War: An Illustrated History, 1945-1991

Description

Like the bestseller The Civil War, Cold War is a highly illustrated narrative history of the forty-year struggle that dominated the course of life in the second half of the twentieth century. Beginning with the joyous meeting of American and Russian soldiers over a prostrate Germany at the end of the Second World War, and ending with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cold War makes sense of what often seemed to be chaotic and disparate events taking place around the globe. From the conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan to the terror of the Cuban missile crisis, from the secret combat of spy vs. spy to the excesses of McCarthyism, ColdWar reveals the titanic scale of this ideological conflict. Based on a wealth of newly uncovered documents, particularly from archives in the former Soviet Union, and concentrating equally upon the lives of ordinary people and world leaders, ColdWar explodes the myths and answers the mysteries left from this epoch. And it does so evenhandedly, for Cold War is written from a global perspective, relying on the insights of an international panel of distinguished historians.