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"United States -- Politics and government -- 1945-1953"
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A companion to Harry S. Truman
With contributions from the most accomplished scholars in the field, this fascinating companion to one of America's pivotal presidents assesses Harry S.Truman as a historical figure, politician, president and strategist.
eBook
The Fear Within
Sixty years ago political divisions in the United States ran even deeper than today's name-calling showdowns between the left and right. Back then, to call someone a communist was to threaten that person's career, family, freedom, and, sometimes, life itself. Hysteria about the \"red menace\" mushroomed as the Soviet Union tightened its grip on Eastern Europe, Mao Zedong rose to power in China, and the atomic arms race accelerated. Spy scandals fanned the flames, and headlines warned of sleeper cells in the nation's midst--just as it does today with the \"War on Terror.\"
In his new book,The Fear Within, Scott Martelle takes dramatic aim at one pivotal moment of that era. On the afternoon of July 20, 1948, FBI agents began rounding up twelve men in New York City, Chicago, and Detroit whom the U.S. government believed posed a grave threat to the nation--the leadership of the Communist Party-USA. After a series of delays, eleven of the twelve \"top Reds\" went on trial in Manhattan's Foley Square in January 1949.
The proceedings captivated the nation, but the trial quickly dissolved into farce. The eleven defendants were charged under the 1940 Smith Act with conspiring to teach the necessity of overthrowing the U.S. government based on their roles as party leaders and their distribution of books and pamphlets. In essence, they were on trial for their libraries and political beliefs, not for overt acts threatening national security. Despite the clear conflict with the First Amendment, the men were convicted and their appeals denied by the U.S. Supreme Court in a decision that gave the green light to federal persecution of Communist Party leaders--a decision the court effectively reversed six years later. But by then, the damage was done. So rancorous was the trial the presiding judge sentenced the defense attorneys to prison terms, too, chilling future defendants' access to qualified counsel.
Martelle's story is a compelling look at how American society, both general and political, reacts to stress and, incongruously, clamps down in times of crisis on the very beliefs it holds dear: the freedoms of speech and political belief. At different points in our history, the executive branch, Congress, and the courts have subtly or more drastically eroded a pillar of American society for the politics of the moment. It is not surprising, then, thatThe Fear Withintakes on added resonance in today's environment of suspicion and the decline of civil rights under the U.S. Patriot Act.
eBook
Truman, Congress, and Korea
Three days after North Korean premier Kim Il Sung launched a
massive military invasion of South Korea on June 24, 1950,
President Harry S. Truman responded, dispatching air and naval
support to South Korea. Initially, Congress cheered his swift
action; but, when China entered the war to aid North Korea, the
president and many legislators became concerned that the conflict
would escalate into another world war, and the United States agreed
to a truce in 1953. The lack of a decisive victory caused the
Korean War to quickly recede from public attention. However, its
impact on subsequent American foreign policy was profound.
In Truman, Congress, and Korea: The Politics of America's
First Undeclared War , Larry Blomstedt provides the first
in-depth domestic political history of the conflict, from the
initial military mobilization, to Congress's failed attempts to
broker a cease-fire, to the political fallout in the 1952 election.
During the war, President Truman faced challenges from both
Democratic and Republican legislators, whose initial support
quickly collapsed into bitter and often public infighting. For his
part, Truman dedicated inadequate attention to relationships on
Capitol Hill early in his term and also declined to require a
formal declaration of war from Congress, advancing the shift toward
greater executive power in foreign policy.
The Korean conflict ended the brief period of bipartisanship in
foreign policy that began during World War II. It also introduced
Americans to the concept of limited war, which contrasted sharply
with the practice of requiring unconditional surrenders in previous
conflicts. Blomstedt's study explores the changes wrought during
this critical period and the ways in which the war influenced US
international relations and military interventions during the Cold
War and beyond.
eBook
Cold War Modernists
European intellectuals of the 1950s dismissed American culture as nothing more than cowboy movies and the A-bomb. In response, American cultural diplomats tried to show that the United States had something to offer beyond military might and commercial exploitation. Through literary magazines, traveling art exhibits, touring musical shows, radio programs, book translations, and conferences, they deployed the revolutionary aesthetics of modernism to prove—particularly to the leftists whose Cold War loyalties they hoped to secure—that American art and literature were aesthetically rich and culturally significant. Yet by repurposing modernism, American diplomats and cultural authorities turned the avant-garde into the establishment. They remade the once revolutionary movement into a content-free collection of artistic techniques and styles suitable for middlebrow consumption. Cold War Modernists documents how the CIA, the State Department, and private cultural diplomats transformed modernist art and literature into pro-Western propaganda during the first decade of the Cold War. Drawing on interviews, previously unknown archival materials, and the stories of such figures and institutions as William Faulkner, Stephen Spender, Irving Kristol, James Laughlin, and Voice of America, Barnhisel reveals how the U.S. government reconfigured modernism as a trans-Atlantic movement, a joint endeavor between American and European artists, with profound implications for the art that followed and for the character of American identity.
eBook
Henry A. Wallace's criticism of America's atomic monopoly, 1945-1948
Art and life in India have been inextricably intertwined from ancient times to the present day. Art as a way of life, as ritual, as decoration and as unity with the Sublime bore testament to the socio-cultural milieu; the high level of sophistication that developed in ancient India was reflected in the arts in a holistic light. The arts, thus, strived to hone man's intellectual sensibilities, thus raising him to the level of the transcendental, which in India was Brahma or ultimate reality. This book brings forth the popular theories of Indian aesthetics and Indian poetics.
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