HTY/POL 301 Career Prep and HTY 339: Historiographical Essays and HTY 499/POL 499 Senior Seminar: US-Iranian Relations in the Cold War

The Illusion of Sympathy: Policy Before World War II -- The Cold War Takes Over -- Consolidating the Royal Dictatorship -- The Collapse of.the Shah -- The Rhythm of the Revolution -- The United States and Iran: A Cold War Case Study.

In this book experts examine the main features of Iran's foreign policy from 1980 - 1990, assessing relations with the UN, the superpowers, Europe, the GCC and Iraq. Although the Islamic revolution made Iran a significant force in the international arena, it is argued that the ending of the Cold War and the rise of Iraq as the dominant power in the Gulf are now creating a very different set of foreign policy challenges and options.

Matthew K. Shannon provides readers with a reminder of a brief and congenial phase of the relationship between the United States and Iran. In Losing Hearts and Minds, Shannon tells the story of an influx of Iranian students to American college campuses between 1950 and 1979 that globalized U.S. institutions of higher education and produced alliances between Iranian youths and progressive Americans. Losing Hearts and Minds is a narrative rife with historical ironies. Because of its superpower competition with the USSR, the U.S. government worked with nongovernmental organizations to create the means for Iranians to train and study in the United States. The stated goal of this initiative was to establish a cultural foundation for the official relationship and to provide Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi with educated elites to administer an ambitious program of socioeconomic development. Despite these goals, Shannon locates the incubation of at least one possible version of the Iranian Revolution on American college campuses, which provided a space for a large and vocal community of dissident Iranian students to organize against the Pahlavi regime and earn the support of empathetic Americans. Together they rejected the Shah's authoritarian model of development and called for civil and political rights in Iran, giving unwitting support to the rise of the Islamic Republic of Iran.