This concise historical narrative by a prize-winning Cold War historian covers the entire Cold War period from the Yalta conference of 1945 to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The book analyzes the Cold War as the primary event and framework that dominated American thought and action for half a century.

Fraser J. Harbutt is Associate Professor of History at Emory University. He is the prize-winning author of The Iron Curtain: Churchill, America, and the Origins of the Cold War (1986).