Recommended Resources
Postwar Politics and the Origins of the Cold War
The books, articles, films, and websites in this section will enhance the materials included on our website for this era of American history. Many of the books are by the historians whose essays and lectures you have read and listened to here and offer in-depth studies of the topics that have caught your interest. The websites and other resources open new ways to explore American history and take advantage of new interpretations and new technologies to enhance classroom or at-home learning.
Lawrence, Mark Atwood. Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Goode, Bill. Infighting in the UAW: The 1946 Election and the Ascendancy of Walter Reuther. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994.
Matthews, Christopher. Kennedy & Nixon: The Rivalry That Shaped Postwar America. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.
Gaddis, John Lewis. The Cold War: A New History. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.
Gellman, Irwin F. The Contender, Richard Nixon: The Congress Years, 1946–1952. New York: Free Press, 1999.
Spalding, Elizabeth Edwards. The First Cold Warrior: Harry Truman, Containment, and the Remaking of Liberal Internationalism. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006.
Lichtenstein, Nelson. The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor. New York: Basic Books, 1995.
Sugrue, Thomas J. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Sis, Peter. The Wall: Growing Up behind the Iron Curtain. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
United States. President’s Committee on Civil Rights. To Secure These Rights: The Report of Harry S Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights. Edited by Steven F. Lawson. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2004.
Recommended Resources from Other Sub-Eras
Halliwell, Martin. American Culture in the 1950s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.
O’Neill, William L. American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945–1960. New York: Free Press, 1986.
Castronovo, David. Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit: Books from the 1950s that Made American Culture. New York: Continuum, 2004.
Parmet, Herbert S. Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy. New York: Dial Press, 1980.
Sorensen, Theodore C. Kennedy. New York: Harper Perennial Political Classics, 2009.
Stephanson, Anders. Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995.
Morris, Roger. Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1990.
Parmet, Herbert S. Richard Nixon and His America. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1990.
Young, William H. The 1950s. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004.
Hanhimaki, Jussi M. and Odd Arne Westad, eds. The Cold War: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Westad, Odd Arne. The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Delbanco, Andrew. The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.