Ice War Diplomat

Discover a diplomacy mission like no other in Ice War Diplomat, the behind-the-scenes story of the historic 1972 Summit Series. Amid the tension of the Cold War, caught between capitalism and communism, Canada and the Soviet Union, young Canadian diplomat Gary J. Smith must navigate the rink, melting the ice between two nations skating a dangerous path. On his first overseas assignment, Smith is tasked with finding common ground and building friendships between the world’s two largest countries. Once in Moscow, he opts for sports diplomacy, throwing off his embassy black tie and donning the blue-and-white sweater of the Moscow Maple Leafs. Trusted by each side with unparalleled access to officials, coaches and players on both teams, Smith witnesses this unique and epic hockey series that has come to transcend time, becoming a symbol of the unity and clarity that sports can offer. The 1972 Canadian-Soviet Hockey Series will go down in history as a pivotal political event, changing the course of two nations and the world of hockey—the fascinating story in these pages will appeal to history and sports fans alike.

Having skyrocketed from six to fourteen teams between 1966 and 1970, leaders of the National Hockey League had planned to wait a few more years before expanding any further. But as its rivalry with the World Hockey Association intensified, competition for markets rose, and the race for continued expansion became too urgent to ignore. Not to be outdone, the NHL introduced two new teams in 1971: one in Long Island, New York, and one in Atlanta, Georgia. For its own part, Atlanta had been watching as White residents left the city for the suburbs over the course of the 1960s. As the turn of the decade approached, city leadership was searching for ways to mitigate white flight and bring residents of the surrounding suburbs back to the city center. So when a stereotypically White sport came to the Deep South in 1971 in the form of the Atlanta Flames, ownership saw a new opportunity to appeal to White audiences. But the challenge would be selling a game that was foreign to most of Atlanta’s longtime sports fans. Filling a significant gap in scholarly literature concerning race and hockey within US history, White Ice: Race and the Making of Atlanta Hockey is a response to two simple questions: How did a cold-climate sport like hockey end up in a majority Black city in the Deep South? And why did it come when it did? Over seven chronological chapters, Thomas Aiello unpacks the history, culture, and context surrounding these questions, teasing out what the story of the Atlanta Flames can teach us about the NHL, Atlanta, race, and the business of professional sports expansion.

"Hockey Priest looks past simply understanding Bauer as a do-gooder or hockey innovator. It shows how he attempted to create a different stream of hockey that could better support youth and so build up the nation. Archival research for the book uncovered Bauer-written hockey reports, speeches, and notes that detail his thinking about the game and his politicking to bring about change in it"--

For his first posting, a fresh-faced Canadian diplomat and his young family are dispatched straight into the belly of the beast: the USSR in full-on Cold War mode. Next stop, Havana - with an additional assignment: clandestine intelligence gathering for the CIA. In this timely memoir, the late cold warrior-diplomat Bill Warden chronicles his years in the realm of western diplomacy during a period when the world stood at, and pulled back from, the brink of nuclear annihilation. Diplomat, Dissident, Spook relays firsthand the experiences of this former Canadian diplomat who, like Voltaire's Candide, gets successively disabused of his ideological certainties. The memoir ranges from espionage-central in Berlin in the late 1950s, to the "Evil Empire" in Moscow, to Cuba, where the author worked gathering intelligence for the CIA in a top-secret program of cooperation between the US and Canada following the Cuban Missile Crisis. Through subsequent ambassadorial postings to Hong Kong and Pakistan, and missions to Tehran, where he negotiated for the resumption of diplomatic relations with the revolutionary regime in Iran following the highly publicized "Canadian Caper" (and secured the release of a Canadian hostage), Warden witnesses with some dismay as Canada's Foreign Service shifts its focus to, as he puts it, selling widgets, away from what he saw as pivotal political concerns. By the time Warden serves as High Commissioner to India during the turbulence of Indira Gandhi's assassination, the ensuing anti-Sikh pogroms and the Air India passenger jet bombing in 1985 that killed 329 people, the Cold War has all but fizzled, new -isms are challenging Western dominance, and he's disenchanted with the workings of Canadian diplomacy. Warden finally leaves the diplomatic corps for other pursuits, including driving buses, observing elections in dodgy Latin American locales, and takes up work with, among other entities, the Gorbachev Foundation, promoting democratic reforms in the Soviet Union - a fitting bookend, he writes, to his journey as a diplomat through the Cold War years. Mikhail Gorbachev has written the foreword to the memoirs.

The A to Z of U.S. Diplomacy from the Civil War to World War I provides a convenient introduction to a critical period of American diplomacy. The half-century from 1861 to 1914 formed a crucial time in the development of the American approach to the world, for the United States laid the foundations for its 20th century foreign policy. While the famed Monroe Doctrine insisted that no foreign power meddle in the American continent, it did not stop the U.S. from waging war against Spain, mixing in conflicts in Cuba, Chile, and Mexico, nor in backing independence for Panama, all the while acquiring smaller Pacific islands. The book includes: o An introductory essay outlining main themes and problems of the era o A chronology of main events o Over 1,000 separate cross-referenced dictionary entries exploring all aspects of American Diplomacy o Appendixes providing lists of presidents; secretaries of state, war, and navy; all American diplomatic ministers and ambassadors, and most U.S. consuls o A photographic section with images of significant individuals and locations o A bibliography facilitating further research

This book analyzes the place and role of sport within public diplomacy, including theoretical conceptualizations of the category of sports diplomacy as a sub-category of public diplomacy and empirical research of selected examples of the use of sport within public diplomacy. The empirical part of the book refers to three approaches to sports diplomacy and concerns the utilization of sport by states in order to shape relations with other states, the role of sport in building the international image of a state and the diplomatic subjectivity of international sports organizations. In reference to the first two approaches, the book uses comparative case study was in order to make observations and generalizations concerning sports diplomacy. Apart from that, the book includes a detailed study of the diplomatic subjectivity of the International Olympic Committee.

Examines the rapidly changing role of diplomacy.