The Cold War as a Question of Scale: Contexts and Comparisons

The Cold War was a global event that was lived—and shaped—across multiple levels of scale. This presentation responds to the Program Committee’s call for analysis along spatial, topical, and temporal scales by analyzing the category of the “Cold War” at levels from the local to the global. The paper will lay out historiographic and methodological debates about periodization, geography, and methodology, and then encourage participants to join a hands-on discussion of three selected primary source documents produced by U.S. service personnel and in-country employees at U.S. military bases in Asia during the period from the 1950s to the 1980s.