"This is an excellent collection. In its thematic breadth and its broad geographical coverage it is quite distinctive." . Mark Roseman, Indiana University, Bloomington

In 1945, Europeans confronted a legacy of mass destruction and death: millions of families had lost their homes and livelihoods; millions of men in uniform had lost their lives; and millions more had been displaced by the war's destruction, and the genocidal policies of the Nazi regime. From a range of methodological historical perspectives-military, cultural, and social, to film and gender and sexuality studies-this volume explores how Europeans came to terms with these multiple pasts. With a focus on distinctive national experiences in both Eastern and Western Europe, it illuminates how postwar stabilization coexisted with persistent insecurities, injuries, and trauma.

Frank Biess is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany (Princeton UP, 2006), and he is currently working on a history of fear and anxiety in postwar Germany.

Robert G. Moeller is Professor of modern European and German history at the University of California, Irvine. He has published widely on the social, cultural, and political history of Germany in the twentieth century.

Sudan, the largest country in Africa, gained independence in 1956. Its population divided itself into Arab Muslim and Black African camps and, almost immediately, a 16-year civil war began. A second revolution broke in out 1983 when the governmant introduced Islamic Sharia law. This book provides a thorough chronicle of events in Sudan since Independance, drawing on first-hand interviews.

The 1950s in India were a crucial transition phase where the legacy and institutions of British rule had to be transformed to fit the needs of a post-colonial state. This period is closely associated with India 's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru (1947 64). Selecting three key policies closely associated with him, the book traces the political origins of the Panchasheela Agreement with China in 1954, the Hindu Code Bills of 1955 and 1956 and the founding of the Planning Commission in 1950. Each provides a window into the compulsions of Indian domestic politics at the time as well as the parameters of parliamentary debate.

The book goes on to discuss how these policies correspond to the pillars of Nehru 's vision for a modern, independent India that encapsulated socialism, nonalignment and secularism and assesses their long-run impact in Indian politics. With a growing recognition of the resilience of India 's political arrangements, the analysis is particularly relevant to those interested in the politics of transition and modernisation, and contributes to studies on Political Institutions and South Asian Politics.

Historical surveys of postwar Japan are usually established on the grounds that the era is already over, interpreting "postwar" to be the years directly proceeding World War II. However, the contributors to this book take a unique approach to the concept of the postwar epoch and treat it as a network of historical time frames from the modern period, and connect these time capsules to the war to which they are inextricably linked. The books strength is in its very interdisciplinary approach to examining postwar Japan and as such it includes chapters centred on subjects as diverse as politics, poetry, philosophy, economics and art which serve to fill the blanks in the collective cultural memory that historical narratives leave behind. Originally published in French, this new translation offers the English speaking world important access to a major work on Japan which has been greatly enriched by the translator's great accuracy and knowledge of English, French and Japanese language, history and culture. Japan's Postwar will appeal to students and scholars of Japanese Studies and Modern Japanese History as well as historians studying the world after 1945.

The Story Of The 'hussards" --It has long been assumed that France was dominated by the political left wing and by Existentialism throughout the 1940s and 1950s. This is the first book to re-evaluate the impact of the vigorous and unrepentant right-wing cultural and literary movement during the postwar period.
In this revealing study, the author concentrates on three neglected but significant writers who constitute the group known as the 'Hussards': Roger Nimier, Antoine Blondin and Jacques Laurent. He offers a detailed analysis of the work of the 'Hussards' and others on the fringe of this iconoclastic group who aggressively (and sometimes violently) opposed Existentialism while adopting a tradition from the 1920s full of nostalgia for lost values.
Students and scholars will find that this book fills an important gap in French literary and cultural history of the postwar period.

Presidential leadership in America can and does make a great deal of difference to what is debated and eventually legislated. At the same time presidents are obviously constrained by what is always a complex and difficult political environment. In this study Dr McKay examines the interaction between presidential policy preferences and the political environment, concentrating on welfare and urban policy and intergovernmental relations under Johnson, Nixon, Carter and Reagan. McKay traces the origins of domestic initiatives, assesses the intellectual coherence of policies and examines the ways in which the four presidents adapted their strategies according to their legislative fortunes and the experience of implementing policies. Throughout the work, McKay measures the independent influence of the White House on policy and draws conclusions for theories of American political development, in particular for the opportunities and constraints provided by the fragmentation of the New Deal political regime.

Unconventional war is an umbrella term which includes insurgencies, counter-insurgencies, terrorism and religious conflicts. Insurgencies and communal conflicts have become much more common in this region since 1947, and more people have died in South Asia due to unconventional wars than conventional warfare. The essays in this volume are organized in two sections. While the first section deals with insurgencies, counter-insurgencies and terrorism; the second section covers the religious aspects of the various intra-state conflicts which mar the multi-ethnic societies of South Asia.

When Harold Macmillan became prime minister in 1957, Britain had reached a critical point in its contemporary history. There was still evidence of Britain's status as a great power, yet the previous year's humiliation at Suez had undermined its credibility. By taking key areas of overseas policy - summitry, the Middle East, defence, Empire, and Europe - this volume looks at Macmillan's attempts to establish a new foreign policy agenda after Suez. Based on research in public and private archives in Britain, America and Germany, Harold Macmillan and Britain's World Role offers a critical reappraisal of British foreign policy between 1957 and 1963, addressing how successfully Macmillan answered his own key question: 'Why should the UK stay in the big game?'

Black Tulip is the dramatic story of history's top fighter ace, Luftwaffe pilot Erich Hartmann. It's also the story of how his service under Hitler was simplified and elevated to Western mythology during the Cold War. Over 1,404 wartime missions, Hartmann claimed a staggering 352 airborne kills, and his career contains all the dramas you would expect. There were the frostbitten fighter sweeps over the Eastern Front, drunken forays to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, a decade of imprisonment in the wretched Soviet POW camps, and further military service during the Cold War that ended with conflict and angst. Just when Hartmann’s second career was faltering, he was adopted by a network of writers and commentators personally invested in his welfare and reputation. These men, mostly Americans, published elaborate, celebratory stories about Hartmann and his elite fraternity of Luftwaffe pilots. With each dogfight tale put into print, Hartmann’s legacy became loftier and more secure, and his complicated service in support of Nazism faded away. A simplified, one-dimensional account of his life – devoid of the harder questions about allegiance and service under Hitler – has gone unchallenged for almost a generation. Black Tulip locates the ambiguous truth about Hartmann and so much of the German Wehrmacht in general: that many of these men were neither full-blown Nazis nor impeccable knights. They were complex, contradictory, and elusive. This book portrays a complex human rather than the heroic caricature we’re used to, and it argues that the tidy, polished hero stories we’ve inherited about men like Hartmann say as much about those who've crafted them as they do about the heroes themselves.

This volume examines the protest movements of 1968 from innovative perspectives. With contributions from leading social theorists the book reflects on the untold narratives of race, gender and sexuality and critically addresses the standard theoretical assumptions of 1968 to discuss overlooked perspectives.

This book provides a clear and lively account of how relations between Russia and America after World War Two fell into a Cold War. Assessing both the clash of ideas and personalities which brought about this confrontation the book highlights the emergences of a new mode of global politics. Looking at this conflict the book argues might help us to understand todays own troubled world.

This book analyses the distant and proximate causes of the 1978 revolution in Iran as well as the dynamics of power which it set in motion. The volume explains the complex and far-reaching processes which produced the revolution, beginning in the late nineteenth century. In explaining the more proximate causes of the revolution, the book analyses the nature of the old regime and its internal contradictions; the emergence of some fundamental conflicts of interest between the state and the upper class; the economic crisis of 1975-8 which made possible a revolutionary mass immobilisation; and the emergence of a new religious interpretation of political authority and the unusual spread of the ideology of political Islam among a segment of the modern intelligentsia. The volume relates the diverse aspects of class, ideology and economic structure in order to provide an understanding of the political processes.

States of Division analyses the division of Germany and the development of the Iron Curtain during the four and a half decades of the Cold War. The centerpiece of this global fault-line was the thousand-mile-long border dividing Germany into West and East. This long border traversed primarily rural peripheries and the development of division along it entailed protracted processes of social and cultural demarcation. Unlike the Berlin Wall, which sprang up overnight in the urban enclave under watchful eyes of Soviet and Western armies, the inter-German border evolved slowly through interactions between frontier residents and various state agencies. The division of Germany and of the world emerged through conflicts between everyday practices, economic necessities, policies of German and foreign governments, and their ability to push these policies through. The division of Germany was a multi-faceted process, which progressed slowly and unevenly. States of Division demonstrates that along with the crucial context of the Cold War, multiple historical and social frameworks are required to decipher division and explain how and where it took place. Dividing a modern integrated society along a thousand-mile border was not planned or intended by the allies and at no stage was agreed upon by East and West German authorities. It gave rise to contradictions and conflicts with practice and tradition, undermining economy and culture in the borderlands, and required protracted negotiations and considerable resources. It was not a fait accompli of Yalta or Potsdam, nor was it completed with the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. German division only stabilized as a sociopolitical fact through the inter-German compromise of the 1970s, which also planted the seeds of its undoing. Integrating local, regional and national perspectives, this volume tells a complex story, showing how diplomacy and policy affected daily practices and were affected by them.

Since the turn of the century Iran has experienced three major political upheavals in the struggle to democratize her political systems. The last revolution inaugurated an era of unprecedented turmoil and instead of fulfilling its democratic aim, paved the way for an even more despotic theocracy. To put the revolution in a proper perspective, some attempt is made to explain the reasons for Khomeini's success in acquiring first, the symbolic leadership of the anti-Shah revolution, and then, the monopolistic control of power in Iran. How and why the other claimants to power were shunted aside and later brutally repressed is a further theme for discussion. The domestic and external ramifications of the revolution are examined in detail; in particular the rise of the anti-American feeling which culminated in the hostage crisis. In conclusion, an analysis is offered of the instrumentalities of power available to the Islamic Republic, and several scenarios are explored in which Iran's competing forces may converge to determine whether this third revolution will finally succeed in subordinating political authority to popular democratic consent.

This invaluable account provides an excellent introduction to the Presidency of John F. Kennedy.

During the Cold War Italy witnessed the existence of an anomalous version of a civil conflict, defined as a 'creeping' or a 'low-intensity' civil war. This was due both to the ideological hatred which pervaded political activists both on the right and on the left and to the deliberate exacerbation of these divisions on the part of occult strategists. Political violence escalated, including bomb attacks against civilians, starting with a massacre in Milan, on 12 December 1969, and culminating with the massacre in Bologna, on 2 August 1980. Making use of the literature on national reconciliation and narrative psychology theory, this book examines the fight over the 'judicial' and the 'historical' truth in Italy today, through a contrasting analysis of judicial findings and the 'narratives of victimhood' prevalent among representatives of both the post- and the neo-fascist right. Anna Cento Bull is Professor of Italian History and Politics at the University of Bath. Her publications include Social Identities and Political Cultures in Italy (Oxford: Berghahn, 2000); The Lega Nord and The Northern Question in Italian Politics (London: Palgrave, 2001) (with M. Gilbert) and Speaking Out and Silencing: Culture, Society and Politics in Italy in the 1970s. (Legenda: Oxford, 2005) (edited jointly with A. Giorgio).

At the height of the first Cold War in the early 1950s, the western powers worried that occupied Austria might become "Europe's Korea" and feared a Communist takeover. The Soviets exploited their occupation zone for maximum reparations. American economic aid guaranteed Austria's survival and economic reconstruction. Their military assistance turned Austria into a "secret ally" of the West. Austrian diplomacy played a vital role in securing the Austrian treaty in bilateral negotiations with Stalin's successors in the Kremlin, demonstrating the leverage of the weak in the Cold War.

After Germany's reunification in 1989-90, the country faced not only the history and consequences of the nation's division during the Cold War but also the continuing burdensome legacy of the Nazi past and the Holocaust. This book explains why concerns that the Nazi past would be marginalized by the more recent Communist past proved to be misplaced. It examines the delicate East-West dynamics and the notion that the West sought to impose "victor's justice" (or history) on the East. More specifically, it examines, for the first time, the history and significance of two parliamentary commissions of inquiry created in the 1990s to investigate the divided past after 1945 and its effects on the reunified country. Not unlike "truth commissions" elsewhere, these inquiries provided an important forum for renegotiating contemporary Germany's relationship with multiple German pasts, including the Nazi period and the Holocaust. The ensuing debates and disagreements over the recent past, examined by the author, open up a window into the wider development of German memory, identity, and politics after the end of the Cold War.

Why did the Cuban Missile Crisis happen? How was it resolved? By focusing on the roles of a number of key individuals, such as JFK, Robert Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, and by using recently declassified materials, this book frames answers to these questions. In so doing, it presents a cluster of new findings and arguments, including a fresh interpretation of Khrushchev's motives for putting missiles in Cuba, new information on the mystery surrounding Senator Kenneth Keating's secret sources, and evidence indicating that JFK planned to carry out a military strike on Cuba at the start of the crisis.

Interdoc was established in 1963 by Western intelligence services as a multinational effort to coordinate an anti-communist offensive. Drawing on exclusive sources and the memories of its participants, this book charts Interdoc's campaign, the people and ideas that lay behind it and the rise and fall of this remarkable network during the Cold War.

Beginning soon after the implementation of the policies of the Great Leap Forward of 1958-1961, when the drive to collectivize and industrialize undermined the livelihoods of the vast majority of peasant workers, China's Great Famine was the worst famine in human history. In addition to claiming more than 45 million lives, it also led to the destruction of agriculture, industry, trade, and every aspect of human life, leaving large parts of the Chinese countryside scarred forever by human-created environmental disasters. Drawing on previously closed archives that have since been made inaccessible again, Zhou Xun offers readers, for the first time in English, access to the most vital archival documentation of the famine. For some time to come this documentary history may be the only publication available that contains the most crucial primary documents concerning the fate of the Chinese peasantry between 1957 and 1962. It covers everything from collectivization and survival strategies, including cannibalism, to selective killing and mass murder.

Shunsuke Tsurumi, one of Japan's most distinguished contemporary philosophers, continues his study of the intellectual and social history of modern Japan with this penetrating analysis of popular culture in the post-war years. Japanese manga (comics), manzai (dialogues), television, advertising and popular songs are the medium for a revealing examination of the many contradictory forces at work beneath the surface of an apparently uniform and universal culture. The author argues that the iconography of these popular forms has deep and significant implication for the development of Japanese national life in the post-growth years that lie ahead.

The period from 1945 to the present day may not constitute an American century, but it can be seen as the American Moment: the time when, for good or ill, the United States became the predominant political, military, economic and cultural power in the world. This revised and updated new edition introduces the historic and tumultuous developments in American politics, foreign policy, society and culture during this period. It includes coverage of key recent events, such as the: - 2008 election of Barack Obama - global recession - protracted war in Iraq and Afghanistan - rise of the internet - transformation of American Society and Culture - challenges of new immigration and multi-culturalism - changing global status of the US in the new millennium. Examining the American Moment in a global context, the authors emphasise the interaction between politics, society and culture. America Since 1945 encourages an awareness of how central currents in art, literature, film, theatre, intellectual history and media have developed alongside an understanding of political, economic and social change.