{"id":642,"date":"2019-04-29T20:13:25","date_gmt":"2019-04-29T20:13:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/presence\/?p=642"},"modified":"2019-04-29T20:13:25","modified_gmt":"2019-04-29T20:13:25","slug":"an-undocumented-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/presence\/2019\/04\/29\/an-undocumented-past\/","title":{"rendered":"An Undocumented Past"},"content":{"rendered":"

In this week\u2019s lecture in the series Presence of the Past, <\/em>we had the opportunity to hear from Heather Streets-Salter on \u201cThe Chill Before the Cold War: The Roots of Anti-communism in the Interwar Period\u201d. \u00a0While much of the lecture was based around the specifics of the period of events and communism that were occurring in Shanghai in 1931, Salters also investigated the reasons for the lack of literature and understanding of these events that were taking place outside of mainland Europe, at a time when many of the relevant on-goings in the development of the Cold War were based in Europe and America. It was interesting to consider this bit of her investigation, as it is seemingly counterintuitive to study areas that are not at the center of events such as this. However, as we can see from the works of Salters, it is actually much more important than one would think to understand other global climates and events leading up to notable worldwide events.<\/p>\n

More than a decade before the beginning of the Cold War, other students have been similarly aware of the ability for the events in Shanghai to feel disjointed from the Cold War itself, which would officially start between the US and Russia in 1945. Many students in the lecture, including students not a part of the series (rather attending for a different reason), noted that while this instance in Shanghai in 1931 is so specific, the way in which it is eventually related to the Cold War made this lecture applicable to almost any class in a multitude of disciplines.<\/p>\n

Throughout this lecture, Salter educated the crowd about the existence of European communists who were living in Asia during the early 1930\u2019s. Not only noting their arrests and investigations surrounding these arrests, she spoke on specific moments and findings that were \u201cjackpots\u201d in terms of providing evidence for the Noulens Affair investigation. Interestingly, as Salter pointed out, there is little literature surrounding this event specifically, even as more has come out surrounding the Noulens Affair and communism in Shanghai. While this might come as a surprise for some people, when thinking about this issue in the context of the lecture series, it seems fitting that there is a lack of acknowledgment for a past event that then only became recognized once the implications were unavoidable in the future.<\/p>\n

Although this may have been one of the first lectures not to hit on the topic of global warming and climate change, I couldn\u2019t help but think about those issues while also thinking about the idea (and effect) that the lack of literature produces. The time period from the Noulens Affair in 1931, and then the actual start of the Cold War in 1945 is similar to the time span from when real acceptance of climate change entered the global sphere and today. Produced in 2006, An Inconvenient Truth <\/em>by Al Gore was arguably one of the first public recognitions of global climate change, and just now (10+ years later) are we seeing real implications that are sparking more than a laid-back conversation, but a call for legitimate action. As other lectures in this series have done, this lecture (based in a field where I lack familiarity) was able to help me connect ideas from past lectures in order to create a better understanding of how to use the past to better (and hopefully not worsen) the present.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this week\u2019s lecture in the series Presence of the Past, we had the opportunity to hear from Heather Streets-Salter on \u201cThe Chill Before the Cold War: The Roots of Anti-communism in the Interwar Period\u201d. \u00a0While much of the lecture was based around the specifics of the period of events and communism that were occurring … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “An Undocumented Past”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7023,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[443105],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/presence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/presence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/presence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/presence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7023"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/presence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=642"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/presence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":643,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/presence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642\/revisions\/643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/presence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/presence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/presence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}