Subject and Course Guides: U.S. History After 1865: The Cold War

Online Resources

Cold War International History Project
The Cold War International History Project supports the full and prompt release of historical materials by governments on all sides of the Cold War. Through an award winning Digital Archive, the Project allows scholars, journalists, students, and the interested public to reassess the Cold War and its many contemporary legacies. It is part of the Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program.
Cold War Origins
Wilson Center Digital Archive- This collection of primary source documents discusses international relations during World War II and the years shortly after. It begins with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed in 1939 and ends with documents from the 1950’s.
FBI Records: The Vault
The Vault is our new FOIA Library, containing 6,700 documents and other media that have been scanned from paper into digital copies so you can read them in the comfort of your home or office.

Included here are many new FBI files that have been released to the public but never added to this website; dozens of records previously posted on our site but removed as requests diminished; files from our previous FOIA Library, and new, previously unreleased files.
Freedom of Infomration Act Electronic Reading Room
The FOIA Electronic Reading Room is provided as a public service by the Directorate of Digital Innovation's Information Management Services.
National Archives Presidential Libraries
Records of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC)
The House Committee on Un-American Activities, most commonly referred to as HUAC, was created as a permanent standing committee on January 3, 1945.

Databases

Gale OneFile: War and Terrorism
Researchers accessing the more than 1.7 million articles in Gale OneFile: War and Terrorism will gain valuable insight into conflicts and their causes, impact, and perception on a global scale. This definitive collection for analysts, risk management professionals, and students of military science, history, and social science is comprised of more than 200 subject-appropriate, full-text periodicals that are updated daily.
JSTOR: The Scholarly Journal Archive
JSTOR provides access to more than 12 million academic journal articles, books, and primary sources in 75 disciplines.
JSTOR (Journal Storage) is an archive collection of over 620 full-text scholarly journals primarily from university presses and professional society publishers. Additional titles are added to the collection as back files are digitized. Subject areas include: African American Studies, Anthropology, Asian Studies, Botany, Ecology, Economics, Education, Finance, Folklore, History, History of Science Technology, Language Literature, Mathematics, Philosophy, Political Science, Population Studies, Public Policy Administration, Science, Slavic Studies, Sociology, Statistics.
Military & Government Collection
Focused on current military affairs, covering areas of engineering, public affairs, public policy, and international affairs
This database is focused on current military affairs, covering areas of engineering, public affairs, public policy, and international affairs. Includes full text for nearly 300 journals, 245 pamphlets, and CountryWatch country reports. Indexing and abstracting is provided for nearly 400 titles.
North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories
This collection includes 2,162 authors and approximately 100,000 pages of information, so providing a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950.
Composed of contemporaneous letters and diaries, oral histories, interviews, and other personal narratives, the series provides a rich source for scholars in a wide range of disciplines. In selected cases, users will be able to hear the actual audio voices of the immigrants. The collection will be particularly useful to researchers, because much of the original material is difficult to find, poorly indexed, and unpublished; most bibliographies of the immigrant focus on secondary research; and few oral histories have been published.
This work in progress is composed of the personal narratives of immigrants to North America, including Canada
ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times (1851 - 2019)
ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times (1851-2019) Historical Papers: The New York Times (1851-2019) offers full page and article images with searchable full text back to the first issue
ProQuest Historical Newspapers---The New York Times is a full-image archive that brings the entire historical run of The New York Times, the definitive voice of American journalism since 1851.
America: History and Life (Full-Text)
Provides indexing, abstracts, and full-text for U.S. and Canadian historical and cultural literature, from prehistory to present. NOTE: Only 6 simultaneous users allowed.
America: History and Life is a comprehensive source for U.S. and Canadian history and culture, from prehistoric times to the present. The database contains indexing, abstracts, and full-text for over 1,700 journals as well as books, book reviews, theses/dissertations, and film project reviews. A strong English-language journal coverage is balanced by an international perspective on topics and events, including English abstracts of articles published in more than 40 languages. This database is an excellent bibliographic reference tool for students and scholars of American history, Canadian history, popular culture, American studies, literature/folklore, genealogy, women's studies/gender studies, multicultural studies, anthropology, sociology, and the history of science. The database corresponds to the print America: History and Life, which is produced by ABC-CLIO. Updated regularly.

NOTE: Only 6 simultaneous users allowed.

Secondary Research - In our Collection

Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race by Richard Lee Rhodes
ISBN: 9780375414138

Publication Date: 2007-10-09

From the Pulitzer Prize-wining author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb comes this story of the postwar superpower arms race, which peaked during the Reagan-Gorbachev decade when the United States and the Soviet Union came within minutes of nuclear war. Illustrated.
By the Bomb's Early Light by Paul Boyer
ISBN: 0807875708

Publication Date: 2005-10-21

Originally published in 1985, By the Bomb's Early Light is the first book to explore the cultural 'fallout' in America during the early years of the atomic age. Paul Boyer argues that the major aspects of the long-running debates about nuclear armament and disarmament developed and took shape soon after the bombing of Hiroshima.
The Cold War and the Color Line by Thomas Borstelmann
ISBN: 9780674005976

Publication Date: 2002-01-10

The Cold War and the Color Line is the first comprehensive examination of how the Cold War intersected with the final destruction of global white supremacy. Thomas Borstelmann pays close attention to the two Souths--Southern Africa and the American South--as the primary sites of white authority's last stand. He reveals America's efforts to contain the racial polarization that threatened to unravel the anticommunist western alliance. In so doing, he recasts the history of American race relations in its true international context, one that is meaningful and relevant for our own era of globalization.
Elvis's Army: Cold War GIs and the Atomic Battlefield by Brian McAllister Linn
ISBN: 0674973739

Publication Date: 2016-09-06

When the U.S. Army drafted Elvis Presley in 1958, it quickly set about transforming the King of Rock and Roll from a rebellious teen idol into a clean-cut GI. Trading in his gold-trimmed jacket for standard-issue fatigues, Elvis became a model soldier in an army facing the unprecedented challenge of building a fighting force for the Atomic Age.
Fall-Out Shelters for the Human Spirit: American Art and the Cold War by Michael L. Krenn
ISBN: 0807829455

Publication Date: 2005-06-06

During the Cold War, culture became another weapon in America's battle against communism. Part of that effort in cultural diplomacy included a program to arrange the exhibition of hundreds of American paintings overseas. Michael L. Krenn studies the successes, failures, contradictions, and controversies that arose when the U.S. government and the American art world sought to work together to make an international art program a reality between the 1940s and the 1970s.
For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, The Soviet Union, and the Cold War by Melvyn P. Leffler
ISBN: 9780809097173

Publication Date: 2007-09-18

To the amazement of the public, pundits, and even the policymakers themselves, the ideological and political conflict that had endangered the world for half a century came to an end in 1990. How did that happen? What caused the cold war in the first place, and why did it last as long as it did? The distinguished historian Melvyn P. Leffler homes in on four crucial episodes when American and Soviet leaders considered modulating, avoiding, or ending hostilities and asks why they failed: Stalin and Truman devising new policies after 1945; Malenkov and Eisenhower exploring the chance for peace after Stalin's death in 1953; Kennedy, Khrushchev, and LBJ trying to reduce tensions after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962; and Brezhnev and Carter aiming to sustain detente after the Helsinki Conference of 1975. All these leaders glimpsed possibilities for peace, yet they allowed ideologies, political pressures, the expectations of allies and clients, the dynamics of the international system, and their own fearful memories to trap them in a cycle of hostility that seemed to have no end. Leffler's important book illuminates how Reagan, Bush, and, above all, Gorbachev finally extricated themselves from the policies and mind-sets that had imprisoned their predecessors, and were able to reconfigure Soviet-American relations after decades of confrontation.
Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy by Robert D. Dean
ISBN: 1558493123

Publication Date: 2001-12-01

This provocative book begins with a question about the Vietnam War. How is it, asks Robert D. Dean, that American policymakers—men who prided themselves on "hardheaded pragmatism" and shunned "fuzzy idealism"—could have committed the nation to such a ruinous, costly, and protracted war? The answer, he argues, lies not simply in the imperatives of anticommunist ideology or in any reasonable calculation of national interest.
Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters by Kate Brown
ISBN: 0199855773

Publication Date: 2013-01-01

While many transnational histories of the nuclear arms race have been written, Kate Brown provides the first definitive account of the great plutonium disasters of the United States and the Soviet Union. In Plutopia, Brown draws on official records and dozens of interviews to tell the extraordinary stories of Richland, Washington and Ozersk, Russia-the first two cities in the world to produce plutonium.