Assign this!

Perfect new book for the second semester: "The Global Cold War". Table of Contents:

Introduction
1. The empire of liberty: American ideology and foreign interventions
2. The empire of justice: Soviet ideology and foreign interventions
3. The revolutionaries: anti-colonial politics and transformations
4. Creating the Third World: the United States confronts revolution
5. The Cuban and Vietnamese challenges
6. The crisis of decolonization: Southern Africa
7. The prospects of socialism: Ethiopia and the Horn
8. The Islamist defiance
9. The 1980s: the Reagan offensive
10. The Gorbachev withdrawal and the end of the Cold War
Conclusion: Revolutions, interventions and Great Power collapse.

raw materials and Soviet collapse

Cool post on the Soviet collapse, tracking various agricultural and raw materials production. Gives good details of the 'long-term structural flaws of the Soviet system' I'm always talking about. As well as some good glimpses into the Politburo mentality on how to fix the system (or not, as it turned out).