History - Cold War Interpretations: The Post Cold War approach

Defiintion of the Post Cold War Approach

• Emerged in the 2000s, due largely to the opening of Cold-War era archives in the former USSR and elsewhere in the world.
• A move away from assigning blame and inevitability, to consider instead, the Cold War in the wider context of historical events of the 20th Century - cultural, technological and ideological.
• Also looking at non USA and USSR perspectives.

As Odd Arne Westad, co-editor of the Cambridge History of the Cold War (2010) has written:

"Very few of our contributors believe that a "definitive" history of the Cold War is possible (or indeed that it should be possible). But a heterogeneous approach creates a strong need for contextualization.... First and foremost we need to situate the Cold War within the wider history of the twentieth century in a global perspective. We need to indicate how Cold War conflicts connect to broader trends in social, economic, and intellectual history as well as to the political and military developments of the longer term of which it forms a part."

Westad, Odd Arne (2010). "The Cold War and the international history of the twentieth century". In Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, eds., The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Volume 1: Origins. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. pp. 1–19. ISBN 978-0-521-83719-4.

Magazines and websites

• The New International History of the Cold War: Three (Possible) Paradigms 
  (An article questioning the degree to which the Cold War ought to be put at the centre of the history of the late twentieth century.)
• The Cold War in Asia and the Americas, Modern History Review, April 2005, pp 29-33, Tanya Harmer
• The Cold War: A Post-Cold War History, Harlan Davidson Publishers, Illinois, USA, 2005, Ralph B Levering (available full text on Questia Schools)

• We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, OUP, Oxford, 1998, John Lewis Gaddis