Selected Milestones

 

• 1994- COWHIG founded
As lore has it, COWHIG traces its beginnings to a fateful meeting one day between Profs. Fredrik Logevall and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa who decided to form an informal group for discussing work-in-progress by graduate students and faculty. Little did they imagine that their efforts would eventually result in a full-fledged Center for Cold War Studies...

• 31 May 1997- COWHIG's Second Graduate Student Conference "Reassessing the Cold War Revisited"
COWHIG's second graduate student conference was the first to feature non-UCSB presenters and commentators. Jerald Combs of San Francisco State University delivered the keynote address on "The United States, NATO and the Soviet Threat to Western Europe, 1948-1962." A faculty roundtable explored "New Directions in Cold War History."

• 28-29 January 2000- The Cold War after Stalin, An Opening for Detente?
This COWHIG conference featured participants from Western Europe, the United States, and Canada who addressed opportunities for negotiation presented by Stalin's death and a new emphasis in Soviet foreign policy on "peaceful coexistence." Conference papers will be published as The Cold War after Stalin’s Death: A New International History, 1953-1956, edited by Klaus Larres and Kenneth Osgood (Rowman & Littlefield, Harvard Cold War Series, forthcoming).

• 9-10 March 2001- "The End of the Pacific War, Revisited" Conference
This conference/workshop brought together a distinguished panel of international scholars to reevaluate the end of the Pacific War in light of new sources, especially those from Russia and Japan, and recent scholarship on the subject. It addressed the roles played by the atomic bombs and the Soviet entry into the war that induced Japan's surrender. Further, it examined the importance of events surrounding Japan's surrender on historical memory in Japan, the United States, and Russia. Its procedings will be published by Stanford University Press (forthcoming).

• 23 April 2003- CCWS Inagural Lecture and Signing of UCSB-LSE Exchange Agreement
Dr. Odd Arne Westad, of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), delivered the inaugural lecture for the Center for Cold War Studies. His lecture was preceded by a signing ceremony for a UCSB-LSE graduate student exchange program. Westad's talk was titled "The Cold War: the Origins of the Present." During his stay Westad also led a workshop on "The Cold War on the Periphery."

• 30-31 March 2005- "Reinterpreting the Cold War in Asia" Conference Series launched
CCWS brought together eleven leading Cold War scholars from three continents (Asia, Europe, and North America) to develop a new interpretive synthesis of the history of the Cold War, beginning with 1945-1956. Conference proceedings will be published digitally on the UC eScholarship Repository. The second of this planned three-conference series is tentatively scheduled for Spring 2006 at UCSB.

• 29-30 April 2005- "The Cold War and its Contexts," the 2005 UCSB-LSE-GWU International Graduate Student Conference on the Cold War
Eighteen graduate students from as far afield as Finland gather in Santa Barbara to share their new research on topics ranging from Cold War culture to the Cold War and Africa to East-West trade relations. The conference's unique format of one faculty commentator per paper allows for a high degree of student-faculty interaction and networking.

• 6-8 April 2006- "The Global Cold War, The LSE-GWU-UCSB International Graduate Conference on the Cold War
The first year that this annual CCWS co-sponsored graduate student conference is held outside the United States, reflecting the truly international nature of this yearly event.