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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Review, Surveillance And Spies In The Civil War: Exposing Confederate Conspiracies In America’S Heartland, By Stephen E. Towne, Evan Rothera
Review, Surveillance And Spies In The Civil War: Exposing Confederate Conspiracies In America’S Heartland, By Stephen E. Towne, Evan Rothera
Secrecy and Society
Review of Stephen E. Towne's Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War: Exposing Confederate Conspiracies in America’s Heartland.
Writing The Official History Of The Joint Intelligence Committee, Michael Goodman
Writing The Official History Of The Joint Intelligence Committee, Michael Goodman
Secrecy and Society
This article recounts the experience of a professional historian in being given the keys to the kingdom: access to the classified vaults of Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee. This article includes some of the problems in having access, but complying with the sensitivities around official accounts, difficulties in writing a global history, or trying to make the work of a committee interesting and accessible, and of trying to determine the impact of intelligence on policy.
Historical Amnesia: British And U.S. Intelligence, Past And Present, Calder Walton
Historical Amnesia: British And U.S. Intelligence, Past And Present, Calder Walton
Secrecy and Society
Many intelligence scandals in the news today seem unprecedented - from Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, to British and U.S. intelligence agencies monitoring activities of their citizens. They seem new largely because, traditionally, intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic were excessively secretive about their past activities: even the names “GCHQ” and “NSA” were airbrushed from declassified records, and thus missing from major historical works and scholarship on on post-war international relations. The resulting secrecy about British and U.S. intelligence has led to misunderstandings and conspiracy theories in societies about them. Newly opened secret records now …
Writing About Espionage Secrets, Kristie Macrakis
Writing About Espionage Secrets, Kristie Macrakis
Secrecy and Society
This article describes the author’s experiences researching three books on espionage history in three different countries and on three different topics. The article describes the foreign intelligence arm of the Ministry for State Security; a global history of secret writing from ancient to modern times; and finally, my current project on U.S. intelligence and technology from the Cold War to the War on Terror. The article also discusses the tensions between national security and openness and reflects on the results of this research and its implications for history and for national security.