Newsroom

The Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) is not what it used to be. The good news is that it continues to produce the world’s most dominant arsenal, even while imposing less of a “burden” on the country than during the Cold War. The bad news is that waste, fraud...

Between 1945 and 1991, dozens of American and Soviet journalists moved to the capital cities of Communism and Capitalism to report on the rival superpower. They wanted to understand a country that appeared to stand against everything that they held dear and...

The pandemic has wiped out our social lives and the approaching election is dominating our political awareness. Dire straits for some of us. But an opportune time to start thinking seriously about what you really, truly want our presidents to be and to do for...

As a writer, it’s rare to feel that a story is destined for you. I felt that way with my first book, Ginseng, the Divine Root, about forests and a secretive subculture around a medicinal plant from American forests that for over two centuries has been exported...

I never intended to write a history of psychological warfare. The project that ultimately became Freedom’s Laboratory started out as a fairly standard investigation into the life and work of Johns Hopkins geneticist H. Bentley Glass. Glass originally attracted...

My interest in the subject of twentieth-century American nightclub culture and its intersection with political activism began as both highly theoretical and mundane. It started with a conversation I was having with a colleague about whether critical theorist...

Earlier this year, the television show The Americans ended its five-season run on the FX network. The Cold War-era drama followed two Soviet KGB officers posing as a married American couple. Smita Rahman, the Frank L. Hall Professor of Political Science at...

The creation of the intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, in the 1950s is an important event in both the history of nuclear weapons and in that of space exploration. Until recent years, however, the real stories behind the first ICBMs were concealed or...

Many people have asked me why I wrote the book and why I chose the title, The American Lab. Much of the motivation arose out of the events associated with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s 50th anniversary in 2002, the last major event that I...

Cold War Perspective on the North Korea Summit: Lessons from the Berlin Crisis Jenny Thompson and Sherry Thompson are the authors of The Kremlinologist: Llewellyn E Thompson, America's Man in Cold War Moscow, recently published by Johns Hopkins University...