Mayterm 2011
Course information | Political Science Faculty | History Faculty | The Great War | The Cold War
The Cold War
The Second World War, in many important ways, was a continuation of the Great War, for the renewed conflict of 1939-1945 only intensified the social and cultural changes seen after 1918. The Second World War brought more military and civilian suffering and produced physical devastation on an even grander scale. It also brought something new—the specter of global destruction with nuclear weapons. Preventing their future use gave birth to a new kind of warfare, at once more abstract, more strategic, more expensive, more long term, and more terrifying. This conflict, lasting from 1945 to 1990, came to be known as the Cold War.
Only in the last ten years have we achieved enough critical distance to begin to understand the global nature of the Cold War. Only in the last fifteen years have archives been opened. Though much still remains shrouded by the mysteries of national security, the main outlines of the conflict—and its basic cultural effects—are beginning to come into focus. The global scale of the conflict makes its mastery difficult, for we are confronted with overt and clandestine actions in such far-flung places as Angola, Vietnam, Turkey, Cuba, Nicaragua, Panama, Argentina and, of course, the heart of the conflict, Eastern Europe, the ground zero of Cold War politics and military confrontation. As an entry point into understanding the Cold War, we will travel along a critically important section of the Iron Curtain, an area known as the Fulda Gap, the area in which World War Three was expected to break out. The European Union has recently opened the entire length of the Iron Curtain as a bike path, and we will travel about 50 miles of the Iron Curtain on bikes, stopping at museums, check points and observation points, and staying at small pensions where troops on both of the divide were billeted. By experiencing the strategic center of this global war, we will be prepared to understand the complicated and interrelated global rivalry in both its military and cultural aspects.
