Roundtable on Hartman's Education and the Cold War (Part I): Introduction by Tim Lacy

Earlier this year one of our own, Andrew Hartman, happily announced the completion of his first book, Education and the Cold War (Palgrave Macmillan). Shortly thereafter I commissioned a review by Milton Gaither of Messiah College. Professor Gaither ably outlined the book and offered his praise and criticism.

For a standard journal a single review would normally suffice. As Andrew's colleagues and friends, however, we wanted to do a bit more. Both I and former USIH contributor Joe Petrulionis, having (finally!) read the book and sharing an itch for a broader discussion, therefore bring you this first USIH Roundtable on Andrew's Education and the Cold War.

As USIH's book review editor, I hope this signals the beginning of more Roundtables to come. Although a weblog's "comments" function always enables a kind of Roundtable, sometimes it is necessary to more formally present the views of more than one person. It's too easy to pass over the discussion portion of a weblog post: time presses, and there is no guarantee that a post's comments will be substantial (although that's not normally a problem at USIH---many comments here are easily worthy of separate posts).

Without further ado, I present to you this four-part Roundtable. You've completed the Introduction, and what follows are two reviews---one by Petrulionis and the other by me---and Andrew's various replies (including responses to Gaither's review). Let's make an effort to centralize all comments after Andrew's reply.

Enjoy! - TL