Thomas K. Murphy

During the Cold War, the West--especially in the popular media--tended to view communism as a monolithic phenomenon, with little variation throughout the Eastern Bloc. Yet culture and geography contributed to social diversity among and within communist systems. Drawing on interviews with approximately 100 Czechs and Slovaks, the author provides new perspectives on day-to-day life in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Their recollections paint a more complex picture of the life on the other side of the Iron Curtain, from the Sputnik era reforms of the early 1960s, through the tumult of the 1968 Prague Spring and the subsequent Soviet invasion, to the Velvet Revolution, the collapse of the communist regime and the formation of democratic Czechoslovakia in 1989.

Thomas K. Murphy explores the shifting history of European attitudes toward America, utilizing British and French writing from the late eighteenth through the middle of the nineteenth centuries. Murphy studies a rich collage of literary, philosophical, and political writing by Europeans during this era. The book covers four stages in the development of European attitudes: traditional theories and their modification in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the influence of early American diplomacy on European attitudes, the cultural iconography of the French Revolution and of England during this same period, and the genre of the travel journal. Murphy has created an interesting historiography that augments our understanding of American history, but also illuminates the role that these imaginative texts about the New World played in the formation of significant social and political developments in modern European history.