Constructing the Monolith

Selverstone Marc J Selverstone Marc J.

ISBN 10: 0674031792 / ISBN 13: 9780674031791

Published by Harvard University Press, 2009

About this Item

pp. xi + 304.

Seller Inventory # 8074901

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Constructing the Monolith
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication Date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674031792
• ISBN 13: 9780674031791
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

As the Cold War took shape during the late 1940s, policymakers in the United States and Great Britain displayed a marked tendency to regard international communism as a “monolithic” conspiratorial movement. The image of a “Communist monolith” distilled the messy realities of international relations into a neat, comprehensible formula. Its lesson was that all communists, regardless of their native land or political program, were essentially tools of the Kremlin.

Marc Selverstone recreates the manner in which the “monolith” emerged as a perpetual framework on both sides of the Atlantic. Though more pervasive and millennial in its American guise, this understanding also informed conceptions of international communism in its close ally Great Britain, casting the Kremlin’s challenge as but one more in a long line of threats to freedom.

This illuminating and important book not only explains the Cold War mindset that determined global policy for much of the twentieth century, but also reveals how the search to define a foreign threat can shape the ways in which that threat is actually met.

About the Author

Marc J. Selverstone heads the acclaimed Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, where he edits the secret White House tapes of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon. He has written for the Washington Post, Atlantic, and U.S. News and World Report and appeared on C-Span radio. He is the author of Constructing the Monolith: The United States, Great Britain, and International Communism, 1945–1950, winner of the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and is Associate Professor in Presidential Studies at the University of Virginia.