading: Gaddis, 5-47; Zubok/Pleshakov, 1-53; Kennan; May, 1-81; Barclay.
On-line assignment: General Marshall’s Harvard Commencement address, June 1947 (requires RealAudio player. Written transcript at site:
- Soviet Plans for Europe, 1941-47. Paper/discussion topics for week 4 distributed.
- Video: Cold War, part of episode 1, episode 2.
PART III:A “LONG PEACE”? THE COLD WAR, 1953-1979.
Week 3
Reading:Gaddis, 48-82; Zubok/Pleshakov, 54-173; May, 124-128, 130-150, 165-193.
On-line assignment: CNN Cold War special: review of first episodes
NOTE: First paper assignments will ask you to draw upon these materials, especially primary sources.
Optional: If you have access to or can download a QuikTime plug-in viewer, you can watch video clips of Richard Nixon’s “Checkers” speech (1952)!
- Video: Cold War, episodes 3-4.
- Video: Cold War, episodes 5-6. Pick up paper assignment for Tuesday of Week 5.
Week 4
Reading:Gaddis, 83-118; Zubok/Pleshakov, 174-235.
On-line assignment: Joseph McCarthy, 1954. And listen to the audio version of the Kitchen Debate between Nixon and Khrushchev, 1959
Optional! If you have access to or can download a QuickTime plug-in viewer, take a look at this declassified video clip from the Kitchen Debate!
- Just a Big Misunderstanding? Soviet and American Perceptions of Each Other. Discussion of Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill, Kennan, Novikov.
- Developing a Strategy: Containment, Korea, and NSC 68.
Week 5
Reading:Zubok/Pleshakov, 236-282. On-line assignment: Selections from The Korean War +50: No Longer Forgotten.
- Discussion: NSC 68 and American Strategies of Containment in the 1950s.
- The Culture of Cold War: “Brainwashing”. FILM: The Manchurian Candidate.
Week 6
Reading: Readings on the Berlin Crisis of 1961 OR readings on the Bay of Pigs OR special issue of Problems of Communism. Outside class: View CNN Cold War episodes 9 or 10 (or, preferably, both!).
On-line assignment: JFK recordings during missile crisis; National Security Archive on Missile Crisis; recommended: 14 Days in October.
- Discussion: On the Brink during the Kennedy-Khrushchev Era: The Second Berlin Crisis (1958-61), the Bay of Pigs, and the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962).
- The Culture of Cold War: The Bomb. FILM: Dr. Strangelove
Week 7
Reading:Gaddis, 119-194.
On-line assignment: The Space Race
Optional! If you have QuickTime viewer or can get it as a plug-in, download and take at look at what may be the most famous – and controversial – TV ad from any U.S. Presidential campaign. Go to and scroll to “1964: Johnson ‘Daisy’.” You’ll probably agree that it’s quite astonishing.
g.The Culture of Cold War: Spies. FILM: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
h.The Cold War in an Age of Detente, 1964-1979: The Brezhnev Doctrine, Stability in Europe, and Instability in Asia.
PART IV:FROM “NEW COLD WAR” TO NO COLD WAR, 1979-1991
Week 8
Reading:Gaddis, 195-257.
a.The Culture of the New Cold War: Invaders. FILM: Red Dawn.
b.From Detente to the Double-Track Decision.
Week 9
Interactive assignment: Ronald Reagan speeches from the 1980s
c.The Crisis of the 1980s and the Disintegration of Communist Power in Central and Eastern Europe.
d.The “Extinction of Leninism” in Europe, 1989-1991. VIDEO: Messengers from Moscow, Part 4: The Center Collapses.
Week 10
Rading:Gaddis, 259-266; Gambles article.
- TUESDAY: Paper presentations.
- THURSDAY: Paper presentations.
Selective Bibliography
The following is a partial and by no means exhaustive bibliography of titles relevant to this course. It focuses on the Cold War in Europe, relations between the United States and the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1991, and the domestic consequences of the Cold War for European, American, and Soviet societies. It should be supplemented with the various useful (and, in most cases, more thorough) bibliographies included in the works listed below, and especially by the excellent bibliography – with titles up to 2005 – in Gaddis’s text. It should also be noted that a substantial biographical and memoir literature has emerged relating to the major “actors” of the Cold War: e.g., Dean Acheson, Konrad Adenauer, James J. Angleton, Ernest Bevin, Willy Brandt, Leonid I. Brezhnev, Jimmy Carter, Fidel Castro, Whittaker Chambers, Lucius D. Clay, Anatoly Dobrynin, John Foster Dulles, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Charles de Gaulle, M. S. Gorbachev, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Václav Hável, Alger Hiss, Erich Honecker, Lyndon B. Johnson, George F. Kennan, John F. Kennedy, N. S. Khrushchev, Harold MacMillan, Mao Zedong, George C. Marshall, Jack Matlock, Joseph McCarthy, John J. McCloy, Robert S. McNamara, Vyacheslav Molotov, Paul Nitze, Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Ernst Reuter, Helmut Schmidt, J. V. Stalin, Margaret Thatcher, Josip Broz Tito, Harry S Truman, and Lech Wasa, to name only a few. If you have questions, please consult me about these titles.
I.General References and Documentary Sources
American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, etc. Current Digest of the Soviet Press. Weekly, 1949-1991.
Burns, Richard Dean, ed. Guide to American Foreign Relations since 1700. Santa Barbara: Clio Press, 1983.
Cold War International History Project: Bulletin. Published since spring 1992 by the Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D. C.
Frankel, Benjamin, ed. The Cold War 1945-1991. 3 vols. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1992.
Journal of Cold War Studies. Published by MIT Press.
Norton, Mary Beth, ed. The American Historical Association’s Guide to Historical Literature. 2 vols. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Parrish, Thomas. The Cold War Encyclopedia, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996.
United States. Department of State. Foreign Relations of the United States. Multiple volumes. Washington, D. C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1932-.
United States. Foreign Broadcast Information Service. Daily Report. Soviet Union. To 3 January 1992.
Young, John W. The Longman Companion to Cold War and Detente 1941-91. London and New York: Longman, 1993.
II. Some On-Line Sources for the Study of Cold War History
General Cold War Summary (recommended! useful!):
Cold War International History Project:
National Security Archive:
Truman Administration: (extremely important site, with numerous primary documents on line)
The VENONA Documents (an important and, until recently, little-known chapter in the history of Cold War intelligence gathering):
American Culture in the 1950s:
The “Forgotten War” Remembered:
Korean War Historical Documents:
III.The Cold War in the Context of Global History: Recent Studies
Craig, Gordon A.; Loewenheim, Francis L. (eds.). The Diplomats 1939-1979. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Grenville, J. A. S. A History of the World in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.
Johnson, Paul. Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties. Rev. ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1991.
Hobsbawm, E. J. The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994.
Kennedy, Paul. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000. New York: Random House, 1987.
Kissinger, Henry. Diplomacy. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.
Lukacs, John. The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern Age. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1993.
Mandelbaum, Michael. The Fate of Nations: The Search for National Security in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Schöllgen, Gregor. Geschichte der Weltpolitik von Hitler bis Gorbatschow 1941-1991. Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1996.
IV.Europe after 1945: General Histories
A.General Accounts
Black, Cyril; Helmreich, Jonathan E.; Helmreich, Paul C.; Issawi, Charles P.; McAdams, A. James. Rebirth: A History of Europe since World War II. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992.
Fulbrook, Mary (ed.). Europe since 1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Garton Ash, Timothy. In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent. New York: Random House, 1993.
Hitchcock, William I. The Struggle for Europe: The Turbulent History of a Divided Continent 1945-2002. New York: Doubleday, 2003.
Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin Books, 2005).
Laqueur, Walter. Europe in Our Time: A History 1945-1992. New York: Penguin Books, 1992.
Lewis, Flora. Europe: Road to Unity. Rev. ed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.
Milward, Alan S. The Reconstruction of Wesrern Europe, 1945-51. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
Thody, Philip. Europe since 1945. London: Routledge, 2000.
B.Central and Eastern Europe
Applebaum, Anne. Gulag: A History. New York: Doubleday, 2003.
Fejtö, François. Histoire des démocraties populaires. 2 vols. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1952, 1969. [English translation of vol. 2: A History of the People’s Democracies after Stalin. Translated by Daniel Weissbrot. New York: Praeger, 1971.]
Garton Ash, Timothy. The Polish Revolution: Solidarity. New York: Scribner, 1983.
______. The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe. New York: Random House, 1989.
Junker, Detlef; Mauch, Christof; Lazar, David (eds.). The United States and Germany in the Era of the Cold War, vol. 1, 1945-1968: A Handbook. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Legters, Lyman H. Eastern Europe: Transformation and Revolution, 1945-1991. Documents and Amalyses. Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath and Company, 1992.
Loth, Wilfried. Stalins ungeliebtes Kind. Warum Stalin die DDR nicht wollte. Berlin: Rowohlt, 1994.
McAdams, A . James. Germany Divided: From the Wall to Reunification. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Murphy, David E.; Kondrashev, Sergei A.; Bailey, George. Battleground Berlin: CIA vs. KGB in the Cold War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.
Naimark, Norman M. The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.
______. “‘To Know Everything and to Report Everything Worth Knowing’: Building the East German Police State, 1945-1949.” Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (Washington, D. C.), Cold War International History Project, Working Paper No. 10, August 1994.
Rothschild, Joseph. Return to Diversity: A Political History of East Central Europe since World War II. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Simons, Thomas W., Jr. Eastern Europe in the Postwar World. 2nd ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993.
Weber, Hermann. DDR. Grundriß der Geschichte 1945-1990. Hanover: Fackelträger, 1991.
V.Origins of the Cold War and the Division of Europe and the World, 1943-53
Alperovitz, Gar. Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam: The Use of the Atomic Bombs and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965.
Benz, Wolfgang. Potsdam 1945. Besatzungsherrschaft und Neuaufbau im Vier-Zonen-Deutschland. 2nd edition. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1992.
Clemens, Diane. “From Isolationism to Internationalism: The Case Study of American Occupation Planning for Post-War Germany, 1945-1946.” Center for German and European Studies, University of California at Berkeley, Working Paper 2.18, May 1993.
Clemens, Diane. Yalta. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.
Cumings, Bruce. The Origins of the Korean War. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981, 1990.
Eisenberg, Carolyn Woods. Drawing the Line: The American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944-1949. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Gaddis, John Lewis. Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.
______. The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947. New York: Columbia University Press, 1972.
Goncharov, Sergei N.; Lewis, John W.; Xue Litai. Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993.
Hogan, Michael J. A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945-1954. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
______. The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Rdconstruction of Western Europe, 1947-1952. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Mastny, Vojtech. The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
McCauley, Martin. The Origins of the Cold War 1941-1949. 2nd edition. London: Longman, 1995.
Offner, Arnold A. Another Such Victory: President Truman and the Cold War, 1945-1953. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
Parrish, Scott D.; Narinsky, Mikhail M. “New Evidence on the Soviet Rejection of the Marshall Plan, 1947: Two Reports.” Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (Washington, D. C.), Cold War International History Project, Wotking Paper No. 9, March 1994.
Raack, R. J. Stalin’s Drive to the West 1938-1945: The Origins of the Cold War. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.