Suggested Reading and Media Resources

• Ash, Timothy Garton. The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague. 1993. An exciting firsthand narrative of the collapse of the East Bloc in 1989 and 1990.
• Cohen, Stephen F. Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War. 2011. An up-to-date book by an acclaimed historian that challenges conventional interpretations of the rise and fall and aftermath of the Soviet Union.
• Guha, Ramachandra. Environmentalism: A Global History. 2000. A powerful and readable overview of environmentalism that puts Europe in world context.
• Kurlansky, Mark. 1968: The Year That Rocked the World. 2003. Popular history at its best, a gripping account of the 1960s generation and 1968 across the globe.
• McLeod, Hugh. The Religious Crisis of the 1960s. 2007. A comparative study of Western religion in decline.
• Okey, Robin. The Demise of Communist East Europe: 1989 in Context. 2004. A measured overview of the collapse of the East Bloc that avoids accusatory Cold War rhetoric.
• Pittaway, Mark. Eastern Europe, 1939–2000. 2004. A survey of east-central Europe from the start of World War II to the end of communism, with a welcome emphasis on social history.
• Port, Andrew I. Conflict and Stability in the German Democratic Republic. 2007. A penetrating analysis of popular support for communism in this major East Bloc country.
• Reitan, Earl A. Tory Radicalism: Margaret Thatcher, John Major, and the Transformation of Modern Britain, 1979–1997. 1997. Clear, concise, and very useful.
• Ross, Kristin. May ’68 and Its Afterlives. 2004. An important book on the way contested memories continue to shape our understanding of France’s May Events.
• Smith, Bonnie G. Global Feminisms Since 1945. 2000. A broadly cast and accessible overview of feminism after World War II that puts European and American movements in a global context.
• Williams, Kieran. The Prague Spring and Its Aftermath: Czechoslovak Politics, 1968–1970. 1997. Explores the events of the Prague Spring and the political changes that followed the revolt.
• Zubok, Vladislav M. A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev. 2008. An in-depth account of Soviet leaders and elites during the Cold War.

• The Beatles Anthology (EMI Records, 1995). This series about the British rock band the Beatles includes clips of many of their songs as well as a detailed look at the lives of the artists.
• My Perestroika (Robin Hessman, 2010). Documents the story of five individuals who were born in the Soviet Union and came of age during its collapse.
• Vietnam’s Unseen War: Pictures from the Other Side (National Geographic, 2001). A look at the Vietnam War through the lenses of Vietnamese photographers.

• Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979). In this famous film, loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a special operations captain undertakes a secret mission into the jungle of Cambodia that reveals the cruelty and absurdity of the war in Vietnam.
• The Iron Lady (Phyllida Lloyd, 2011). A film about the life of Great Britain’s first female prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, who is renowned for her neoliberal policies in the 1980s.
• The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006). An East German secret agent spies on a prominent writer and his lover and becomes obsessed with their lives.
• Man of Marble (Andrzej Wajda, 1977). By a noted Polish director, this film tells the story of the first decade of Communist rule in Poland through the experiences of a young bricklayer and a documentary film maker who seeks to make a film about the bricklayer’s life and times.
• Omagh (Pete Travis, 2004). A dramatic film about the tragic 1998 bombing in Omagh by the Irish Republican Army.

• BBC News Special Report: The Thatcher Years in Statistics. An interactive Web site that allows users to compare and contrast various sets of economic and social statistics in Britain during the Thatcher years. news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/4447082.stm
• Making the History of 1989. Primary sources, scholarly interviews, and case studies on the fall of communism in eastern Europe. chnm.gmu.edu/1989/
• The Whole World Was Watching: An Oral History of 1968. A joint project between South Kingstown High School and Brown University’s Scholarly Technology Group consisting of interviews and a timeline of events in 1968. www.stg.brown.edu/projects/1968/index.html