Honors Paper on the Cold War need some ideas

[spencer]

Okay guys. So I'm writing a paper in my honors history class about the cold war and I've got a lot of information, mainly about the beginnings, some stuff about bomb testing and a bit on the Bay of Pigs and I started some research on Korea.

I'm at a loss for a thesis. I basically have to be all analytical and not just restate information. I know I want to argue that the Alliance during WWII made the Cold War inevitable but I don't think I can write 10-12 pages on that alone. I kind of also want to talk about the Cold War being the scariest era ever. So I suppose I have a thesis but I think I still need some direction.

This is an honors class and I really need to redeem myself because last semester sucked and my GPA dropped. I basically have to get an A so I can prove I'm worthy of the honors program so some help would be greatly appreciated. I'm not asking anyone to write or research for me. I just want some ideas thrown at me so I can get a little boost.


PS. I did just have one incredible idea: A homework help section on the forum!

[southbiochem]

There's a heck of a lot to be drawed from the Cold War..I will adress one of your points and you can tell me if you like it.

1.- Your mention to the inevitability of the Polarization is a nice place to go.

Cold war in fact started in the Yalta conference 1943, and it became apparent with the intervention of UK in the first stages of the Greek Civil War in 1944. Meaning it began even before WWII was done.

The fight bewteen communism and capitalism started waaay sooner. But it began to take a great importance once facisms were defeated. The disappearance of the common enemy, Germany and Japan, soon lead to the Western Powers and the Soviet Union to clash in fight for areas of influence in the aftermath.

It was to such an extent, that in the final phases of the war, the Soviet Union was pushing to reach as west of Germany as possible before UK, US and France made contact. Also, it was pushing as south of Manchuria and Korea as possible (while attacking Japanese controlled territory), to which the US responded immediately in South Korea from Occupied Japan.

China, Greece, Angola, etc, are all fine examples of this tendency to fight civil wars with one faction being a communist party or rebel group, and with the intervention, tacit or obvious from one of the Major Powers on each side.

So, you see, even before 1950 you already have much to go on!

[Miles]

Your school's library should probably have some online databases available through their website, you can look through those to find peer-reviewed scholarly articles on all sorts of subjects - great for research and backing up any claims you make. And of course there's the library itself. As for specific areas of focus, volumes can and have been written about all sorts of facets of the Cold War...you could talk about how it manifested proxy wars in Latin America and Asia and how that's contributed to how those regions have ended up the way they are today, how mutual fear of the other side manifested itself at home and what effects that had, the paranoia, Red Scare, Sino-Soviet relations, how the over-hanging fear of nuclear devastation played into the psyche of people who lived during that time in way that it wouldn't for those of us born after the wall fell....there's so much there. It was the last half of the century.

Plus everything Suds said. The guy knows his stuff.

[Bowyn Aerrow]

Oh how cute, the children are talking about my era as if they actually know anything about it...

Which is a segway to my propsal. There may still be a few peole still alive who lived through part or most of the Cold War Era - why not go from the angle of personal perspective of events of the Cold War - what people thought, felt, how they acted and reacted.

For instance, did you know that bomb shelters were very popular, and at one point the whole duck and cover thing was seriously considered a great way to survive the Nuclear War with the Ruskies....

Growing up in that era, living through it had its impact on the psyche of John Q Private Citizen... We all knew that we were all going to die in a blaze of nuclear glory - and that heavily influenced how the common man stopped saving for the future, stopped stocking the pantry fully and started to spend more and more via credit - no future, no bills you see.

And you kids know what that lead to, because you lived through the Credit Bust fallout....

[Pix]

For what it's worth, it definitely shaped their character. When I saw Star Trek IV in 2000 on VCR it got to where Chekov in I guess the 1980s asking in his thick Russian accent for where the "nuclear wessels" are and it was obvious this was intended to be a comedic moment though it wasn't immediately apparent why to me. But after a brief thought about it I turned to the older people watching with me and asked, "Cold War humor?" Yup.

One guy raised in the Cold War told me that watching Terminator 2 stunned him for one line, it was like a punch in the gut, where the kid asks why Russia would attack "aren't they our friends now?" It was too bizarre. That's not to say he didn't trust Russia (at least as much as he trusted anyone), but rather Cold War thought (and propaganda) had been so ingrained into him that it was just too much to take in--unlike the idea of a nuclear holocaust or even cyborgs from the future traveling back in time.

That aside, I highly recommend seeing The Atomic Cafe. You can watch it here (or find it on YT):

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-atomic-cafe/