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Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis talks about George Kennan, troubled Cold War mastermind. In the late 1940s, George Kennan wrote two documents that set the strategy of containment that defined U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union for the next four decades. He was also an architect of the Marshall Plan and would become an outspoken critic of American diplomacy, politics, and culture. George F. Kennan: An American Life took almost 30 years to write, is based on interviews with Kennan and his voluminous diaries and other personal papers.

In June 1961, Nikita Khrushchev called Berlin "the most dangerous place on earth." American and Soviet fighting men and tanks stood only yards apart. Frederick Kempe talks about what made Berlin so dangerous. His book Berlin 1961 is based on a wealth of new documents and interviews, filled with fresh insights, and is a masterly look at key events of the 20th century, with powerful applications to these early years of the 21st century.

In June 1961, Nikita Khrushchev called Berlin "the most dangerous place on earth." American and Soviet fighting men and tanks stood only yards apart. Frederick Kempe talks about what made Berlin so dangerous. His book Berlin 1961 is based on a wealth of new documents and interviews, filled with fresh insights, and is a masterly look at key events of the 20th century, with powerful applications to these early years of the 21st century.

Young, idealistic, and in love, at the age of 18, Deb Olin Unferth ran away from college with her Christian boyfriend and followed him to Nicaragua to join the Sandinistas. In Revolution: The Year I Fell In Love and Went to Join the War, Unferth recounts her struggles to find “revolution jobs”, the subsequent disillusionment, and the eventual end of the Cold War in this rumination of what happens to a country and its people after the revolution is over.

Filmmaker Christian Carion and CIA veteran Jack Divine discuss Russian spies and international espionage in the 1980s. Carion’s film “Farewell” is set in Moscow in 1981, and recounts the true story of a disenchanted KGB colonel who gives top-secret documents to a French businessman working in Russia in an effort to end of the Cold War and create a better world for his son.

Twenty years ago today, at a press conference aboard the Russian cruise ship Maxim Gorky, the end of the Cold War was officially declared.  And yet the fear accompanying nuclear weaponry remains, as evidenced by President Obama's explanation of the stakes in Afghanistan on Tuesday night: “We know that al Qaeda and other extremists seek nuclear weapons, and we have every reason to believe that they would use them.”