Patriot's History of the Modern World, Vol. II - From the Cold War to the Age of Entitlement, 1945-2012

Informationen zum Autor Larry Schweikart Klappentext The bestselling historians turn their focus to America's role in the world since the end of World War II Schweikart! author of the number one New York Times bestseller A Patriot's History of the United States! and Dougherty take a critical look at America! from the postwar boom to her search for identity in the twenty-first century. The second volume of A Patriot's History of the Modern World picks up in 1945 with a world irrevocably altered by World War II and a powerful! victorious United States. But new foes and challenges soon arose: the growing sphere of Communist influence! hostile dictatorships and unreliable socialist allies! the emergence of China as an economic contender! and the threat of world Islamification. The book reestablishes the argument of American exceptionalism and the interplay of our democratic pillars—Judeo-Christian religious beliefs! free market capitalism! land ownership! and common law—around the world. Schweikart and Dougherty offer a fascinating conservative history of the last six decades. INTRODUCTION It could have been a postwar American town or the Farmer’s Market in Los Angeles. Busy streets served as the setting for a bustling vegetable market, teeming with customers, awash in produce—a rich bounty spread out over hundreds of stands. As far as one could see, makeshift shops in the open air stretched down the street—in post–World War II Romania. Communism, in the early 1950s, still had not gained total control of the Romanian market, and farmers came from the countryside to sell their goods. A young Romanian, Gabriel Bohm, walked through the marketplace with his mother in awe of the cornucopia of fruits and vegetables, displayed under homemade tents or on crates by ordinary farmers. Bohm remembered seeing a market “full of merchandise . . . good looking, healthy stuff.” Yet within twenty years, Bohm witnessed a dramatic change. The same scene in 1965 would be much different: empty streets, devoid of vendors, patrolled by police. “Those markets were deserted,” he recalled years later: “not a single carrot, not a single vendor selling a carrot.” There were other changes as well, ending many of the mainstays of life. Churches were closed, political gatherings banned. What had happened in the interim to Bohm and other Romanians? Communism took full control of the economy. “We saw the country deteriorate,” he noted. “Anyone who could get out would. You had to be brain dead not to get out.”1 Yet they could not get out. Nor could their neighbors in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, or East Germany, all of them trapped as prisoners of the Soviet Union, which since 1945 had embarked on a program of expansionism dictated by Soviet communism’s godfather, Vladimir Lenin. Nor were the scenes of want and desperation in those Communist-controlled countries different in any of the other Eastern European nations that could be observed—Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland—and often they were worse. East Germans lived in constant fear of the Stasi, the state’s secret police, which recruited informants and compiled dossiers on almost every citizen to crush any potential opposition to the state. Even so much as an anti-Communist cartoon or joke was sufficient grounds for jail. One East Berliner who escaped to West Germany discovered decades later, after communism’s collapse, that one of her best friends had informed on her to the Stasi. Everywhere in the Iron Curtain countries (as they were labeled by Winston Churchill in 1946), the state spied on average citizens. Even children were tricked into informing on parents. Bulgarians knew that people simply disappeared—but they did not know that a secret prison island, kept off official maps, was their ultimate destination. An atmosphere of discontent and fear permeated the Communist bloc. After a time, the fear and depression produced a numbing ...

Product details

• Authors: Dave Dougherty, Larry Schweikart, Larry/ Dougherty Schweikart
• Publisher: Penguin Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 05.12.2013
• EAN: 9781595231048
• ISBN: 978-1-59523-104-8
• No. of pages: 704
• Dimensions: 163 mm x 243 mm x 54 mm
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > 20th century (up to 1945); Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous