Dr. Masuda Hajimu, Purity and Order: Toward Social-Cultural Understandings of the Cold War World, 1950-1953

Speaker:
Masuda Hajimu (family name Masuda) received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2012 and currently is Assistant Professor of history at the National University of Singapore, where he specializes in the history of Japan, student movements in Asia, decolonization, and the Cold War. He is the author of Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World (Harvard University Press, 2015) and has published articles in Diplomatic History, The Journal of Contemporary History, The Journal of Cold War Studies, and The Journal of American-East Asian Relations.

Event Description:
What was the Cold War? Professor Masuda Hajimu argues that it was more than an international confrontation between West and East blocs. It was also a social mechanism of purity and ordering at home, in the chaotic post-WWII world. The suppression of counterrevolutionaries in China, the White Terror in Taiwan, the Red Purge in Japan, McCarthyism in the United States–these were not merely end results of the Cold War, but forces that brought the Cold War into being, as ordinary people throughout the world strove to silence disagreements and restore social order under the mantle of an imagined global confrontation.

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