Talk: Winds of Hope, Storms of Discord: The United States since 1945

Professor Salim Yaqub will discuss his new book, Winds of Hope, Storms of Discord: The United States since 1945, which traverses the broad sweep of postwar U.S. history. It explores how Americans of all walks of life—political leaders, businesspeople, public intellectuals, workers, students, activists, migrants, and others—struggled to define the nation’s political, economic, geopolitical, demographic, and social character. The book chronicles the nation’s ceaseless ferment, from the rocky conversion to peacetime in the early aftermath of World War II; to the frightening emergence of the Cold War and repeated U.S. military adventures abroad; to the struggles of African Americans and other minorities to claim a share of the American Dream; to the striking transformations in social attitudes catalyzed by the women’s movement and struggles for gay and lesbian liberation; to the dynamic force of political, economic, and social conservatism. Carrying the story to the spring of 2022, Winds of Hope also shows how dizzying technological changes at times threatened to upend the nation’s civic and political life.

Salim Yaqub received his Ph.D. in U.S. history from Yale University in 1999. He is now Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Director of UCSB’s Center for Cold War Studies and International History. He is the author of three books: Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East (University of North Carolina Press, 2004), Imperfect Strangers: Americans, Arabs, and U.S.–Middle East Relations in the 1970s (Cornell University Press, 2016), and Winds of Hope, Storms of Discord: The United States since 1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Professor Yaqub has also written several articles and book chapters on the history of U.S. foreign relations, the international politics of the Middle East, and Arab American political activism.

Sponsored by the Center for Cold War Studies and International History