In the seven decades since World War II ended, Americans have come to regard their postwar reconstructive ventures in defeated Germany and Japan as shining examples of “nation building” at its best. The “good war” was, fittingly enough, followed by the “good occupation.” But for millions of American service personnel, membership of an army of occupation was a perplexing, oftentimes dispiriting, experience. Drawing on hundreds of letters and diaries produced by uniformed men and women of every rank, Susan L. Carruthers explores the intimate phenomenology of postwar soldiering. This talk, based on her newly published book, The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace (Harvard University Press, 2016) suggests a more fraught history of a surprisingly neglected topic: military victory.

Susan L. Carruthers is Professor of History (US & the World) at Rutgers University-Newark, where she has taught since 2002. Over the past decade, she has also held visiting fellowships at Harvard’s Charles Warren Center (2006-07), the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2010-11) and the Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton (2015-16). Her books include Cold War Captives (University of California Press, 2009); The Media At War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), and The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace (Harvard University Press, 2016).

4:00pm – 5:30pm
Woodrow Wilson Center, 6th Floor Moynihan Boardroom

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is sponsored jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Wilson Center’s History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and the George Washington University History Department for their support.

The Cold War is often seen as a bilateral US-Soviet conflict, but Jeremy Friedman argues that the Sino-Soviet split was deeply consequential for the fate of Asia, Africa, and Latin America as well for the adherents of the left worldwide. While the Soviets prioritized the replacement of capitalism by socialism, the Chinese instead saw the defeat of imperialism as the primary revolutionary objective. Coming in the wake of decolonization, the Sino-Soviet clash became the geopolitical vehicle for the new nations of the Global South to alter the Second World’s revolutionary agenda.

Jeremy Friedman is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Previously he was the Associate Director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale, after receiving his Ph.D. from Princeton in 2011. In addition to Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World (UNC Press, 2015), he has published articles in Cold War History and Modern China Studies. His current project, “Modelling Revolution: Constructing Third World Socialisms,” looks at the attempt to find a workable model of socialism for developing countries.

4:00pm – 5:30pm
Woodrow Wilson Center, 6th Floor Moynihan Boardroom

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is sponsored jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Wilson Center’s History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and the George Washington University History Department for their support.