Robert T. Holt: Radio Free Europe (1958)

What is radio Free Europe? Where does it broadcast? Who runs it? What are its purposes? Although thousands of Americans are familiar with Radio Free Europe (many have contributed to its support through the Crusade for Freedom campaigns), few know enough about its background to answer these and similar questions. In this book a political scientist with first-hand knowledge gives a detailed account of the organization and development of this unique propaganda enterprise.

Radio Free Europe was established as a private broadcasting project in 1949 by the Free Europe Committee, headed by Joseph C. Grew, as part of the Committee’s program of broad, long-range assistance to democratic exiles from totalitarian countries. The operational headquarters are located at Munich, and the broadcasts are directed to the people of five satellite countries: Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Poland.

Professor Holt tells how Radio Free Europe was established, outlines its basic policies and objectives, describes its organization, personnel, programming, and services, discusses transmission problems, and examines the effectiveness of the propaganda. He describes in detail the role of RFE in connection with the uprisings in Poland and Hungary and analyzes the charges that RFE stimulated the Hungarian revolt.

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 1958
ISBN 978-0-8166-5788-9
249 pages

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Charles Merewether (ed.): The Archive (2006)

“In the modern era, the archive—official or personal—has become the most significant means by which historical knowledge and memory are collected, stored, and recovered. The archive has thus emerged as a key site of inquiry in such fields as anthropology, critical theory, history, and, especially, recent art. Traces and testimonies of such events as World War II and ensuing conflicts, the emergence of the postcolonial era, and the fall of communism have each provoked a reconsideration of the authority given the archive—no longer viewed as a neutral, transparent site of record but as a contested subject and medium in itself.

This volume surveys the full diversity of our transformed theoretical and critical notions of the archive—as idea and as physical presence—from Freud’s “mystic writing pad” to Derrida’s “archive fever”; from Christian Boltanski’s first autobiographical explorations of archival material in the 1960s to the practice of artists as various as Susan Hiller, Ilya Kabakov, Thomas Hirshhorn, Renée Green, and The Atlas Group in the present.”

Publisher Whitechapel, London, and MIT Press, 2006
Documents of Contemporary Art series
ISBN 0262633388, 9780262633383
207 pages

Reviews: Sas Mays (caa.reviews 2009), Barbara Beckers (Incirculation 2012).

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Joel Andreas: Rise of the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the Origins of China’s New Class (2009)

Rise of the Red Engineers explains the tumultuous origins of the class of technocratic officials who rule China today. In a fascinating account, author Joel Andreas chronicles how two mutually hostile groups—the poorly educated peasant revolutionaries who seized power in 1949 and China’s old educated elite—coalesced to form a new dominant class. After dispossessing the country’s propertied classes, Mao and the Communist Party took radical measures to eliminate class distinctions based on education, aggravating antagonisms between the new political and old cultural elites. Ultimately, however, Mao’s attacks on both groups during the Cultural Revolution spurred inter-elite unity, paving the way—after his death—for the consolidation of a new class that combined their political and cultural resources. This story is told through a case study of Tsinghua University, which—as China’s premier school of technology—was at the epicenter of these conflicts and became the party’s preferred training ground for technocrats, including many of China’s current leaders.

Publisher Stanford University Press, 2009
Contemporary issues in Asia and the Pacific series
ISBN 0804760780, 9780804760782
344 pages

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