Nature and the Iron Curtain PDF Download

Author: Astrid Mignon Kirchhof
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822986485
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
In Nature and the Iron Curtain, the authors contrast communist and capitalist countries with respect to their environmental politics in the context of the Cold War. Its chapters draw from archives across Europe and the U.S. to present new perspectives on the origins and evolution of modern environmentalism on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The book explores similarities and differences among several nations with different economies and political systems, and highlights connections between environmental movements in Eastern and Western Europe.

Author: Astrid M. Eckert
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190690054
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 445

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Book Description
West Germany and the Iron Curtain takes a fresh look at the history of the Federal Republic and the German re-unification process from the spatial perspective of the West German borderlands that emerged along the volatile inter-German border after 1945. The book is the first environmental history of the Iron Curtain.

Author: Dóra Vargha
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108420842
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Through the lens of polio, Dóra Vargha looks anew at international health, communism and Cold War politics. This title is also available as Open Access.

Author: Anne Applebaum
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385536437
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 803

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Book Description
In the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag, acclaimed journalist Anne Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking history of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its sway. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union to its surprise and delight found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. In Iron Curtain, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. She draws on newly opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts translated for the first time to portray in devastating detail the dilemmas faced by millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief and took away everything they had accumulated. Today the Soviet Bloc is a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics Applebaum captures in the electrifying pages of Iron Curtain.

Author: Yale Richmond
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271046679
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Some fifty thousand Soviets visited the United States under various exchange programs between 1958 and 1988. They came as scholars and students, scientists and engineers, writers and journalists, government and party officials, musicians, dancers, and athletes&—and among them were more than a few KGB officers. They came, they saw, they were conquered, and the Soviet Union would never again be the same. Cultural Exchange and the Cold War describes how these exchange programs (which brought an even larger number of Americans to the Soviet Union) raised the Iron Curtain and fostered changes that prepared the way for Gorbachev's glasnost, perestroika, and the end of the Cold War. This study is based upon interviews with Russian and American participants as well as the personal experiences of the author and others who were involved in or administered such exchanges. Cultural Exchange and the Cold War demonstrates that the best policy to pursue with countries we disagree with is not isolation but engagement.

Author: Astrid M. Eckert
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190690062
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
West Germany and the Iron Curtain takes a fresh look at the history of Cold War Germany and the German reunification process from the spatial perspective of the West German borderlands that emerged along the volatile inter-German border after 1945. These border regions constituted the Federal Republic's most sensitive geographical space where it had to confront partition and engage its socialist neighbor East Germany in concrete ways. Each issue that arose in these borderlands - from economic deficiencies, border tourism, environmental pollution, landscape change, and the siting decision for a major nuclear facility - was magnified and mediated by the presence of what became the most militarized border of its day, the Iron Curtain. In topical chapters, the book addresses the economic consequences of the border for West Germany, which defined the border regions as depressed areas, and examines the cultural practice of western tourism to the Iron Curtain. At the heart of this deeply-researched book stands an environmental history of the Iron Curtain that explores transboundary pollution, landscape change, and a planned nuclear industrial site at Gorleben that was meant to bring jobs into the depressed border regions. The book traces these subjects across the caesura of 1989/90, thereby integrating the "long" postwar era with the post-unification decades. As Eckert demonstrates, the borderlands that emerged with partition and disappeared with reunification did not merely mirror some larger developments in the Federal Republic's history but actually helped to shape them.

Author: Jennifer M. Hudson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781498559263
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This study examines cases of rhetorical antagonisms and collaborations between the United States and the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War. The author analyzes relations from cultural and political angles and investigates mutual perspectives at both the government and grassroots levels.

Author: Antonina Duridanova
Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
ISBN: 1649521103
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Burning with desire to share the value of freedom, Antonina takes you from her plight in communist Bulgaria to the free shores of America. Following unfortunate events of life in a totalitarian regime in Bulgaria, Antonina bids goodbye to her homeland and flees to the Western world. She provides true experiences and observations of what life is in a communist society-her family's lands and cattle being confiscated by the agricultural labor cooperatives; the censorship of the press and any literal, artistic, and scientific works from the West; religion being prohibited; and any deviation from the norm leading to detention in a labor camp. Her last crossing of the Bulgarian-Yugoslavian border almost costs Antonina her life and makes up her mind to never go back. She describes her life as an immigrant at the refugee camp in Traiskirchen, Austria, while waiting for an American visa. Antonina is ecstatic when the plane cruises over the Statue of Liberty and lands in the most amazing city in the world-New York. She describes how she could taste, smell, feel, and touch freedom as she gets off the plane, ready to embark on new adventures. Antonina gets educated and becomes a good specialist in taxation, working for the United States Treasury Department. Ultimately, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, she is invited to go back to Bulgaria and fix a broken tax system as a representative of the United States government. Her work in the newly democratic society of Bulgaria paved the way for the country to become a member of NATO, escaping Soviet influence, and later being accepted in the family of the European Union. 20

Author: Anna McWilliams
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789186069780
Category : Cold War
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
The Iron Curtain was seen as the divider between East and West in Cold War Europe. The term refers to a material reality but it is also a metaphor; a metaphor that has become so powerful that it tends to mark our historical understanding of the period. Through the archaeological study of two areas that can be considered part of the former Iron Curtain, the Czech-Austrian border and the Italian-Slovenian border, this research investigates the relationship between the material and the metaphor of the Iron Curtain. As a study of the archaeology of the contemporary past this thesis brings forward methodological issues when dealing with many different sources as well as general reflections on our historical understanding.

Author: Edward K. Snajdr
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295800542
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
As societies around the world are challenged to respond to ever growing environmental crises, it has become increasingly important for activists, policy makers, and environmental practitioners to understand the dynamic relationship between environmental movements and the state. In communist Eastern Europe, environmental activism fueled the rise of democratic movements and the overthrow of totalitarianism. Yet, as this study of environmentalism in Slovakia shows, concern for the environment declined during the post-communist period, an ironic victim of its own earlier success. Through ethnographic interviews and archival materials, Edward Snajdr explains why Slovakia's ecology movement, so strong under socialism, fell apart so rapidly despite the persistence of serious environmental problems in the region. Synthesizing theory in anthropology and political ecology, he suggests that the fate of environmentalism in Slovakia marks the beginning of a global post-ecological age, where nature is culturally maginalized in new ways. In addition to its significance for policy makers, this book will be a valuable resource for anthropologists, sociologists, political ecologists, and scholars of East European and post-Soviet studies.