| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena. By Thomas Borstelmann. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. xiv, 369 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-674-00597-X.)

Thomas Borstelmann's analysis of the international dimensions of American racial attitudes ably demonstrates the benefits of viewing domestic history in a global context. The broad sweep of the narrative, its effortless movement between domestic and international developments, and its clear and accessible prose make this book an ideal choice for courses on post-1945 American history. The book is organized around the administrations of the Cold War presidents from Harry S. Truman to George H. W. Bush and concentrates primarily on their response to the civil rights struggle in the United States and the fight against colonialism and white supremacy in Africa.

For most of the Cold War American foreign policy makers confronted what the sociologist Harold Isaacs described as the "peculiar consonance that has existed between the rise and fall of Western white power and the rise and fall of white racism in America" (quoted p. 7). Caught between a need to rally the former colonial world against Communism and a desire to maintain the support of those who had a stake in preserving white dominance, American officials tried to "manage and control the efforts of racial reformers at home and abroad, thereby minimizing provocation to the forces of white supremacy and colonialism while encouraging gradual change" (p. 2).

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