Cold War 2
Undergraduate (1st and 2nd year)
2 pages
Discipline: History
Type of service: Application Essay
Spacing: Double spacing
Paper format: Chicago / Turabian
Number of sources: 7 sources
Related Orders: None
DeadLine: 47 hours left
Paper details:
When preparing your History of American Foreign Affairs II, I thought about how best to cater to your needs based on how you have analyzed and interpreted both historical sources and historical events in your essays. This assignment will serve as an exercise that will continue to hone your skills in the following: drawing historical parallels, choosing sources carefully, interpreting historical documents, developing a clear thesis that directly answers the essay question, answering the question concisely, and supporting your argument by marshaling evidence from scholarly sources.
During the course of the semester, you were assigned excerpts of The New York Times bestseller Truman by David McCullough, which you may have used as one of the sources for your midterm essay. McCullough has a new book out (as of April 18, 2017), a collection of his speeches entitled The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For. In a Time interview about the work, he highlights the thrust of what we have been examining this semester:
History is about people. History is about cause and effect. History is about leadership or lack thereof, or twisted vision that inflicts its mistakes upon leaders…. the best of our presidents, using the presidency as a model of leadership, were all avid readers of history. Several of them were historians….
We have put the current president, and past presidents, under the microscope for their role in the conduct of American foreign policy over the long twentieth century. We have examined the checks and balances on their power by Congress, by the media (sometimes referred to as the fourth branch of government), and by public opinion. In our discussions, we have drawn historical parallels between the actions of the Trump administration and that of past administrations. We have contrasted ideologies and looked closely at key policy issues, events, and crises, including the possibility, put forth by The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, that “doomsday” is near.
We were fortunate to watch live in class The Bulletin’s yearly prediction of how close civilization has come to its end. Using this broadcast and your knowledge of the Cold War from the discussions, lectures, and readings such as the articles on Blackboard assigned for the last day of class, and one source taken from one of the ProQuest Historical Newspapers databases available through the Rutgers University Libraries website (go to “Find Articles,” “Indexes and Databases,” and then “P” for the ProQuest list), write a concise argument (of no more than 500 words) as to why America is entering a Cold War 2.0. I expect you draw brief comparisons between pivotal Cold War figures, documents, and events, and current ones to make your argument.
Note: You must make an argument that America is entering, or has entered, a second Cold War, whether you believe this to be the case or not. (If you are of the school that thinks that, after the fall of détente, the U.S. entered a second Cold War and this is technically a third Cold War, for our purposes, call this period the second Cold War.)
As always, you must footnote anything that is not your original work. You should not cite the sources from the readings, PowerPoints, or lectures in a “Works Cited,” page, but you must cite the source you chose from the ProQuest Historical Newspapers databases at the top of your essay and include a link to it.
Your short 500-word essay is due at the beginning of class on the last day of class
