Southern Literature, Cold War Culture, and the Making of Modern America

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordan J. Dominy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Southern Literature ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Societal Pressure ◽  
The Cold War

The formalized study of southern literature in the mid-twentieth century is an example of scholars formalizing the study of modernist aesthetics in order to suppress leftist politics and sentiments in literature and art. This formalized, institutional study was initiated in a climate in which intellectuals were under societal pressure, created by the Cold War, to praise literary and artistic production representative of American values. This even in southern literary studies occurred roughly at the same time that the United States sought to extoll the virtues of America’s free, democratic society abroad. In this manner, southern studies and American studies become two sides of the same coin. Intellectuals and writers that promoted American exceptionalism dealt with the rising Civil Rights Movement and the nation’s complicated history with race and poverty by casting the issues as moral rather than political problems that were distinctly southern and could therefore be corrected by drawing on “exceptional” southern values, such as tradition and honor. The result of such maneuvering is that over the course of the twentieth century, “south” becomes more than a geographical identity. Ultimately, “south” becomes a socio-political and cultural identity associated with modern conservatism with no geographical boundaries. Rather than a country divided into south and north, the United States is divided in the twenty-first century into red and blue states. The result of using southern literature to present southern values as appropriate, moderate values for the whole nation during the Cold War is to associate these values with nationalism and conservatism today.

Selling White Supremacy in the United States

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Grant
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
South African ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Party ◽  
Black Protest ◽  
Sustained Effort ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter traces South African foreign policy responses to the civil rights movement in the United States. It explores how the National Party engaged with the racial politics of the Cold War in an attempt legitimize apartheid to an increasingly sceptical global audience. The National Party did not shy away from challenging negative portrayals of apartheid. In the United States, South African diplomatic officials mounted a systematic propaganda campaign to correct “misconceptions” and present the apartheid system in a positive light. Equating black protest with communist subversion, South African diplomats engaged in a deliberate and sustained effort to defend apartheid in the United States.

The Unbearable Whiteness of Grand Strategy

2021 ◽  
pp. 329-345
Author(s):  
Adriane Lentz-Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
National Interests ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Foreign Relations ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter explores grand strategy as an intellectual and cultural project by considering its willful unseeing of race as a political project. To ignore race is to misapprehend how power works in the United States and how domestic formulations of subjectivity, difference, and racialized power imbue American foreign relations. The chapter focuses on African Americans in the era of Cold War civil rights. For Carl Rowan and Sam Greenlee, the two African American veterans who provide concrete cases for thinking about the United States and the world, their blackness and ambitions for their people would color how they interpreted America's role in political and military struggles in the Third World and beyond. As with other people of color, their encounters with white supremacy shaped their understandings of liberation, violence, and the United States security project. Their perspectives challenge scholars’ conceptions of the Cold War as a period of “defined clear national interests” and “public consensus.” Centering the stories of Rowan and Greenlee highlights not simply ongoing contestation over the myth and history of the Cold War, but, more fundamentally, the unthinking whiteness of grand strategy itself.

Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez and Guion Bluford

2019 ◽  
pp. 145-166
Author(s):  
Cathleen Lewis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Adverse Impact ◽  
Soviet Space ◽  
Black Man ◽  
The Cold War

Cathleen Lewis argues that throughout the Cold War, race played an important role in foreign policy with the United States painfully aware that its civil rights situation could have an adverse impact on foreign policy ambitions abroad. The USSR preyed on that U.S. sensitivity, calling the country out on its failures. In the early 1980s, almost a decade after U.S. foreign policy had all but abandoned race as a Cold War issue, the race issue reemerged, albeit briefly when the USSR launched the first black man into space, Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez, beating NASA’s own Guion Bluford. This final battle over race in the Cold War ultimately revealed American domestic progress and the hollowness of Soviet space stunts.

Charlie Brown's America

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Blake Scott Ball
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Comic Strip ◽  
Nuclear Testing ◽  
Social Turmoil

Charles Schulz’s Peanuts was an unexpectedly political comic strip. While many people have come to identify Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, Peppermint Patty, and Snoopy with childhood and innocence, Peanuts regularly commented on the politics and social turmoil of Cold War America. From nuclear testing to the civil rights movement, from the Vietnam War to the feminist revolution, Peanuts was an unlikely medium for Americans of all stripes to debate the hopes and fears of the era. Charlie Brown’s America is the story of how the creation of one Midwestern man became one of the most influential pop-culture properties of the twentieth century and what its popularity reveals about the character of the United States.

scholarly journals Techno-Transatlantic Science and Technology in Relations Between the United States and Europe

Ad Americam ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 89-106
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Zachara
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Technology Development ◽  
Political Competition ◽  
The United States ◽  
Transatlantic Cooperation ◽  
Transatlantic History ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
The Cold War

The article focuses both on account technology as a factor in the twentieth-century relations of the United States and Europe and a view of transatlantic history through the lens of technology. It describes the trajectory of modernization through technology in certain characteristically transatlantic contexts – including the Cold War role, the advancement in military technologies and the international political competition. It demonstrates that technology development in many ways, provides structure for transatlantic cooperation and acting as a force reshaping political relations.

Performing Catfish Row in the Soviet Union: The Everyman Opera Company andPorgy and Bess, 1955–56

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 470-501 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL SY UY
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
The United States ◽  
Porgy And Bess ◽  
Race Identity ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War

AbstractFor three weeks in 1955 and 1956 the Everyman Opera Company stagedPorgy and Bessin Leningrad and Moscow. In the previous two years, the Robert Breen and Blevins Davis production of Gershwin's opera had toured Europe and Latin America, funded by the U.S. State Department. Yet when Breen negotiated a performance tour to Russia, the American government denied funding, stating, among other reasons, that a production would be “politically premature.” Surprisingly, however, the opera was performed with the Soviet Ministry of Culture paying the tour costs in full. I argue that this tour, negotiated amid the growing civil rights movement, was a non-paradigmatic example of cultural exchange at the beginning of the Cold War: an artistic product funded at different times byboththe United Statesandthe Soviet Union. Through an examination of the tour's archival holdings, interviews with surviving cast members, and the critical reception in the historically black press, this essay contributes to ongoing questions of Cold War scholarship, including discussions on race, identity, and the unpredictable nature of cultural exchange.

Americanists in Unexpected Places

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Blaustein
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
American Studies ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
International Diffusion ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter is a centrifugal history of American Studies in the United States and abroad. There have been many crises within American Studies, including calls to rename it, internationalize it, or abandon it altogether. But what was American Studies? What were the original preoccupations of this unusual field, and what were the historical conditions that enabled its establishment and international diffusion? American Studies operated in the knotty terrain of military occupation, reconstruction, and democratization after World War II, but the Americanist century has many points of origin, and it transcends the binaries of the Cold War. This chapter brings together the histories of American Studies in the United States with the less familiar histories of American Studies in Europe and Japan, stretching from the early twentieth century to the Cold War. It also offers a more cosmopolitan history of “American exceptionalism.”

Solving for X

2012 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-118
Author(s):  
Clayton R. Koppes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Third World ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Power ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The U.S

George F. Kennan is renowned as the author of the containment doctrine and subsequently as a critic of American Cold War policy. But other elements of his thought, which have been neglected, are integral to a reconsideration of his stature. He distrusted democracy and proposed ways to limit its expression, discounted movements for human rights in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, believed Hispanics posed a threat to the United States, and often argued against the national liberation aspirations in the Third World (which he considered largely irrelevant to Great Power diplomacy). He failed to grasp the connection between the U.S. civil rights movement and foreign policy. These weaknesses limited his usefulness as a policy adviser and still cloud his legacy as America’s “conscience.”

scholarly journals Ou ficar a pátria livre ou morrer pelo brasil: a ALN e sua natureza “anti-estadunidense”

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 272-297
Author(s):  
Carolina de Castro Palhares ◽  
Pedro Henrique de Moraes Cicero
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Armed Struggle ◽  
Coup D'etat ◽  
Us Hegemony ◽  
America Latina ◽  
The Cold War

Na segunda metade do século XX, no contexto da política de poder bipolar decorrente da Guerra Fria, a América Latina vivenciou o surgimento de ditaduras civil-militares as quais, em parte, estruturam-se com a finalidade de manter a hegemonia estadunidense na região. Como resposta armada aos regimes de exceção, grupos guerrilheiros foram fundados tanto para reverter o cenário político interno quanto para denunciar a subordinação daqueles regimes aos interesses econômicos e geopolíticos estadunidenses. Partindo dessa conjuntura e apoiado nos documentos originais que tratam do tema, o artigo analisa a maneira pela qual a Ação Libertadora Nacional (ALN) denunciou, interpretou e reagiu à participação dos Estados Unidos tanto no golpe de Estado de 1964 quanto na consolidação da ditadura brasileira.     Abstract: In the second half of the twentieth century, in the context of the bipolar power policy resulting from the Cold War, Latin America experienced the emergence of civil-military dictatorships which, in part, were structured with the purpose of maintaining US´ hegemony in the region. As an armed response to the regimes of exception, guerrilla groups were founded both to reverse the internal political scenario and to denounce the subordination of those regimes to US economic and geopolitical interests. Within this conjuncture and guided by the original documents that illustrate the theme, the article analyzes the way in which the Ação Libertadora Nacional (ALN) denounced, interpreted and reacted to the participation of the United States both in the 1964 coup d'état and in the maintenance of the Brazilian Dictatorship . Keywords: Inter-American Relations; Civic-Military Dictatorships; Armed Struggle; Ação Libertadora Nacional.     Recebido em: abril/2020. Aprovado em:  setembro/2020.

An Erosion of Credibility

2018 ◽  
pp. 21-44
Author(s):  
Laurence R. Jurdem
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Great Society ◽  
National Review ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War

In the opinion of these media outlets, America’s failure to achieve victory in Southeast Asia was due to an inherent weakness at the foundation of the nation’s foreign policy. Those who wrote for Human Events and National Review argued that the misdirection and uncertainty that plagued the war strategy of the Johnson and Nixon administrations were due to the divisiveness in the country over the ramifications of the civil rights movement and the Great Society. Conservative commentators believed that the disunity among the nation’s citizenry, combined with the failure of the two administrations to do whatever was necessary to win the war, caused the United States’ credibility as a combatant in the Cold War to be questioned around the world.

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