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This dissertation examines the early U.S.-D.R.V. relationship by analyzing related myths and exploring Viet Minh policies. I go beyond the previous literature to examine the Viet Minh government's modernization and anti-imperialist projects, both of which proved critical to D.R.V. policy evolution and the evolution of a new national identity. During the French era, as Vietnamese thinkers rethought the meaning of "being Vietnamese," groups like the Viet Minh determined that modernization was the essential to Vietnam's independence and that imperialist states like the U.S. posed a serious threat to their revolution and their independence. I argue that D.R.V. officials dismissed all possibility of a real alliance with the U.S. long before 1950. Soviet and Chinese mentors later provided development aid to Hanoi, while the D.R.V. maintained its autonomy and avoided becoming a client state by seeking alliances with other decolonizing countries. In doing so, Vietnamese leaders gained their own chances to mentor others and improve their status on the world stage. After Geneva, Hanoi continued to advance modernization in the North using a variety of methods, but its officials also heightened their complaints against the U.S. In particular, the D.R.V. denounced America's invasion of South Vietnam and its "puppet" government in Saigon as evidence of an imperialist plot. In advocating an anti-imperialist line and modernized future, D.R.V. leaders elaborated a new national identity, tying modernization and anti-imperialism inextricably to "being Vietnamese." Yet modernization presented serious challenges and Hanoi's faith in anti-imperialism had its drawbacks, limiting their ability to critique and evaluate the U.S. threat fully. / History

Growing Cold: Postwar American Women Writers and the Novel of Development, 1945-1960, examines how women writers developed, negotiated, and struggled with representing adolescent girl selfhood in the novel of development – also termed the Bildungsroman – during the early postwar era. By examining four women’s Bildungsromans written between 1946-1960 – Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding (1946), Jean Stafford’s The Mountain Lion (1947), Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman (1951), and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) – I show that postwar women writers were actively shaping the genre in a way that would fundamentally shift how adolescent girlhood would be represented in second wave feminist and contemporary female Bildungsromans. By 1960, adolescent girls in women’s literature were far different from where they began in 1945: they were younger, more sexual, and more psychologically complex than the adolescent girl characters earlier in the 20th century. Yet these novels are also racially and sexually problematic, advancing white heteronormative identity at the expense of queer and racially othered characters. In this way, these writers suggest that postwar adolescent development is a process of "growing cold"; it is a process of loss, emptiness, and violence, leading to emotional and social isolation. This project therefore intervenes in postwar American literary studies and women's studies by raising awareness of the importance that postwar women writing played in the development of the contemporary Bildungsroman. / English

On November 4, 1956, Soviet forces brutally suppressed the Hungarian Revolution in Budapest. Although Nikita Khrushchev had attempted to "repair" the Soviet Union's image by denouncing Stalin's crimes, the Soviet invasion of Hungary damaged the Soviet Union's legitimacy in the international community. This thesis examines the popular and religious press' coverage of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. By publishing anticommunist editorials and letters to the editor, the popular press furthered the phenomenon known as Cold War Consensus. Historians have looked at Cold War Consensus as a conscious political project created by a number of individuals and institutions. This thesis emphasizes the role of the popular and religious press as agents in the solidification of the Cold War Consensus. Most notable was the popular and religious press' use of the victimization narrative. By portraying the Hungarian freedom fighters as victims of the Soviet system, the popular and religious press condemned the Soviet Union's actions while extolling "American values" such as democracy, freedom, and charity. The popular and religious press' treatment of Soviet brutality also built a sensationalized image of Hungarian refugees. The emphasis on Soviet savagery and narrative centered on incoming Hungarian refugees as heroes strengthened anticommunist rhetoric that was typical during the 1950s. / History

What is NATO? This diplomatic history reveals that NATO and its meaning were contingent and never static. Instead, NATO was a machine the allies sought to adapt and use to achieve their national interests. NATO was shrouded in an "Atlantic mystique," the suggestion that the allies practiced a unique and exceptional type of cooperation based on shared values and common heritage. But this mystique did not define or ensure NATO's longevity; in fact NATO was thought necessary because of differences between the allies. The allies' national interests did converge on fundamental points, like the need for security. But they rarely agreed on specifics. And when they disagreed on basic questions, like NATO's relationship to the rest of the world, the role of Europe in NATO, and the American commitment to the continent, sparks flew. But because NATO was not static, it could adapt. And the hope held by each ally that they could convince their allies to change NATO to meet their needs - the hope inherent in a dynamic NATO machine - kept the allies working together. From 1955 to 1968, both the allies and the world situation changed dramatically. So to did the allies' plans and uses they saw for NATO. The primary interest of allies was protection from the Soviet Union. But the allies - even some in the Federal Republic of Germany - also believed NATO protected them from a resurgent Germany. Just how to defend against either threat was never agreed. But the allies believed that NATO, by keeping the Cold War cold, and by fostering cooperation between the western European states, established a Pax Atlantica. In this Atlantic peace the allies prospered. They cooperated and they competed, but peacefully. By the end of the 1960s, the allies believed NATO was necessary to maintaining the Pax Atlantica, even if - especially if - the Soviet empire collapsed. Amidst the crises of the 1950s and 1960s, the allies came to believe NATO was guaranteed a long future. / History

This paper examines Free World articles covering anticommunism, modernization, decolonization, intra-regionalism, US foreign affairs, US foreign aid, and neocolonialism because the task of popularizing specific iterations of these ideas illustrated the implementation of the ideas formulated in NSC 48/5. Moreover, NSC 48/5 called non-communist Asia the location of “the most immediate threats to American National Security.” My paper seeks to answer the question of how American propaganda in Asia, seen through a case study of Free World, tried to accomplish this popularization objective. I argue that the United States Information Agency (USIA) masked America’s neocolonialist intentions and activities in East and Southeast Asia through a rhetoric of anticommunism, intra-regionalism, and modernization. / History

This dissertation explores the complex interactions between the Cold War military-scientific apparatus, the idea of a culture of the Cold War, and the desert environment of the Tularosa Basin in south-central New Mexico. During and after World War II, the War Department and then the Department of Defense established several military reserves in the region. The massive White Sands Missile Range (at 3,200 square miles the largest military reserve in North America and larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined) and other military attachés would increasingly define the culture and economy of the Tularosa Basin. Historians have cast places such as White Sands Missile Range as cratered wastelands. Yet the missile range and surrounding military reserves became a contested landscape that centered on the viability of the nonhuman natural world. Diverse communities sought to find their place in a Cold War society and in the process redefined the value of a militarized landscape. Undeniably, missile technology had a profound impact on south-central New Mexico and thus acts as a central theme in the region's postwar history. However, in the years after 1945, environmentalists, wildlife officials, tourists, and displaced ranchers, amongst many others, continued to find new fangled meanings and unexpected uses for the militarized desert environment of south-central New Mexico. The Tularosa Basin was not merely a destroyed landscape. The design and sheer size of the missile range compelled local, national, and transnational voices to not just make sense of the economic implications of the missile range and surrounding military sites, but to rethink its cultural and environmental values in a changing Cold War society. It was a former home to ranchers still tied to the land through lease and suspension agreements. New Mexico Department of Game and Fish personnel cast the site as perfect for experimentation with exotic big game. Environmentalists and wildlife biologists saw the site as ideal for the reintroduction of the Mexican wolf. Tourists came to know the landscape through the simple obelisk at the Trinity Site. While missiles cratered the desert floor, the military bureaucracy did not hold absolute power over the complex interactions between cultures, economies, and the nonhuman natural environment on the postwar Tularosa Basin. / History

This dissertation “To Balance the World: The Development of the U.S. National Interest, 1935 – 1963” traces the transfer of American geopolitical thinking from military intellectuals inside the War Department in the 1930s to university defense intellectuals who began to set strategic agendas in the 1950s and 1960s. I study the concept of balance of power not as an idea or a theory but as an ideology in the Cold War through the twin rise of the military intellectual and the defense intellectual as policymakers. I argue the balance of power ideology animated the thinking of international lawyer Frederick Sherwood Dunn and U.S. geostrategist Nicholas Spykman in the 1920s and 1930s; political scientist Arnold Wolfers in the 1940s; career U.S. Army officer and strategic planner George A. Lincoln in the 1950s; and defense intellectual Henry Kissinger in the 1950s/1960s as they crafted national security policy. I work against the presumption that grand strategy serves as an intellectual architecture for policymaking. Rather, I argue grand strategy is a closed ideological circuit determined by a “strategic field” of planners and practitioners consisting of individuals like Dunn, Spykman, Wolfers, Lincoln, and Kissinger. Retired general disarmament activist Tasker A. Bliss served as an important and early voice of dissent to the balance of power ideology in the interwar period. The balance of power ideology, the belief that a single powerful state maintained the balance between states, guided their discussions as they agreed on the U.S. assuming responsibilities to guarantee international order and stability from the British Empire. Over the decades, balance of power colored their perceptions of any changes or transformations within the international system. “Order” and “stability” were their watchwords. Grand strategy subsequently serves as the “laboratory” for national interest. The balance of power ideology led to the strategic field’s adoption of survival as the U.S. national interest. The strategic field subsequently employed limited war as the policy of choice to “preserve” the United States’ survival. My findings highlight the antidemocratic principles within the design of grand strategy, particularly as they relate to the unequal power dynamic between the military-academic nexus and the U.S. public. / 2026-03-26T00:00:00Z

No / The analysis of armed conflict in the post Cold War era has been profoundly influenced by neoclassical economists. Statistical approaches have generated important propositions, but there is a danger when these feed into policy prescriptions. This paper first compares the economics of civil war literature with the social movement literature which has also tried to explain collective action problems. It argues that the latter has a much more sophisticated set of conceptual tools, enriched by empirical study. The paper then uses the case of multipolar militarization in oil-rich Casanare, Colombia, to demonstrate complexity and contingency in civil war trajectories. State policy failure and civil actors can be an important source of explanation alongside the economic agendas of armed actors.