With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening of the borders in November 1989 and eventual unification in October 1990, Berlin faced the distinct challenge of how to create a modern, unified capital city in the center of Europe while the physical landscape continued to reinforce mental divisions. Changing the physical face of Berlin to capitalize on the city's less-traumatic history while promoting an active tourist economy proved the most visually appealing and marketable approach to meet this goal. This study focuses on the impacts of these efforts two heavily debated sites of heritage tourism in Berlin: The Schloßplatz and the Berlin Wall. By applying methods of American Public History and History of Tourism, this paper answers the following question: How can Berlin sites of heritage tourism support the city's tourist economy, properly interpret the history of division and engage a population that carries its own narratives, experiences, and continued consequences of the Cold War? Examination of these sites demonstrates that the histories produced through sites of Cold War heritage tourism continue to propagate the popular narratives of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), but in recent years also demonstrate a notable shift towards engaging a more nuanced understanding of Cold War experience in divided Berlin. In a city only twenty years separated from reunification, Berlin's sites of heritage tourism are increasingly successfully providing their visitors, both supremely local and broadly foreign, with nuanced and critical narratives of Berlins Cold War history. / History

This project examines the scientific developments, strategic considerations, and political circumstances that led to the rise and fall of herbicidal warfare in Vietnam. The historical narrative draws on a wide range of primary and secondary source literature on the Vietnam War and the Cold War, the history of science, and American and international history of the 1960s and 1970s. The author conducted archival research in the United States in a variety government and non-government research facilities and toured formerly sprayed areas in Vietnam. This project utilizes oral history interviews of American and Vietnamese scientists who were involved in some aspect of the Agent Orange controversy. The thesis explains why American scientists were able to force an end to the herbicide program in 1971 and ensure that the United States would not engage in herbicidal warfare in the future. This political success can be understood only in the context of two major political transformations in the Vietnam Era: the collapse of Cold War containment as a salient model of American foreign policy, and the development of globally-oriented environmental politics and security regimes. The movement to end herbicidal warfare helped shift the meaning of security away from the Cold War toward transnational efforts to combat environmental problems that threaten all of the world's people. / History

Government agencies exercise bureaucratic autonomy when they are able to pursue their goals independent, and sometimes in defiance, of political superiors. Over the last three decades, research in the area of bureaucratic autonomy has provided numerous examples of relatively autonomous agencies and has generally recognized the desire of administrators to carve out greater autonomy for their organizations, but the question of how administrators consciously or unconsciously pursue autonomy remains a rich and largely unexplored area of research. Most theories of bureaucratic autonomy typically fall into two categories: an autonomy based on task-specificity that is contingent on the function and expertise of the organization and the ability of the agency to accept or reject new tasks; and a reputation-based autonomy contingent on the ability of the agency to build and maintain a constituency and to secure a reputation for effectiveness that makes it politically difficult for elected officials to influence agency action. This study applies a discourse analytic approach to the study of autonomy in two agencies established during the Cold War whose primary function is the distribution of federal grants-in-aid: the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Institute of Mental Health. Drawing on the theory and practice of discourse analysis, this study seeks to expand upon existing perspectives by better understanding how storylines help administrators to define the agency's mission and tasks and to develop its reputation for effectiveness. The findings suggest that storylines serve as causal drivers toward autonomy, operating in complex ways to influence individual decisions such as the scope of agency services and appropriations. They also suggest that storylines operate over time to both construct the circumstances that lead to greater autonomy and are simultaneously made more or less persuasive by those circumstances. / Ph. D.

In 1948 post-war Berlin, a mother, whose son was stolen from her during the war, implicates the woman that the Nazis gave him to in a Soviet spy ring, but soon realizes that her son's adoptive mother might be able to give her son a better life than she can and her actions put him in mortal danger.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Duke University, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.

Even though the Cold War ended almost 30 years ago, it has been one the most discussed phenomenon not only among IR scholars but also within the public. The whole Cold War discourse addresses many controversial question and who ended the Cold War is one of these questions. Basically, there are two schools of thought, one of which gives the credit to General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev and his reform policies. The second one perceives the US President Ronald Reagan and his unapologetic foreign policy as the most decisive factor in the End of the Cold War. By employing the methodology of analysis, this thesis aims to assess the impact of Ronald Reagan and his foreign policy on the End of the Cold War. This thesis tests the hypothesis that Ronald Reagan and his foreign policy were the most decisive factor in the End of the Cold War.

The imperial visits to the United States by Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia in 1954 and Emperor Hirohito of Japan in 1975, while billed as unofficial by all parties involved, demonstrated the problematic nature of America's unstable Cold War political agendas, connected African and Asian Americans with alternative sources of race, nationality, and ethnic pride, and created spaces for the emperors to reinforce domestic policies while advancing their nations on the world stage. Just as America's civil and governmental forces came together during the imperial tours, in 1954 and 1975 respectively, to strongly promote Cold War ideological narratives to a global audience, African American and Japanese American racial and ethnic groups within the United States created their own interpretations of the tours. Likewise, the governments and imperial institutions of Ethiopia and Japan both appropriated American efforts in an attempt to renegotiate political relationships and produce imperial narratives for domestic consumption. However, fundamental contradictions arose during these tours as both Ethiopia and Japan simultaneously sought to embrace America and to expand their presence on the world stage. The full nature of the political, economic, and social ramifications of these two imperial visits, and the contradictions in American's Cold War policies revealed by the tours, has yet to be explored. Reactions to the emperors' tours demonstrated the connections and conflicts between race, nation, and identity. Further the narratives of Ethiopia's and Japan's role on the world stage, particularly during these "unofficial" imperial tours, have yet to be fully examined by historians. Only by examining the emperors' tours within a broader transnational context, taking multiple political, racial, and economic perspectives into account, can the consequences of these visits be fully observed and understood.

Indiana University-Purdue University (IUPUI)

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