Across the Blocs

Exploring Comparative Cold War Cultural and Social History

Edited by Patrick Major, Rana Mitter

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About the Book

This book asks the reader to reassess the Cold War not just as superpower conflict and high diplomacy, but as social and cultural history. It makes cross-cultural comparisons of the socio cultural aspects of the Cold War across the East/West block divide, dealing with issues including broadcasting, public opinion, and the production and consumption of popular culture.

Reviews

'Historical science would do well to emphasize the status of ther east-West conflict as a struggle for cultural meaning - as a 'war of intellects'. This book helps that process.'

Jost Dulffer

Table of Contents

1. East is East and West is West?: Towards a comparative sociocultural history of the Cold War 2. The Man Who Invented Truth: The tenure of Edward R. Murrow as director of the United States Information Agency during the Kennedy years 3. Soviet Cinema in the Early Cold War 4. Future Perfect?: Communist science fiction in the Cold War 5. The Education of Dissent: Radio free Europe and Hungarian society, 1951-56 6. The Debate over Nuclear Refuge 7. Some Writers Are More Equal Than Others: George Orwell, the state and Cold War propaganda

About the Author(s)

Patrick Major is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Warwick and author of The Death of the KPD: communism and anti-communism in West Germany, 1945-1956 (Oxford University Press, 1997).
Rana Mitter is University Lecturer in the History and Politics of Modern China at Oxford University and author of The Manchurian Myth: Nationalism, Resistance, and Collaboration in Modern China (University of California Press, 2000).