[ laughter ] the book is available for purchase at major book stores like this. And actually we have books on sale outside our room today thank you very much for listening to my talk. [ applause ] ill now introduce our first discussant, ryan irwin, who writes about the intersection of International Law and global power during the 20th century. His first book apartheid and the unmaking of the liberal world order examined this intersection against the backdrop of african decolonization. Hes won several writing and Research Prizes from the society of American Foreign relations and hes currently writing a book about legal realisms influence on american liberal internationalism during the early cold war. He is an assistant professor at the university at albany at the State University of new york. So one place to begin unpacking professor masudas book is its research question, which was meaty. What was the cold war . His answer, as youve just heard, is that the cold war was an imagined reality. A gigantic social mechanism that operated to tranquilize chaotic postwar situations worldwide by putting an end to social conflicts and culture wars at home. Whose home . Well, professor masuda is interested in east asia and north america specifically and hes focused on this period between world war iis end and the korean war which he explains is when this imagined reality started to feel more and more real to more and more people in these various locales. Now, its not easy to Say Something original about the 1940s and the early 1950s but cold war crucible pulls it off and ill do two things. First, ill make a pair of observations about the book and second ill ask professor masuda some questions which will hopefully get our q a rolling. So opt separation one is that the book is simultaneously original and very familiar. If you are a political scientist, one label to toss at professor masudas work is constructivism. If youre a historian, it probably makes a little more sense to cite someone like Benedict Anderson and Michele Foucault but cold wars starting point is instantly recognizable, that power makes reality. What does this mean . Well, professor masuda is inviting us to think about the cold war not simply as a series of events, a blockade here, a war there, events that build logically on each other, events with selfevident meaning. No, for professor masuda, the cold war was a man made reality. Method logically, hes nudging us to see this man made reality through the prism of social and culture history but his bigger claim is that the process of reality making can be historicised. You can actually look at how more and more people in this case americans, chinese, japanese, korean people, accepted the cold war as something that was real. So this is a very capacious starting point for a book folks have used some of these tropes to criticize special cold warrior, mark silverstones examined a comparable dynamic in the Anglo American context but very few monographs on my radar begin im going to show you how the cold war became real. Or how it became imagined as real in several places over a tenyear period. And my favorite part of the book is that professor masuda tell this is story in a very tangible way. The conceit here is that no one is driving this realitymaking process. Which makes professor masudas actual narrative more straightforward than you might expect. Cold war crucible basically explores how Different Actors or ordinary people came to explain their own claims in their local worlds visavis communism and antikrichl. These folks were not necessarily communists or anticommunists but they invoked the cold war for their own reasons, mostly to get ahead, which resulted eventually in the creation of this shared nativist fantasy world with transnational purchase. So observation number one is that professor masuda is arguing a familiar point, a point as old as richard hoffsteader, in a new way, which sets up a second observation because the research, as chuck said, is very, very good. Ten countries, lots of archives, lots and lots of languages. Some International History tends to repackage old stories with new footnotes but professor masuda is writing about people you have never heard of and hes telling stories that you probably dont know. Ill admit i assumed that the books narrative would be disconnected. That there could be too many people saying too many things but the three sections hang together well and the chapters are divided in a logical way. This is a story that could have been too complex and tidy yet professor masuda to his credit delivers something unexpected, something very hard which is a beautifully written messy story that actually make sense. Now, if i had to critique the book, the jargon is probably the lowest hanging fruit. The word reality is in quotation marks a lot. So much so that some of the passages give you flash backs to that famous scene in the movie matrix with the pills and the rabbit holes and all the rest and throughout the book i find myself wrestlingle with the question of whether or not i was reading a transnational social cultural history of reality making in the early cold war or was a reading a political history of the cold wars or gins told from a multinational grass roots perspective . Now this is pedantic, i admit, and i imagine the choice youd take, professor masuda, is option c, all of the above. But this opens up space for a few questions. To start, walk us through your relationship with the methodology that you take up here. Why tell this story this way . This question has a mechanical side. Why were you drawn to these particular archives and not others . Did the project start small and become really big or was it always scaled as a comparative study . And this question has a slightly abstract side because a few things surprised me. If someone asked me to write a look like this one i think i would have looked at technology or international organizations, im talking about the radio, public diplomacy, about reality making as an intellectual and institutional phenomenon and i would have taken this approach because thats what other scholars who were interested in this process have done already. So what are the stakes of anchoring this story in the experiences of ordinary people . What are the stakes of anchoring this story in the experience of ordinary people . More pointedly, do you think the study of technology in these regions or a history about folks who interfaced with newly built Institution Institutions would undercut the presupposition that this was an evolutionary story that in no one directed this process. Does that claim still stand up if you adjust the frame . After all, some people incented it and others used them. Some people make institutions, others join them. Focusing on technology or institutions nudges us toward a different place, perhaps a distorted place. So this point is probably more compelling as a question. What does cold war crucible reveal about power . This has to be something you wrestled with constantly as you wrote this book. The accomplishment here is the way professor masuda gives agency to people who are often overlooked. So theres a natural tension between this panoramic approach and the asymmetry of global power after world war ii and id love to see you bring your conclusions that you just articulated into dialogue with some of the more classic his store graphical riddles of this time period. Was the u. S. Government weaker than we think . Were peasants and workers in asia stronger than we imagined . If the cold war reality requires quotation marks, what passes for truth when we talk of power in an International Context . Now im getting rhetorical so ill wrap up. My final question is straight forward and selfserving. How should i teach the cold war to my students . What would this story look like in the classroom . In my classroom. Does cold war crucible advance the cold wars decomposition or does it it bring it to midcentury World History . You walk this line with admirable subtlety but i think youre challenging scholars like me who push against the cold wars monopoly of discourse after 1945 and are experimenting with alternative ways to teach midcentury geopolitics. So stretch this story out. Explains what it looks like on a semestersized canvas. What does this story look like if we stretch it into the 1960s . The 1970s . How long did the cold war reality last if defined on your terms . How might the incorporation of alternative regions complicate or affirm the interpretation youve outlined for us today . Does k the dynamic at the heart of your story be replicated in other periods . Regardless, theres no doubt cold war crucible should be on your bookshelf. Buy a copy. It reframes the cold wars origins in an interesting way and it sets a new con start. So congratulations to professor masuda for a thoughtprovoking first book. Thank you. [ applause ] thank you very much. So our second commentator is Andrew Rotter who is the charles a. Dana chair in history at Colgate University where hi has taught since 1988. His most recent book is hiroshima, the worlds bomb and hes at work on a study of two empires, the british and india and the americans and philippines and the five senses. Professor . Thank you. Thank you for coming thank you professor masuda for inviting me to comment on your book. Ill begin by saying that this book is a paradigm rattling study. A couple months ago i had a conversation with a colleague id identify him, David Angerman of Brandeis University in which he said, i thought too casually, that within a generation or less historians would no longer see the cold war as central as a useful category of analysis. I really was stunned to hear him say that and i pushed back and while i think professor masuda would agree with me that the cold war remains an event, a thing with which historians must continue to come to terms, he has so thoroughly problem lem tides it had concept of the cold war as to make it nearly unrecognizable to those of us who are more conventionally trained or inclined. As you have heard, professor masuda renders the cold war a constructed imaginary. Locally generated. In his formulation, the cold war sprang less from ideology or geopolitical contest than from political or social or cultural circumstances within nations the cryian conflict of the books subtitle was an agent, in his word a catalyst rather than a single knowable event. It indicated to all parties that World War Three might be immine imminent. At the same time, as you heard, elites sought to contain or suppress populist movements within nations as diverse as the United States, the peoples republic of china and the philippines in this way did a local story become global or nearly so. Mccarthyism, the antihook campaign in the philippines, all of which followed closely the outbreak of conflict in korea indicated the presence of small cold wars both similar and different that constitutes or constructed the big cold war. In the end, professor masuda concludes people translate it had meaning of the korean conflict through local lenses. And in this way created the entity that we have called the cold war. Listeners and readers will recognize how challenging and even provocative professor masudas interpretation is. He has read everybody. Hes read the usual suspects on the cold war. Hes read gatt thys and melvin lefler. But hes taken to heart the work of people likian a kwan and mary caldor among many others. His debt to those who have insisted on the privacy of domestic politics in the formation of cold war discourse, Thomas Christian son, Jeremy Surrey is obvious. Professor masudas contemplation of cold war epistomology is, however, largely his own and it is remarkably bold. His claims are bus interpreted by a wealth of evidence drawn from a breathtaking array of sources in at least three languages. Many of his sources are local, not in national archives. Professor masuda has gone where few have gone before. The auburn Avenue Research Library in atlanta, the Vermont Historical society. How on earth did he imagine those would be good places to find cherl . And he found it. The book teaches us not to read the cold war backwards. Men and women in 1945 did not know from cold war, as my grandfather might have said. Their most recent and terrible experience of conflict was world war ii, which shaped them profoundly. That the cold war ought to be decentered seems to me an idea whose time has come. Professor masuda decenters the cold war here artfully and confidentbly. This is a wonderfully assured first book. Like ryan, i would raise several questions for professor masudas consideration. First, he argues that the reality of the cold war was less salient in some places than in others. It had low valance, for example, in latin america and africa. This was the result, he says of the relative remoteness of these contin continents of the ravages of the cold war. Yet if you extend the story a few years out, you find critical exceptions to this rule. Think of cuba and the congo where issues concerning decolonization surely shared space with cold war conflict. And one could as easily say that latin america and africa were farther from the strategic front lines of the cold war regardless of their position during world war ii. In short, it isnt clear to me that the relative lack of interest in these areas by the great powers demonstrates that the cold war was locally sourced. I hoped this book expecting a fresh interpretation of the korean war and was delighted to find that it was more than that. Still the centrality of korea, even as a catalyst of social transformation in asia, europe, and the United States seems to me uncertain. Professor masuda argues that et made the cold war real because it reminded people of world war ii. Yet it was unlike that war fundamentally in that it stayed limited in participation and scope. Was it more important as a cold war catalyst than, say, the Nuclear Arms Race which we preceded and followed it . The atomic bomb doesnt make much of an appearance in the book. You saw the wonderful colliers title but this is imagining a future Nuclear Attack and its represented pretty much only in the form of national or local response to the atomic bomb. The sound of axes grinding is audable in the room. Sorry for that. If korea was a watershed, why did social formations look pretty much the same before as after it . Ive fallen into one of the misconceptions that professor masuda located among his crickets before and ill let him answer it again or ignore it if he likes. So in britain, the austerity program, including the devaluation of the pound in 1949 set off what a newspaper described in june of that year of 1949 as a wave of industrial unrest for which the korean conflict cannot claim responsibility. In the United States repression preceded mccarthyism. In the philippines, the battle against the hooks antidated 1950. The assassination of caisson who was assassinated by the hooks took place in 1949. To what extent then did korea solidify or even cattalize the reality of a cold war . It struck me here as it did when reading Jeremy Surreys power and protest and a later period that there is a presumed commence rabbit between the various social protests and repression of them. Thus the suppression of labor strife in japan, the red scare in the United States, the january fan movement in china are rendered morph logically the same. You heard professor masuda in this earlier and what he does in the book very cleverly is allow for the possible objections of critics. Hell say i understand these things are not exactly the same but then hell go on for several pages to prove that in fact they largely were. It seems there is an air of scale here. As bad as the first two, that is the suppression of labor, unrest in japan and the red scare in the United States were, neither resulted in the mass killing that characterized the jan fan movement in china. Japan, the United States and the prc had profoundly different political cultures. Professor masuda ingeniously uses letters to local newspapers to demonstrate that chinese citizens criticized the regime as late as 1950. This is amazing stuff. This is accounts of jan fan rallies suggest to me that the partys orchestration of the executions of nonconformists, ideological and otherwise, were done from the top down. These examples do not seem to be evidence of a common mortarfulology of protest and presentation but of separate and unequal social and political pathologies. In claiming the cold war was at first a thing imagined, professor masuda is granting implicitly poststructuralist argument about the social constructiveness of things. That suggests a preference for representation over causation, though i acknowledge what ryan said is that hes walking very subtly and cleverly a fine line between these. Whatever it is, it may rankle those for whom the cold wars apparent constructedness did not prevent it from wrecking their lives or their societies and its hardly a logically parsimonious argument. Race, jend herb, religion, culture generally, what category of analysis is not socially constructed . If the point is to add geopolitics, strategy and ideology to the list of imaginaries, well and good, though in that case to cold war was hardly unique. Finally i wonder if in trying to establish the novelty of his approach professor masuda has not chucked out the baby with the bath water, or at least has the baby dangling precariously by one leg outside the window. Sorry, thats terrible forget i said that. [ laughter ] i sort of like it. He writes that we should see the cold war world as a eye ban i can social construction of an imagined reality in which many people participated in restoring order and harmony through marginalizing disagreements at home. Might it be instead that the cold war was a dynamic process between the ideological and geopolitical on one hand and social cultural and local on the other . Or, more specifically, is it possible to understand local cold war conflicts as