From introduction by Jaclyn Stanke: The origins of this volume are rooted in the many discussions and meetings that took place between Maryna Bessonova, Spasimir Domaradzki, and Rob Verhofstad over the past several years. In the summer of 2004, Bessonova and Verhofstad met as Fulbright scholars studying American foreign policy in the United States. In the course of that summer, the two discussed the many different and varying views that existed within Europe concerning America’s foreign policy past and present. Their conversations continued when they returned home and began visiting each other’s universities in Ukraine and the Netherlands as guest lecturers. In the process, they discovered how little their students knew about the Cold War period, not having lived through it or having experienced it themselves. Consequently, their students had a difficult time grasping just what the Cold War was, why it was one of the most significant phenomenons of the twentieth century, and how it affected the daily lives of individuals around the world, including those from their own countries. In the summer of 2005, Domaradzki met Bessonova and Verhofstad at a conference in Croatia. He shared their concern regarding students’ difficulty in comprehending the Cold War, and as a result a project to explore the Cold War from comparative national perspectives officially began. Over the course of the next few years, the three traveled to each other’s universities to deliver lectures on the Soviet, Dutch, and Polish perspectives. In 2009, Jaclyn Stanke and Lee Trepanier joined the endeavor, providing American perspectives at the conference, “Multilateral Comparison of Cold War Perspectives,” organized by Verhofstad at his home institution, Radboud University. The proceedings from the conference were published as Comparative Perspectives on the Cold War: National and Sub-National Approaches (Krakow Society for Education: AFM Publishing House, 2010).

Conference proceedings "Comparative Perspectives on the Cold War: National and Sub-National Approaches" available at https://repozytorium.ka.edu.pl/handle/11315/13774