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• The official explanation: statement and challenge: Stimson, H. L. The decision to use the atomic bomb.--We were anxious to get the war over: an interview with James F. Byrnes.--The interim committee discusses the bomb: minutes of May 31, 1945.--Scientists petition the government: the Franck Committee report.--Grew, J. The war could have been ended without the bomb.--Was the bomb necessary?: Baldwin, H. W. The atomic bomb, the penalty of expediency.--Morison, S. E. Why Japan surrendered.--United States Strategic Bombing Survey. Japan's struggle to end the war.--Why was the bomb used?: Feis, H. The atomic bomb and the end of World War II.--Alperovitz, G. Atomic diplomacy.--Kolko, G. The politics of war: the war with Japan.--Bernstein, B. J. The atomic bomb and American foreign policy: the route to Hiroshima.--Atomic diplomacy and the moral significance of Hiroshima: Ulam, A. Re-reading the cold war: revising the revisionists.--Rose, L. The atomic dilemma and atomic diplomacy.--Bernstein, B. J. Atomic diplomacy and the cold war.--Herken, G. F. Atomic diplomacy reversed and revised.--Macdonald, D. The bomb: the decline to barbarism.

• American foreign policy and the origins of the cold war, by B. J. Bernstein.--The quest for peace and prosperity: international trade, communism, and the Marshall Plan, by T. G. Paterson.--America and the German "problem", 1945-1949, by L. C. Gardner.--The cold war comes to Latin America, by D. Green.--The rhetoric of politics: foreign policy, internal security, and domestic politics in the Truman era, 1945-1950, by A. Theoharis.--The ambiguous legacy: the Truman administration and civil rights, by B. J. Bernstein.

Stanford professor Barton J. Bernstein lectures on the Cuban Missile Crisis.

"The Borders of Culture" is a comprehensive study of U.S. government-sponsored transnational cultural programs to focus on the U.S. and Latin America. After the end of the military phase of the Mexican Revolution in 1920, the Department of State established a variety of initiatives--celebrity tours, libraries, cultural centers, film, and radio campaigns--to give Mexican citizens first-hand knowledge of the U.S. These projects aimed to promote the U.S.'s vision of modernization for the Americas and to temper the perceived radicalism and violence of the revolution. As U.S. fears of extremism increased during the 1920s and 1930s, transnational cultural and educational programs became well-funded and permanent tools of U.S. statecraft. These new institutions and campaigns formed a crucial part of the Good Neighbor Policy, allowing the U.S. to influence the development of the Mexican state without resorting to military intervention. Cultural and educational programs became the main vector of power through which the U.S. attempted to transform Mexico into a better neighbor by shaping the information available to Mexican citizens, influencing educational reforms, and encouraging Mexicans to reproduce a U.S. middle-class lifestyle.

This dissertation examines the politics, ideas, and cultural beliefs of the Cold War's two most prominent American dissenters: Henry Wallace and Herbert Hoover. From the nation's liberal left wing and conservative right wing, respectively, Wallace and Hoover presented the two most powerful alternative perspectives on the Cold War—and, beyond that, on America's role in the post-World War II world. Focusing primarily on World War II and the Korean War, this study investigates Wallace and Hoover's attempts to contest the nation's global security policies during a critical period in the global Cold War. They failed, and as a result the U.S.-led anti-Communist and U.S.S.R.-led Communist blocs fought an expanded war in Korea that drastically escalated the Cold War arms race and bipolar confrontation for years to come. But their efforts to shape alternatives had a lasting impact on both men and many of their contemporaries into the Vietnam War era and beyond.

Kennedy, Adenauer and the Making of the Berlin Wall, 1958-1961 The Second Berlin Crisis, which began with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's threat to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany in November 1958, has largely been interpreted by foreign policy historians as a conflict between the superpowers, in which the dependent allies - the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR - had almost no influence on the course of events that led to the erection of the Berlin Wall. This interpretation served the political purposes of the governments involved for most of the Cold War. The Kennedy administration as leading government of the Western world could claim to have successfully managed a difficult crisis; the Adenauer administration and the Ulbricht regime could both point to Washington's and Moscow's responsibility for the division of Germany's capital; and Khrushchev, as leading statesman of the Warsaw pact, could finally deliver on some of his promises made to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. However, recent findings suggest that Ulbricht, not Khrushchev, was the driving force behind the decision to close the East Berlin sector. In the course of the first two years of the Kennedy administration, severe problems arose in West German-American relations. It is time to ask how the West German government's interactions with the Kennedy administration influenced the course of the crisis. President Eisenhower had seemingly managed to avoid an escalation of the Berlin crisis from 1958 to late 1960. This came at the cost of increasing pressure for his successor to find a solution. Ten months into the Kennedy administration, Berlin was divided by a wall, and American and Soviet tanks faced each other at Checkpoint Charlie. This dissertation reexamines the interactions between the Western governments, in particular between West Germany and the United States during the Second Berlin Crisis, and shows how these affected the outcome of the crisis. The first chapter serves as an introduction to the historiography of the Berlin Crisis and German-American relations in the period, especially between the Kennedy and Adenauer governments, and defines the pertinent questions; the second chapter provides an outline of the first two years of the crisis and the Eisenhower administration's approach to Adenauer and Berlin, especially as to Western policy on Berlin when the Eisenhower administration handed over the reins; the third to fifth chapters trace the Kennedy administration's and Chancellor Adenauer's interactions during the crisis in 1961 with particular regard to the actual sealing off of West Berlin, and the last chapter finally serves as an overview of the immediate aftermath. I argue that four key assumptions about the Berlin Wall crisis in 1961 can no longer be upheld: 1. The claim that Kennedy had stood firm on Berlin and merely continued the Eisenhower posture on Berlin is wrong. Instead, the Kennedy administration attempted to find new approaches to Berlin and Germany in line with its general revision of US foreign policy. 2. The notion that the closing of the sector border came as a surprise is not supported by the documents. President Kennedy had been informed numerous times that a closing of the sector border could be expected within the year. 3. Adenauer's policy to prevent diplomatic recognition of the GDR contributed to an escalation of Washington's search for alternative policy options, rather than slowing them. The West German election campaign in 1961 further limited the chancellor's willingness to make changes to his foreign policy. The Kennedy administration eventually sought accommodation with Khrushchev without consulting Bonn. 4. Inherent conceptual mistakes in Kennedy's early foreign policy agenda exacerbated the crisis, rather than contributed to its eventual solution. An additional lack of trust between West Germany and the United States complicated and delayed the attempt to find a more coherent, unified Western approach. All four Western governments anticipated an end to the refugee flow through West Berlin as the first step in a crisis escalation, while developing no contingency plans for this step. The lack of any political intention to prevent the expected stop of the refugee flow became the casting mould for Ulbricht's plan to close the sector border, a plan Khrushchev eventually made his own. By leaving Ulbricht and Khrushchev with only one option, Western policies on Berlin and Germany unwillingly conspired to force East Germany to face its systemic flaws in the summer of 1961.

This dissertation analyzes the historical process that culminated in the 1972 nationalization of the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) -- a consortium that included four of the world's largest and most powerful corporations. I draw on IPC archives, recently declassified U.S. Government documents, and the Arab press to trace the impact of Iraq's 1958 "Free Officers' Revolution" on IPC interests in Iraq. I show that the Revolution set in motion a process of institutional development that resulted in the complete nationalization of the Iraqi oil industry at a relatively early date, and I emphasize the agency of a particular group of Western-trained Iraqi technical experts in producing this outcome. Moreover, I examine U.S and IPC efforts to counter Iraq's radical movements and offer an original interpretation of the relationship between the American government and the international oil industry. I show that the Iraqi challenge to the IPC undermined the stability of an implicit "corporatist bargain" between the U.S. State Department and the major American oil companies, and that the breakdown of this relationship was part of a larger crisis of American hegemony in the early 1970s. In so doing, I reveal powerful underlying factors that continue to drive the historical encounter between the U.S. and the Middle East.