In Dr. Streets-Salter’s lecture, she discussed the origins of the testy relationship that defined the post world war II conflict between the United States and Russia. I found this talk to be really interesting because although I am a STEM major, history is one of my side interests, and I have tried to take at least one history class per year during my time at Colby. The scope of this talk focused on events that transpired in Shanghai, China in 1931, and how these events led to the spread of communism in east Asia long before the end of World War II. In the 1930’s the Shanghai police discovered communist links between China and Russia, with a vast network of communications between these countries and made 276 arrests. These arrests became well known news internationally, and introduced communism as a legitimate threat to certain developed nations.
This talk gives a slight critique on how we study history, and how teachers or professors teach it. The study of history treats historical events often as singular bullet points in time, which makes it hard to study the overlap of certain events, and how different historical events interact with each other over time. There are countless examples of this in history, and usually when discussing wars, this is where this train of thought is most egregious. Oftentimes, the history behind a war starts years behind its officially listed beginning, and the Cold War is no different. Additionally, events in the first world war set into motion what occurred in the Cold War, for example the designation of clear sides to the conflict that lasted through the second world war as well, which introduced a dichotomy of powerful nations. As countries began to become more interconnected, this complicates viewing history as a list of events as well. For example, the correspondence that China had with Russia would have never been as developed in years past, and that made it easier to study countries as individual entities. Nowadays, studying a specific country is impossible without going into its relationships with others, whether it be politically, militarily, commercially or otherwise.
Overall, this talk was an illuminating way to look at events that go unnoticed throughout history. It is obviously very difficult to bring attention to every single event that contributed to the cold war, but it was certainly an interesting way to look at just how far back this conflict did span, as well as how communism made its way through international eyes and ears.