Beyond the Cold War: Lyndon Johnson and the New Global Challenges of the 1960s(Reinterpreting History: How Historical Assessments Change over Time)

In writing about international affairs in the 1960s, historians have naturally focused on the Cold War. The decade featured perilous confrontations between the United States and the Soviet Union over Berlin and Cuba, the massive buildup of nuclear stockpiles, the escalation of war in Vietnam, and bitter East-West rivalry throughout the developing world. As the world historical force of globalization has quickened and deepened, however, historians have begun to see that many of the global challenges that we face todayBeyond the Cold War examines how the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson responded to this changing international landscape. To what extent did U.S. leaders understand these changes? How did they prioritize these issues alongside the geostrategic concerns that dominated their daily agendas and the headlines of the day? How successfully did Americans grapple with these long-range problems, with what implications for the future? What lessons lie in the efforts of Johnson and his aides to cope with a new and inchoate agenda of problems? By reconsidering the 1960s, this work suggests a new research agenda predicated on the idea that the Cold War was not the only - or perhaps even the most important - feature of international life in the postwar period.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Contributors Introduction, Francis J. Gavin and Mark Atwood Lawrence Part I: Thinking Beyond East and West 1. Lyndon Johnson and the Challenges of Economic Globalization, Daniel Sargent 2. Toward a New Deal for the World? Lyndon Johnson's Aspirations to Renew the Twentieth Century's Pax Americana, Patrick O. Cohrs 3. Moving Beyond the Cold War: The Johnson Administration, Bridge-Building, and Détente, Thomas A. Schwartz Part II: Internationalizing the Great Society 4. One Global War on Poverty: The Johnson Administration Fights Poverty at Home and Abroad, 1964-1968, Sheyda Jahanbani 5. LBJ's Third War: The War on Hunger, Nick Cullather 6. LBJ and World Population: Planning the Greater Society One Family at a Time, Matthew Connelly 7. Globalizing the Great Society: Lyndon Johnson and the Pursuit of Smallpox Eradication, Erez Manela Part III: Adapting to a World of Scarcity 8. Thinking Globally: U.S. Foreign Aid, Paul Ehrlich, and the Emergence of Environmentalism in the 1960s, Tom Robertson 9. "More a Gun at Our Heads than Theirs": The 1967 Arab Oil Embargo, Third World Raw Materials Sovereignty, and American Diplomacy, Christopher R.W. Dietrich Part IV: Shifting Moralities 10. The Rise of Human Rights during the Johnson Years, Sarah B. Snyder 11. Globalized Faith, Radicalized Religion, and the Domestic Sources of U.S. Foreign Policy, Andrew Preston

About the Author :
Francis J. Gavin is the Frank Stanton Chair in Nuclear Security Policy Studies in the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Gold, Dollars, and Power: The Politics of International Monetary Relations, 1958-1971 and Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America's Atomic Age. Mark Atwood Lawrence is Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He is author of Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam and The Vietnam War: A Concise International History.

Review :
"Even more happened in the 1960s than we thought....The editors Francis J. Gavin and Mark Atwood Lawrence lay out the underlying factors that accelerated what would become known as globalization....This book demonstrates that the 1960s remain a rich field for research."--Journal of American History "Distinguished historians Frank Gavin and Mark Lawrence have assembled an all-star cast of young scholars of U.S. foreign relations to shed new light on the 1960s, a decade we thought we already knew perhaps too well. These excellent essays focus on contemporary global issues of the greatest importance--environmental change, energy, poverty and disease, human rights, religion, globalization--and trace them back to their emergence as policy concerns during the Lyndon Johnson administration. The authors challenge and expand our understanding of national security in a global age. This is some of the best of the new U.S. international history."--Thomas Borstelmann, author of The Cold War and the Color Line "This exemplary collection sets the agenda for a new phase in the scholarship on the international history of the 1960s."--Fredrik Logevall, Cornell University