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Then and Now: Global History and Culture


Welcome to our podcast. Current episodes feature lectures from my global culture and history course at the University of Minnesota. The podcast title (Then and Now)  reflects the relationship between today's events with the history forces from the past.

When the podcast began in 2006, it was a project with students in my global history course. We worked together to: (a) review of history topics in the course' (b) special music episodes connecting a country's culture with its artistic production through music; (c) special interview episodes with voices of students and community members as they were part of historical events; (d) 'podcast rebroadcasts' that other history podcasters gave permission to rebroadcast one of their episodes; and (e) music videos that featured important slides from the unit PP presentation. Every episode featureded some of the best independent music artists from a website that makes available podcast-approved songs. Share comments about the podcast with the course instructor, David Arendale, arendale@umn.edu  I am an associate professor  at UMN.  Visit my personal website for other history-related content and other information, http://arendale.org  

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Please post comments to the individual episodes, post to the iTunes podcast review and rating section, and email to me, arendale@umn.edu You can also check out David's other four podcasts and social media channels at www.davidmedia.org  Thanks for listening. 

Mar 7, 2024

(Bonus) The domino theory is a geopolitical theory which posits that increases or decreases in democracy in one country tend to spread to neighboring countries in a domino effect.[1] It was prominent in the United States from the 1950s to the 1980s in the context of the Cold War, suggesting that if one country in a region came under the influence of communism, then the surrounding countries would follow. It was used by successive United States administrations during the Cold War as justification for American intervention around the world. Former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower described the theory during a news conference on April 7, 1954, when referring to communism in Indochina as follows: Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the "falling domino" principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.

Moreover, Eisenhower’s deep belief in the domino theory in Asia heightened the “perceived costs for the United States of pursuing multilateralism"[3] because of multifaceted events including the “1949 victory of the Chinese Communist Party, the June 1950 North Korean invasionthe 1954 Quemoy offshore island crisis, and the conflict in Indochina constituted a broad-based challenge not only for one or two countries, but for the entire Asian continent and Pacific."[3] This connotes a strong magnetic force to give in to communist control, and aligns with the comment by General Douglas MacArthur that “victory is a strong magnet in the East."