Product Description: In 1948, civil rights for black Americans stood higher on the national political agenda than at any time since Reconstruction. President Harry Truman issued orders for fair employment and the integration of the armed forces, and he proceeded to campaign on a platform that included an unprecedented civil rights plank, pushed through the Democratic convention by Hubert Humphrey...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

After World War II the United States faced two preeminent challenges: how to administer its responsibilities abroad as the world's strongest power, and how to manage the rising movement at home for racial justice and civil rights. The effort to contain the growing influence of the Soviet Union resulted in the Cold War, a conflict that emphasized the American commitment to freedom. The absence of that freedom for nonwhite American citizens confronted the nation's leaders with an embarrassing contradiction. Racial discrimination after 1945 was a foreign as well as a domestic problem. World War II opened the door to both the U.S. civil rights movement and the struggle of Asians and Africans abroad for independence from colonial rule. America's closest allies against the Soviet Union, however, were colonial powers whose interests had to be balanced against those of the emerging independent Third World in a multiracial, anticommunist alliance. At the same time, U.S. racial reform was essential to preserve the domestic consensus needed to sustain the Cold War struggle. The Cold War and the Color Line is the first comprehensive examination of how the Cold War intersected with the final destruction of global white supremacy. Thomas Borstelmann pays close attention to the two Souths--Southern Africa and the American South--as the primary sites of white authority's last stand. He reveals America's efforts to contain the racial polarization that threatened to unravel the anticommunist western alliance. In so doing, he recasts the history of American race relations in its true international context, one that is meaningful and relevant for our own era of globalization.

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With its sweeping, inclusive view of American history, Created Equal emphasizes social history-including the lives and labors of women, immigrants, working people, and persons of color in all regions of the country-while delivering the basics of political and economic history. This new text acknowledges and reflects the diversity of class, culture, region, and gender that has always been the American story, and pays unique attention to the large middle class that has been central to the development of American society.