The Cold War : a world history / Odd Arne Westad.

Winner of the Bancroft Prize

Includes bibliographical references (pages 637-675) and index.

World making -- Starting points -- Tests of war -- Europe's asymmetries -- Reconstructions -- New Asia -- Korean tragedy -- Eastern spheres -- The making of the West -- China's scourge -- Breaking empires -- Kennedy's contingencies -- Encountering Vietnam -- The Cold War and Latin America -- The age of Brezhnev -- Nixon in Beijing -- The Cold War and India -- Middle East maelstroms -- Defeating détente -- European portents -- Gorbachev -- Global transformations -- European realities -- The world the Cold War made.

"We tend to think of the Cold War as a bounded conflict: a clash of two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, born out of the ashes of World War II and coming to a dramatic end with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But in this major new work, Bancroft Prize-winning scholar Odd Arne Westad argues that the Cold War must be understood as a global ideological confrontation, with early roots in the Industrial Revolution and ongoing repercussions around the world. In The Cold War, Westad offers a new perspective on a century when great power rivalry and ideological battle transformed every corner of our globe. From Soweto to Hollywood, Hanoi, and Hamburg, young men and women felt they were fighting for the future of the world. The Cold War may have begun on the perimeters of Europe, but it had its deepest reverberations in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, where nearly every community had to choose sides. And these choices continue to define economies and regimes across the world. Today, many regions are plagued with environmental threats, social divides, and ethnic conflicts that stem from this era. Its ideologies influence China, Russia, and the United States; Iraq and Afghanistan have been destroyed by the faith in purely military solutions that emerged from the Cold War. Stunning in its breadth and revelatory in its perspective, this book expands our understanding of the Cold War both geographically and chronologically, and offers an engaging new history of how today's world was created."--Amazon.com.