Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David L. Pike
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Nuclear Family ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Protest Movements ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
The Government ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The 1960S

Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered Decades studies the two periods in which Americans were actively encouraged to build backyard shelters while governments exhausted their budgets on fortified super-shelters and megaton bombs. The dreams and nightmares inspired by the specter of nuclear destruction were expressed in images and forms of fallout shelters and other bunker fantasies from comics, movies, and pulp paperbacks to policy documents, protest movements, and survivalist tracts. Bunker fantasies stratified class, region, race, and gender and created often unrecognized through-lines leading from the 1960s and the less-studied 1980s into the present day. A substantial Introduction defines “bunker fantasy” and the meanings of shelter and security since the end of World War II. The five chapters of Part 1 taxonomize the primary and sometimes overlapping forms taken by the bunker and its fantasies during its first heyday in the years around the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962: the basement or backyard shelter, suburbia, and the nuclear family; the cave, tribalism, and feral humanity; the private supershelter, survivalism, and self-reliance; the community shelter, infrastructure, and urban bunkerism; and the government supershelter, paranoia, and paternalism. The four chapters of Part 2 treat the new bunker fantasies that emerged around 1983, the closest the world had come to nuclear war since 1962, in general popular culture, men’s action fiction, nuclear realism, and feminist science fiction. A conclusion briefly discusses the legacy of these decades in today’s anxieties around security, borders, and apocalypse both real and imagined.

“I Wanted It to Change and to Make Up for Its Past”

2020 ◽  
pp. 162-204
Author(s):  
Simon Wendt
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Public Rhetoric ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Immigration Laws ◽  
Femininity And Masculinity ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The 1960S

The chapter explores the organization’s post–World War II history. This period saw major challenges to its conservative vision of America’s “imagined community.” Despite these challenges, the DAR’s views on race, immigration, gender, and the nation’s past remained virtually unchanged. It continued to embrace ethnic nationalism, opposing racial integration and a liberalization of America’s immigration laws, and upheld the very same ideals of femininity and masculinity that its campaigns had emphasized prior to 1945. The organization regarded the social movements of the 1960s, including the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and second wave feminism, as a grave danger to the nation. Although the DAR began to admit black members in 1977 and finally acknowledged African Americans’ patriotic contributions to American independence in the 1980s, its public rhetoric of civic tolerance frequently belied the DAR’s conservative views on race and gender.

Women and Gender

2019 ◽  
pp. 178-207
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
American Life ◽  
Family Tradition ◽  
The Social ◽  
Women's Equality ◽  
Social Liberalism ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

Benson’s views on women’s roles might be dismissed as simply the old-fashioned vestiges of Mormon patriarchy and generational sexism. Certainly, “Motherhood to the exclusion of all else” and the redirecting of feminine ambition back toward the home had been a rhetorical line from LDS leaders since early in the twentieth century, especially in reaction to the gender shifts of World War II and beyond. Like other anxieties within Mormonism about postwar disruptions in American life, the movement for women’s equality--and church leaders’ reactions to it--can best be understood against the backdrop of Cold War fears about the infiltration of communism, atheism, sexual liberation, and expressions of anti-authority impulses into American life. For Benson, as this essay argues, Mormonism’s emphasis on family, tradition, children, and maternity offered a reliable counterinfluence to the Cold War and the social liberalism of the 1960s that brought sexual debauchery, crime, and the degradation of women.

‘When The Time Comes’: The Damned and British Cold War Culture

The Damned ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 41-46
Author(s):  
Nick Riddle
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Regular Feature ◽  
Cold War Culture ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
The Government ◽  
Historical Moment

This chapter evaluates the influence of the British Cold War culture on Joseph Losey's The Damned (1963). British cinema was far slower than Hollywood to address the nuclear threat in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This was a reflection of the government's own reticence on the matter. The Edgehill Establishment, Bernard's secret facility, would have been a familiar sight to most people in Great Britain by the early 1960s. Such 'secret establishments' became a regular feature of science fiction from the late 1950s onwards, embodying the growing public distrust in the government's defence programme and anxieties about safety. Ultimately, The Damned inhabits a historical moment between the wane of public deference towards the government concerning nuclear weapons and the more full-throated protests and bolder visualisations of nuclear war that appeared mid-decade.

Creatures of Cain

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erika Lorraine Milam
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Late Night ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
American Science ◽  
Human Exceptionalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

After World War II, the question of how to define a universal human nature took on new urgency. This book charts the rise and precipitous fall in Cold War America of a theory that attributed man's evolutionary success to his unique capacity for murder. The book reveals how the scientists who advanced this “killer ape” theory capitalized on an expanding postwar market in intellectual paperbacks and widespread faith in the power of science to solve humanity's problems, even to answer the most fundamental questions of human identity. The killer ape theory spread quickly from colloquial science publications to late-night television, classrooms, political debates, and Hollywood films. Behind the scenes, however, scientists were sharply divided, their disagreements centering squarely on questions of race and gender. Then, in the 1970s, the theory unraveled altogether when primatologists discovered that chimpanzees also kill members of their own species. While the discovery brought an end to definitions of human exceptionalism delineated by violence, the book shows how some evolutionists began to argue for a shared chimpanzee–human history of aggression even as other scientists discredited such theories as sloppy popularizations. A wide-ranging account of a compelling episode in American science, the book argues that the legacy of the killer ape persists today in the conviction that science can resolve the essential dilemmas of human nature.

‘Almost the same, but not quite’: Ontological politics of recognition in modern science fiction

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 251-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingvil Hellstrand
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Politics Of Recognition ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
Human Ontology ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Fixed Boundaries

This article explores how issues of ‘not quite human-ness’ expose the conditions of possibility of being considered human; of human ontology. I refer to these dynamics for identifying sameness and difference as ontological politics of recognition. Tracing the genealogies of passing, I situate passing and Othering socio-political regulation and ideological frameworks for conceptualising ontology. I am particularly concerned with how the notion of ontology is bound up in questions of race and gender, and with the entanglements of technology and biology that can destabilise apparently fixed boundaries between the (natural/normative) human and its (constructed/abnormal) Others. I identify three trajectories of passing as human in the histories of science fiction. The first trajectory discusses ontological mimicry: the ways in which the non-human attempts to be like the human. The second trajectory addresses how passing as human relies on a Butlerian performativity: doing human-ness by complying with the regulatory frames for appearances and practices. The final trajectory discusses what is at stake in contemporary ontological politics of recognition: a renegotiation of human supremacy through an emphasis on collectivity and collaboration rather that singularity and boundedness.

scholarly journals In self defense : black female journalists' advocacy in the Cold War

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Rachel (Rachel Lindsey) Grant
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
White Woman ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
Female Journalists ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Cold War

"Mary Church Terrell, Black female journalist and civil rights activist, stood in front of the United Nations board in Lake Success, New York, on Sept. 21, 1949, to present a brief on Rosa Lee Ingram. Ingram and her two sons had been sentenced in 1948 to life in prison after they were accused of murdering John Stratford, their white neighbor who attacked Ingram after her livestock ventured onto his Georgia property. As a mother of 14 children, Ingram believed she acted in self-defense, but the Southern justice of an all-white jury convicted her. In front of an audience of 75 people, Terrell stated: "Under similar circumstances it is inconceivable that such an unjust sentence would have been imposed upon a white woman and her sons." She went further in noting the role that both race and gender played in the Ingram case." -- Introduction

Containment

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Preston
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
World War ◽  
Land War ◽  
The Government ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Cold War Consensus

Assessing the application of the liberal consensus idea to postwar foreign policy, this chapter contends that myths about the bipartisan spirit of U.S. foreign policy have too long found ready acceptance from historians. Politics did not stop at the water’s edge, even when bipartisanship was at its supposed zenith during World War II and the early Cold War. While there was unanimity during the post-war era that the growth of international communism was a threat to U.S. interests, this did not mean that foreign policy was free of political conflict, and partisan charges that the government of the day was losing the Cold War were commonplace. Meanwhile, non-elite opinion evinced little support for confrontation with the main Communist powers, reluctance to engage in another land war like Korea, and concern about survival in the nuclear era. The divisiveness wrought by Vietnam was supposed to have brought an end to the “Cold War consensus,” but uncertainty over its meaning was evident well before this.

Joanna Russ and the New Wave

Joanna Russ ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 20-38
Author(s):  
Gwyneth Jones
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Star Trek ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Protest Movements ◽  
Joanna Russ ◽  
Modernist Novel ◽  
The 1960S

“Experiment and Experience” covers Joanna’s first years as a reviewer for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, under the editorship of Judith Merril, and her first post as a university teacher at Cornell, and discusses modernism in sf, Joanna’s role as interpreter of the British “New Worlds” writers and the American New Wave and her response to the protest movements and cultural revolutions of the 1960s (in the psychedelic “Modernist novel by a Star Trek fan”) And Chaos Died. Essays and stories (1968-1971) examined include the important “The Wearing Out of Genre Materials,” and autobiographical short fictions that foreshadow The Female Man and illuminate And Chaos Died.

The Millennial/Gen Z Leftists Are Emerging: Are Sociologists Ready for Them?

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 408-427
Author(s):  
Elaine Bell Kaplan
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Gender Inequality ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
The Status ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
New Generation ◽  
Do So

Sociology is being challenged by the new generation of students and scholars who have another view of society. Millennial/Gen Zs are the most progressive generation since the 1960s. We have had many opportunities to discuss and imagine power, diversity, and social change when we teach them in our classes or attend their campus events. Some Millennial/Gen Z believe, especially those in academia, that social scientists are tied to old theories and ideologies about race and gender, among other inconsistencies. These old ideas do not resonate with their views regarding equity. Millennials are not afraid to challenge the status quo. They do so already by supporting multiple gender and race identities. Several questions come to mind. How do we as sociologists with our sense of history and other issues such as racial and gender inequality help them along the way? Are we ready for this generation? Are they ready for us?

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