THE COLD WAR AND THE 1950S

THE COLD WAR AND THE 1950S

How did the Cold War affect notions of freedom in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s? In the context of a geopolitical struggle with Soviet communism, how did Americans come to define freedom at home? How did they seek to spread it abroad – and at what cost?

Required reading: Voices of Freedom

• Document 158 – Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (1945)
• Document 159 – The Truman Doctrine (1947)
• Document 161 – Walter Lippman, A Critique of Containment (1947)
• Document 164 – Joseph R. McCarthy on the Attack (1950)
• Document 167 – Richard M. Nixon, “What Freedom Means to Us” (1959)
• Document 171 – C. Wright Mills on “Cheerful Robots” (1959)
• Document 172 – Allen Ginsberg, “Howl” (1955)
• Document 173 – Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955)