Write an informative, research-based essay that explains what factors contributed to the escalation of the Cold War. Develop your topic with properly cited, relevant support in the form of facts, definitions, concrete details, and quotations. << Read Less

To be found in ¨The Age of Extremes¨ by Eric Hobsbawm

Explanation:

Hobsbawm states that the Cold War was based on a Western belief, absurd in retrospect but natural enough in the aftermath of the Second World War, that the Age of Catastrophe was by no means at an end.  J.F. Kennedy, one of the most overrated presidents according to Hobsbawm, shows this belief by saying: ´The enemy is the communist system itself... this is a struggle for supremacy between two conflicting ideologies: freedom under God versus ruthless, godless tyranny.´

It is exactly this democratic freedom that ironically fueled the Cold War fire.

Where the Sovjet government didn´t have to bother about winning votes the U.S. government did.

Another element that contributed to move confrontation from the realm of reason to that of emotion was the schizoid demand of the vote-sensitive politicians to roll back the tide of ¨communist aggression¨.

On the other side of the globe the Sovjet government, with a country and economy in ruins after the Second World War, they needed all the economic help they could get to survive. So on any rational assessment the U.S.S.R. presented no immediate danger.

president franklin roosevelt supported the tva as part of his first new deal measures approved by congress in 1933. this new agency was designed to control floods, produce electric power, and improve the lives of people living in the tennessee valley. the tva accomplished many of these goals despite problems.

the reform movements that arose during the antebellum period in america focused on specific issues: temperance, abolishing imprisonment for debt, pacifism, antislavery, abolishing capital punishment, amelioration of prison conditions (with prison's purpose reconceived as rehabilitation rather than punishment), the humane treatment of animals, the humane and just treatment of native americans, the establishment of public institutions for the care of the destitute, orphans, blind, and mentally ill, the establishment of public schools, the abolition of tobacco use, vegetarianism, health reform, homeopathic medicine, woman's rights (including, at first, especially the establishment of a woman's right to own property apart from her husband and her right to sue for divorce), and the amelioration of labor conditions (including higher pay, the right to form unions, the right to strike, and the demand for limits on the number of work hours, and safe working conditions).

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