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Massachusetts Democratic senator John F. Kennedy won the 1960 presidential election partly by assailing the torpor many contemporary observers believed had overcome the Eisenhower administration. The Cold War held dan gers as perilous as any conflict in which shots were fired, and Kennedy raised the horrifying specter that the United States might lose: "I think that there is a danger that history will make a judgment that these were the days when the tide began to run out for the United States," Kennedy stated. "These were the times the Communist tide began to pour in" (1). Over the next thirty years, many high officials voiced variations on this theme of dread and threat. Some leading Americans inside and outside of gov ernment expressed doubts about the magnitude of the threat posed by communism and the Soviets, while an even greater number considered the cost of the Cold War born by the United States to be too high. The result was the breakdown of a broad American consensus over the wisdom of a policy of confrontation with the Soviet Union. In the end, of course, the tide ran out on Soviet-style communism. Surveying the last three decades of the Cold War from the brief period of time that has elapsed since it ended, the follow ing questions stand out. In ascending order of complexity and controversy, they are: What policies did the participants follow? How and why did these policies alter over time? What effects did the policies of the U.S. and the Soviet Union have on altering the behavior of their adversary? What effects did the last thirty years of the Cold War have on the political cultures of the United States and the So

Notes on ContributorsIntroduction. (Robert D. Schulzinger)1. Ideas and Foreign Affairs. (H.W. Brands)2. As Far As We Can," Culture and US Foreign Relations. (Susan Brewer)3. International Environmental Issues. (Kurk Dorsey)4. The Early National Period, 1775-1815. (Peter P. Hill)5. American Expansion, 1815-1860. (William E. Weeks)6. The United States and Imperialism. (Frank Ninkovich)7. Relations with Africa since 1900. (Andrew DeRoche)8. History As Victim, The Sorry State of the Study of US-Japanese Relations to 1945. (Michael A. Barnhart)9. The United States and Latin America, 1889-1941. (Mark T. Gilderhus)10. Woodrow Wilson and World War I. (Lloyd E. Ambrosius)11. Recent Explorations Concerning the Interwar Period. (Justus Doenecke)12. World War II. (Mark A. Stoler)13. The Early Cold War. (Jeremi Suri))14. The United States and Latin America, 1941-1960. (Darlene Rivas) 15. From Containment to Containment? Understanding U.S. China Relations since 1949. (Evelyn Goh and Rosemary Foot)16. The Korean War. (James I. Matray)17. Foreign Relations in the 1950s. (Richard H. Immerman)18. The Vietnam War. (David L. Anderson)19. Beyond Vietnam: The 1960s. (Randall B. Woods)20. The Middle East since 1967. (Peter L. Hahn)21. The United States and Latin America since 1961. (Stephen G. Rabe)22. Presidential Elections from the Cold War. (Melvin Small)23. The Era of Detente. (Keith L. Nelson)24. Nationalism and Regionalism in the Era of Globalization, U.S. Relations with South and Southeast Asia, 1975-2000. (Robert J. McMahon)25. Conclusion. (Robert D. Schulzinger)Bibliography.Index

It used to be obvious. History happened. People's memories were true or false or some mixture of the two. The historian's task consisted of discovering what happened and shaping a coherent narrative. That job often involved exploring participants' memories of actual events. But historians regularly affirmed that contemporaneous, documentary (customarily written) evidence gave a truer, more faithful, or more accurate account of what actually happened than did individuals' fallible memories. Historians considered the written record produced at the time to be rich and immutable. Traditionally-trained historians did not dismiss or ignore personal memories, but they were on their guard to consider them malleable, fragile, and, worst of all in the positivist tradition, inaccurate. We now know that this traditional view of the relationship between events, documents, memories and history is not so much obvious as it is simplistic. As Peter Burke, a historian who made uses of popular and collective memories, observed in 1989 “both history and memory are becoming increasingly problematic.” Where once remembering the past and writing about it were considered to be straightforward, transparent activities, now “neither memories nor histories seem objective any longer.” Historians and others engaged in recollecting the past consciously and unconsciously make judgments about what is important, and therefore worth recalling, and what is trivial. History and memory are both considered socially conditioned.