From Subversion to Liberation: Homosexuals and the Immigration Act 1952–1977.

Author(s):  
Philip Girard

Historians of the Cold War have tended to focus on the repression of political dissidents during that period, but only recently has attention been shifted to the simultaneous suppression of other types of non-conformity, such as sexual variance and non-traditional gender roles. Parallel to the repression of internal political dissent which accompanied the international Cold War, another, more subtle, campaign was proceeding. This was the attempt to re-establish the social order, based on family life and traditional sex roles, which the war had tended to undermine.

Author(s):  
Raymond A. Patton

This chapter situates the rise of punk in the avant-garde artistic networks that spanned the First, Second, and Third Worlds of the Cold War era. It examines the roles of UK punk impresario Malcolm McLaren, who launched the Sex Pistols, and Polish punk impresario Henryk Gajewski, and the mutual interest between burgeoning punks and international art circles involved in avant-garde art movements such as Pop Art and Fluxus. It shows how punk evolved in dialogue with the wider phenomenon of postmodernism, challenging conventional metanarratives structuring the social order, blurring genres, and striking down the boundaries between art and everyday life.


Author(s):  
Andrea Lorenzo Capussela

This chapter reviews the evolution of Italy’s social order and institutions between the end of Fascism, in 1943, and the early 1950s. The peninsula was a battlefield for two years, during 1943–5. War and resistance shook Italy’s social order, and the post-war years saw the emergence of a democratic republic based on a progressive constitution. Reconstruction was rapid, and laid the basis for the country’s full industrialization. The ideological cleavage traced by Marxism, however, which split the anti-fascist coalition, and the political repercussions of the Cold War eased the efforts of the pre-war elites to constrain the opening up of the social order and undermine the newly adopted political institutions. An episode of collective action in the rural South nonetheless showed the potential of well-designed reforms sustained by effective organizations. The chapter concludes that during the 1950s electoral democracy consolidated, but Italy remained distant from the liberal democracy paradigm.


2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 559-582 ◽  
Author(s):  
HOLGER NEHRING

This article examines the politics of communication between British and West German protesters against nuclear weapons in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The interpretation suggested here historicises the assumptions of ‘transnational history’ and shows the nationalist and internationalist dimensions of the protest movements' histories to be inextricably connected. Both movements related their own aims to global and international problems. Yet they continued to observe the world from their individual perspectives: national, regional and local forms thus remained important. By illuminating the interaction between political traditions, social developments and international relations in shaping important political movements within two European societies, this article can provide one element of a new connective social history of the cold war.


Thesis Eleven ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 072551362110592
Author(s):  
Lars Bo Kaspersen ◽  
Liv Egholm

We are living in a world which is severely crisis-ridden and faces some major challenges. The fact that we are currently facing a genuine global pandemic (COVID-19) brings about even more uncertainty. The social and political institutions, which emerged and consolidated during the 20th century, and which created stability, have become fragile. The young generation born in the 1990s and onwards have experienced 9/11 and the ‘war against terrorism’, the financial crisis of 2008, changes to climate, environmental degradation, and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic. The generation born between 1960 and 1990 have had the same experiences along with severe economic crises in the 1970s and 1980s and the Cold War. Some of these challenges are in different ways intertwined with capitalism and its crises, while others are linked to the rapid development of new technologies, in particular innovations within communication and information technologies. This introduction lists the most important grand challenges facing the world as they have emerged more recently. The five articles following this introduction address some of these challenges, with particular attention to the problems of capitalism and democracy and the relation between these two areas. Most authors agree that climate change and the destruction of the environment are the biggest and most pertinent problems to address, but it is their stance that we can only meet these challenges if democracy is functioning well.


Author(s):  
Andrew I. Port

The ‘long 1950s’ was a decade of conspicuous contrasts: a time of dismantling and reconstruction, economic and political, as well as cultural and moral; a time of Americanization and Sovietization; a time of upheaval amid a desperate search for stability. But above all, it was a time for both forgetting and coming to terms with the recent past. This article focuses on the two forms of government that controlled Germany, democracy, and dictatorship. The Cold War was without doubt the main reason for the rapid rehabilitation and integration of the two German states, which more or less took place within a decade following the end of the Second World War. This article further elaborates upon the political conditions under dictatorship and its effect on the social life. East Germany, under the Soviet control underwent as much political upheaval. It was not until the second half of the twentieth century that Germany became a democracy.


2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-293
Author(s):  
Rebecca Gould

This essay investigates the challenges facing Caucasus philology, by which I mean the institutional capacity to conduct deep research into the literary cultures of Azerbaijan Republic, Georgia, Daghestan, and Chechnya. I argue that the philological approach to the literary cultures of the Caucasus has been a casualty of the rise of areas studies in the North American academy during the Cold War, and that Cold War legacies continue to shape Caucasus Studies to this day. I conclude by offering three proposals for opening exchanges between the humanities and the social sciences within Caucasus Studies. More broadly, this essay argues for a rapprochement between the social sciences and philological inquiry vis-à-vis the Caucasus.


Author(s):  
Grace Huxford

This introduction first gives an overview of Korean War historiography alongside a summary of the war itself, before exploring the position of the Korean War and the Cold War in British history-writing. It highlights how selfhood and citizenship have emerged as growing categories of analysis in Cold War studies and argues why it is important to consider them in the context of post-1945 Britain. It closes by exploring the challenges and possibilities of writing the social history of warfare and bringing domestic and military ‘spheres’ together in a meaningful way.


Author(s):  
Lawrence Freedman

This chapter reflects on the question of whether strategic studies has a future as a field of academic study. It first considers the early development of strategic studies and how it became a broad enquiry by the end of the cold war. It then examines how the study of strategy posed a challenge to the social sciences and goes on to discuss the tensions that exist between the academic and policy worlds with respect to strategic studies. It also explores elements of realism that remain very useful in the study of strategy, particularly when it comes to the issue of armed force. The chapter concludes by explaining why strategic studies should be revived as a subject in the universities and how this might be achieved.


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