The Cold War: Core Documents

by David Krugler

This collection of documents on the Cold War continues the Ashbrook Center's extended series of document collections covering major periods, themes, and institutions in American history and government. The volume begins with George Kennan's "long telegram" (1946) laying out the containment policy that the United States would follow in various forms throughout the struggle with the Soviet Union. It ends with the transcript of a phone call between President George H. W. Bush and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in 1989 in which the two leaders discussed how to deal with the changes transforming Russia and bringing the Cold War to an end. It covers American aid to Europe in the early years of the Cold War and American intervention in subsequent years in conflicts around the world to contain the spread of Soviet power. Its documents also explore the domestic effects of the Cold War, chronicling how national security concerns affected relations between American citizens and between Americans and their government. This collection and its companion volumes - World War I and the Twenties, The Depression and New Deal, and World War II - comprise a detailed account of the major events of America's 20th century.

153 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 28, 2018

About the author

David F. Krugler grew up in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. He left his home state to attend Creighton University, in Omaha, Nebraska, in the late 1980s. After graduating with degrees in English and history, he earned a M.A. and Ph.D. in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He moved back to Wisconsin in 1997 to teach at the University of Wisconsin—Platteville, where he’s now Professor of History. A historian of the modern United States, he has published books on several different topics: Cold War propaganda, nuclear warfare, and racial conflict in the United States. Krugler is the author of The Voice of America and the Domestic Propaganda Battles, 1945-1953 (University of Missouri Press, 2000) and This Is Only a Test: How Washington, D.C., Prepared for Nuclear War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). In December 2014, Cambridge University Press released his third book, 1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back. Krugler frequently serves as a faculty leader for teacher education programs at the Newberry Library in Chicago and the Master of American History and Government program at Ashland University in Ashland, Ohio. He is the past recipient of research grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Organization of American Historians, the White House Historical Association, and the University of Wisconsin System Institute on Race and Ethnicity. He appeared in the National Geographic Channel documentary American Doomsday in 2010. In Spring 2011, he was a fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. When he’s not teaching and writing, Krugler enjoys overseas travel (most recent trip: Copenhagen, Denmark), going to art museums, and reading mysteries (latest favorite author: Charles Willeford).

Reviews

[Michelle Palmer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for a grad school class on Postwar America. Good combination of primary documents covering the material.