Secondary Sources
- Gaddis, John Lewis. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997
For my dissertation topic I wish to study the origins of the Cold War. John Lewis Gaddis is a giant in Cold War history, particularly in its origins. This book was useful as it discusses the early origins of the Cold War (1917-1945), and with that Gaddis looks at what various historians have said about this period.
- Mayer, Arno. Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles, 1918–1919. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1967.
Arno Mayer’s classic which looks heavily at the Versaille’s Treaty. How did communism effect the writing of the treaty? This is what Arno analyses. This is useful because it helps to establish the origins of the Cold War.
- Ruotsila, Markku. British and American Anticommunism Before the Cold War. London: Routledge, 2001.
Again another vital book which looks at the origins of the Cold War from pre-1945.
Primary Sources
Firstly The Times will be used for evidence of the British medias reaction to events and in turn this could be used as a reflection of publics reaction. To use The Times I used the primary source guide described in the lecture. An example of a document from The Times that I could use would be this article from 1917, which describes the ‘world revolution’ which Lenin describes after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. All the way to 1967 during the Cold War this remains relevant as Crozier discusses in the newspaper article. Crozier, Brian. “Belief Still in World Revolution.” Times, 1967. https://go-gale-com.ezproxy-s2.stir.ac.uk/ps/i.do?p=TTDA&u=unistirl&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CCS705260902&searchId=R1&tabID=Newspapers&linkSource=termClusters&inPS=true
Secondly the ideal type of primary source to use when researching this topic would be official government documents or what members of parliament were debating at this time. Upon using the ‘U.K. Parliamentary Papers’ resource I typed in ‘Communism’ and limited it by the date. In turn this gave me all the history of debates in parliament which communism has been mentioned. This is a good way of looking through the ‘high politics’ perspective of obtaining evidence.
Therefore it is clear that there will be the use of high politics and also media in order to obtain primary evidence for my topic.