Many of us who grew up in the decades of the Cold War have
memories of participating in air raid drills in school, watching
Joseph McCarthy and his anti-communist hearings on the grainy
black and white of our televisions, waiting breathlessly for
nuclear war during the Cuban Missile crisis, and listening to
the debates over the handling of the Korean war. For us, the
Cold War is part of our personal experience. For our students,
however, this is ancient history. Yet as teachers and
historians, we know that the policies and politics of the post
World War II era still play a critical role in shaping the
diplomatic and economic contours of America today. In this
issue, seven leading scholars examine the era of the Cold War so
that we can better demonstrate to our students the strands of
ideology and the trajectories of foreign policy that produced
the world in which they are growing up. In "Iran and the United
States in the Cold War," Malcolm Byrne explains how, and why,
Iran came to be one of this nation’s prim