The Cold War and the United States Information Agency PDF Download

Author: Nicholas J. Cull
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521819970
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book provides an exhaustive account of America's public diplomacy during the Cold War.

Author: Wilson P. Dizard
Publisher: Lynne Rienner Publishers
ISBN: 9781588262882
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Public diplomacy - the uncertain art of winning public support abroad for one's government and its foreign policies - constitutes a critical instrument of U.S. policy in the wake of the Bush administration's recent military interventions and its renunciation of widely accepted international accords. Wilson Dizard Jr. offers the first comprehensive account of public diplomacy's evolution within the U.S. foreign policy establishment, ranging from World War II to the present. Dizard focuses on the U.S. Information Agency and its precursor, the Office of War Information. Tracing the political ups and downs determining the agency's trajectory, he highlights its instrumental role in creating the policy and programs underpinning today's public diplomacy, as well as the people involved. The USIA was shut down in 1999, but it left an important legacy of what works and what doesn't in presenting U.S. policies and values to the rest of the world. Inventing Public Diplomacy is an unparalleled history of U.S. efforts at organized international propaganda.

Author: Gregory M. Tomlin
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1612347711
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
In March 1961 America’s most prominent journalist, Edward R. Murrow, ended a quarter-century career with the Columbia Broadcasting System to join the administration of John F. Kennedy as director of the United States Information Agency (USIA). Charged with promoting a positive image abroad, the agency sponsored overseas research programs, produced documentaries, and operated the Voice of America to spread the country’s influence throughout the world. As director of the USIA, Murrow hired African Americans for top spots in the agency and leveraged his celebrity status at home to challenge all Americans to correct the scourge of domestic racism that discouraged developing countries, viewed as strategic assets, from aligning with the West. Using both overt and covert propaganda programs, Murrow forged a positive public image for Kennedy administration policies in an unsettled era that included the rise of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and support for Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem. Murrow’s Cold War tackles an understudied portion of Murrow’s life, reveals how one of America’s most revered journalists improved the global perception of the United States, and exposes the importance of public diplomacy in the advancement of U.S. foreign policy.

Author: Nicholas J. Cull
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137105364
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
Using newly declassified archives and interviews with practitioners, Nicholas J. Cull has pieced together the story of the final decade in the life of the United States Information Agency, revealing the decisions and actions that brought the United States' apparatus for public diplomacy into disarray.

Author: Laura A. Belmonte
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 081220123X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
In 1955, the United States Information Agency published a lavishly illustrated booklet called My America. Assembled ostensibly to document "the basic elements of a free dynamic society," the booklet emphasized cultural diversity, political freedom, and social mobility and made no mention of McCarthyism or the Cold War. Though hyperbolic, My America was, as Laura A. Belmonte shows, merely one of hundreds of pamphlets from this era written and distributed in an organized attempt to forge a collective defense of the "American way of life." Selling the American Way examines the context, content, and reception of U.S. propaganda during the early Cold War. Determined to protect democratic capitalism and undercut communism, U.S. information experts defined the national interest not only in geopolitical, economic, and military terms. Through radio shows, films, and publications, they also propagated a carefully constructed cultural narrative of freedom, progress, and abundance as a means of protecting national security. Not simply a one-way look at propaganda as it is produced, the book is a subtle investigation of how U.S. propaganda was received abroad and at home and how criticism of it by Congress and successive presidential administrations contributed to its modification.

Author: Nicholas J Schlosser
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252097785
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Founded as a counterweight to the Communist broadcasters in East Germany, Radio in the American Sector (RIAS) became one of the most successful public information operations conducted against the Soviet Bloc. Cold War on the Airwaves examines the Berlin-based organization's history and influence on the political worldview of the people--and government--on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Nicholas J. Schlosser draws on broadcast transcripts, internal memoranda, listener letters, and surveys by the U.S. Information Agency to profile RIAS. Its mission: to undermine the German Democratic Republic with propaganda that, ironically, gained in potency by obeying the rules of objective journalism. Throughout, Schlosser examines the friction inherent in such a contradictory project and propaganda's role in shaping political culture. He also portrays how RIAS's primarily German staff influenced its outlook and how the organization both competed against its rivals in the GDR and pushed communist officials to alter their methods in order to keep listeners. From the occupation of Berlin through the airlift to the construction of the Berlin Wall, Cold War on the Airwaves offers an absorbing view of how public diplomacy played out at a flashpoint of East-West tension.

Author: Yale Richmond
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271031573
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Some fifty thousand Soviets visited the United States under various exchange programs between 1958 and 1988. They came as scholars and students, scientists and engineers, writers and journalists, government and party officials, musicians, dancers, and athletes—and among them were more than a few KGB officers. They came, they saw, they were conquered, and the Soviet Union would never again be the same. Cultural Exchange and the Cold War describes how these exchange programs (which brought an even larger number of Americans to the Soviet Union) raised the Iron Curtain and fostered changes that prepared the way for Gorbachev's glasnost, perestroika, and the end of the Cold War. This study is based upon interviews with Russian and American participants as well as the personal experiences of the author and others who were involved in or administered such exchanges. Cultural Exchange and the Cold War demonstrates that the best policy to pursue with countries we disagree with is not isolation but engagement.

Author: Walter L. Hixson
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312176808
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
During the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, Washington policymakers aspired to destabilize the Soviet and East European Communist Party regimes by implementing programs of psychological warfare and gradual cultural infiltration. In focusing on American propaganda and cultural infiltration of the Soviet empire in these years, Parting the Curtain emerges as a groundbreaking study of certain aspects of US Cold War diplomacy never before examined.

Author: Susan A. Brewer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199753962
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Why America Fights explores how the U.S. government has sold war aims designed to rally public support throughout the 20th century.

Author:
Publisher: Aperture
ISBN: 9781597115339
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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One of the frankest books ever done on South Africa. -Robert Cromie, Chicago Tribune First published in the US in 1967 and in Britain in 1968, House of Bondage presented images from South Africa that shocked the world. The young African photographer Ernest Cole had left his country at 26 to find an audience for his stunning exposure of the system of racial dominance known as apartheid. In 185 photographs, Cole's book showed from the vantage point of the oppressed how the system closely regulated and controlled the lives of the black majority. He saw every aspect of this oppression with a searching eye and a passionate heart. House of Bondage is a milestone in the history of documentary photography, even though it was immediately banned in South Africa. In a Chicago Tribune review, Robert Cromie described it as "one of the frankest books ever done on South Africa--with photographs by a native of that country who would be most unwise to attempt to return for some years." Cole died in exile in 1990 as the regime was collapsing, never knowing when his portrait of his homeland would finally find its way home. Not until the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg mounted enlarged pages of the book on its walls in 2001 were his people able to view these pictures, which are as powerful and provocative today as they were 50 years ago. Ernest Cole was born near Pretoria, South Africa, in 1940. Leaving school at 17 to become a photographer, he secured staff jobs and freelance assignments for newspapers and magazines for black people--honing his skills with a correspondence course from the New York Institute of Photography. Inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson's book The People of Moscow, in 1960 Cole embarked on a project to document the lives of his people, which resulted in House of Bondage.