Rethinking International History: The Cold War and Cultural History
Great power diplomacy and geopolitical conflicts have long dominated the history of international relations. The traditional history of the Cold War was no different, with such topics as the battles over Berlin, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1970s détente, the NATO Double-Track Decision, and Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative dominating the historical narration of the Cold War. Yet the rise of the cultural turn in historiography has begun to broaden the meaning of international relations in general and the Cold War in particular. This project explores the ways in which a cultural approach alters our understanding of the Cold War. It focuses on seven ways in which people and processes outside the realm of high-power politics influenced the way the Cold War unfolded and analyzes the cultural context that is crucial to understand the extent and limits of the Cold War in international history.
Petra Goedde
Vita
Petra Goedde is Professor of History at Temple University and editor of the journal Diplomatic History. Her research interests are in U.S. foreign relations, transnational, culture, and gender history. She is the author and editor of numerous books, including most recently The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History (Oxford 2019). She has written articles on cultural globalization since 1945, transnational history, and culture and gender in U.S. foreign relations history. Her research has been supported by the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton University, the Center of Advanced Studies at the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, and other organizations. Currently she is completing a book manuscript International History: A Cultural Approach in collaboration with Akira Iriye.
Research Areas
U.S. Foreign Relations
Transnational Cultural and Gender
History
History of Cultural Globalization since 1945
Publications (Selection)
The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History (Oxford 2019).
Oxford Handbook on the Cold War, co-editor with Richard Immerman (Oxford 2013).
The Human Rights Revolution: An International History. Co-editor with Akira Iriye and William I. Hitchcock (Oxford 2012).
GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender, and Foreign Relations, 1945–1949 (Yale 2003).
“US Mass Culture and Consumption in Global Context,” in The Cambridge History of America and the World, Vol. 4: 1945 – Present; ed. David C. Engerman, Max Paul Friedman, Melani McAlister (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
“Power, Culture, and the Rise of Transnational History in the United States” in International History Review, Vol. 40, No 1, (2018): 592–608.
“Global Cultures,” in Akira Iriye, Jürgen Osterhammel, eds. Global Interdependence: The World after 1945, Vol. 6 of A History of the World. (Belknap Press / C.H. Beck, 2013).
