New York University Cold war studies

1º  CALL FOR PAPERS

New York University’s Center for the United States and the Cold War invites New York metropolitan area based scholars to submit proposals to present at the Center’s seminar series. The Cold War seminar is a venue for work in progress. The seminar is interdisciplinary and international in scope. All papers are pre-circulated.

We are interested in projects that explore the ways in which the ideological and geopolitical conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States affected politics, culture, and society throughout the world. Proposals that focus on the impact of the Cold War on political economy, the national security state, civil rights, civil liberties, labor relations, and gender relations are welcomed, as are projects that that see the central issue as U.S., Soviet, and European response to revolutionary nationalism and decolonization.

The Center is a joint project of Faculty of Arts and Science and the Tamiment Library, a special collection at NYU documenting the history of Labor and the Left http://www.nyu.edu/library/research/tam.

The Center will reimburse presenters’ travel expenses. However, due to budget cutbacks we cannot offer hotel accommodations. We can offer a modest honorarium.

Please submit a one-page abstract and current CV by June 1st to Zuzanna Kobrzynski at zk3@nyu.edu

2º New York University Cold war studies

Alger Hiss Collections:

Most historians believe that the Henry Wallace campaign of 1948 and the Alger Hiss case were crucial turning points in this conservative counter offensive. The 1948 presidential election campaign fractured the left-liberal coalition as many of Harry Truman’s Democratic supporters began to call Henry Wallace a Communist fellow traveler. Similarly, the Hiss Case, which targeted one of the nation’s most highly visible New Dealers, was used to reinforce the idea that progressives were soft on Communism. A major figure in the Roosevelt administration, Alger Hiss sat directly behind the President at the Yalta Conference and became the founding Secretary General of the United Nations. His public career embodied the reformist vision that linked FDR’s domestic agenda to an internationalist foreign policy. It thus appeared to many men and women on the Left that the Hiss indictment was part of a wide- ranging campaign designed by Richard Nixon and the Republican right to discredit the New Deal and by extension the United Nations.

Alger Hiss-related Collections at the Cold War Center include Hiss family papers as well as collections from long-time Alger Hiss associates and supporters including attorney and film-maker John Lowenthal, philanthropist Agnes Haury, and journalist William Reuben. The Tamiment Library has joined with the Harvard Law School Library to compile an edited microfilm edition of the Alger Hiss Papers. This publication will place Alger Hiss’ career and the Hiss case within the broad context of New Deal and World War II foreign and domestic politics. As of 2010 The Alger Hiss Defense Collection for the Harvard Law School Library and the Hiss Papers at the Tamiment Library are available from Primary Source Microfilm. Records documenting Alger Hiss’s career at the State Department are now being filmed and will be available in 2011. Future projects will film the Alger Hiss correspondence in the records of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace held by Columbia University’s Department of Special Collections and the Alger Hiss files in the United Nations Archives.