[KS] Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World

Frank Joseph Shulman fshulman at umd.edu
Thu Feb 19 14:38:09 EST 2015


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Subject: H-Asia: H-Asia Member publication: Cold War Crucible

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From: "Masuda, Hajimu" <hishm at nus.edu.sg<mailto:hishm at nus.edu.sg>>

I am pleased to share with my H-Asia colleagues news of the publication of my new book:

Masuda, Hajimu
_Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World_
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015
ISBN: 9780674598478

The end of World War II did not mean the arrival of peace. The major powers faced social upheaval at home, while anticolonial wars erupted around the world. American–Soviet relations grew chilly, but the meaning of the rivalry remained disputable. Cold War Crucible reveals the Korean War as the catalyst for a new postwar order. The conflict led people to believe in the Cold War as a dangerous reality, a belief that would define the fears of two generations.

In the international arena, North Korea’s aggression was widely interpreted as the beginning of World War III. At the domestic level, the conflict generated a wartime logic that created dividing lines between "us" and "them," precipitating waves of social purges to stifle dissent. The United States allowed McCarthyism to take root; Britain launched anti-labor initiatives; Japan conducted its Red Purge; and China cracked down on counterrevolutionaries. These attempts to restore domestic tranquility were not a product of the Cold War, Masuda Hajimu shows, but driving forces in creating a mindset for it. Alarmed by the idea of enemies from within and faced with the notion of a bipolar conflict that could quickly go from chilly to nuclear, ordinary people and policymakers created a fantasy of a Cold War world in which global and domestic order was paramount.

In discovering how policymaking and popular opinion combined to establish and propagate the new postwar reality, Cold War Crucible offers a history that reorients our understanding of what the Cold War really was.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: What Was the Cold War?
I. The Repercussions
   1. Naming the Unnamable
   2. Local Translation
II. The Social
   3. Cold War Fantasy
   4. Politics of Impression
   5. The Truth-Making Campaign
   6. Between Mobilization and Participation
III. The Simultaneity
   7. Social Warfare
   8. "Expose Enemies within Our Gates!"
   9. People’s War at Home
   10. Decolonization as Recolonization
Epilogue: The Cold War as Social Politics
Notes
Archives Consulted
Acknowledgments
Index

For further information:
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674598478

My essay on this book, "The Social Politics of Imagined Realities," is also available at:
http://t.co/ITaf6c0t9y

Masuda Hajimu, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of History
National University of Singapore (NUS)
Email: hishm at nus.edu.sg<mailto:hishm at nus.edu.sg>





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