Rodolfo Margaria and the First Walk on the Moon

2019 ◽  
Vol 90 (11) ◽  
pp. 982-985
Author(s):  
Gabriele S. Grasso ◽  
Egidio P. Beretta ◽  
Giuseppe A. Miserocchi ◽  
Michele A. Riva
Keyword(s):  
Human Physiology ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Lunar Soil ◽  
Human Locomotion ◽  
Maximum Speed ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Space Race ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The University ◽  
Moon Landing

INTRODUCTION: During the Cold War years, the Space Race was largely supported by the efforts of many engineers and scientists, in particular human physiologists. Rodolfo Margaria (1901–1983), director of the Institute of Human Physiology at the University of Milan, was one of the most eminent and focused his studies on the mechanics of human locomotion in subgravity, in particular on the Moon’s surface. Long before the real Moon landing, Margaria was able to correctly theorize how astronauts would walk on lunar soil, what would be the optimal pattern of progression, as well as determine the optimum and maximum speed at one-sixth of the Earth's gravity. On 21st July 1969 at 02:56 UTC, great excitement was aroused by the television images of Neil Armstrong's first steps on the Moon. Instead of walking, he moved around making small leaps, as expected from Margaria and colleagues.Grasso GS, Beretta EP, Miserocchi GA, Riva MA. Rodolfo Margaria and the first walk on the Moon. Aerosp Med Hum Perform. 2019; 90(11):982–985.

The Politics of Culture in Cold War America

Prospects ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 451-454 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Sugrue
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
University Of Pennsylvania ◽  
Literary Figure ◽  
National Security State ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The University

In march, 1994, the University of Pennsylvania held a conference to celebrate the opening of the Howard Fast papers at the university's library. To commemorate Fast's remarkable sixty-year career, a group of historians and literary critics gathered to reconsider the intellectual and cultural milieu of the United States in the early years of the Cold War. During the eventful years, from 1945 to 1960, Fast emerged as a leading Communist activist and a major literary figure who achieved great popular success. Fast, an unabashed member of the Communist Party, like many other oppositional writers of the era, clashed with the national security state. He faced harassment, blacklisting, and marginalization for his refusal to cooperate with federal authorities who were committed to silencing cultural and political voices from the Left. Like other stalwarts of the Communist Party, Fast was often doctrinaire. As a reporter for the Daily Worker and an occasional partisan polemicist, Fast was often stiflingly orthodox. But Fast's Communism was a distinctively American variant, mediated by New York's Jewish radicalism, deeply concerned with the American dilemma of racial inequality.

Cultural Context of Apollo Culture

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Westwood ◽  
Beth Laura O’Leary ◽  
Milford Wayne Donaldson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Apollo Program ◽  
International Geophysical Year ◽  
Social Events ◽  
Space Race ◽  
Cold War Era ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
International Geophysical

This chapter expands on the notion of Apollo Culture in greater detail, beginning with an historic context of the Cold War era. It takes a look at the Sputnik and Vanguard launches during the IGY (International Geophysical Year) Space Race, and explains how these political and social events of the mid-20th century set the stage for the rise and fall of the Apollo program- which required a combination of engineering, marketing, and scientific efforts by the federal government.

Daʿwa in the Neighborhood: Female-Authored Muslim Students Association Publications, 1963–1980

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-325
Author(s):  
Justine Howe
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Nuclear Family ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Image ◽  
Muslim Americans ◽  
Religious Revival ◽  
Islamic Revival ◽  
Muslim Students ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The University

AbstractFounded in 1963 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the Muslim Students Association of the United States and Canada (MSA) expanded to 116 local chapters by 1968, with members representing more than forty countries. During the Cold War, the MSA embraced the project of daʿwa, or renewing and correcting other Muslims’ devotional practice, and improving the public image of Islam. Extant scholarship on the MSA portrays the organization as ambivalent, if not antagonistic, toward U.S. society during the Cold War because it was deeply enmeshed in the political and religious ideologies associated with the global Islamic Revival. This article offers a different view by examining female-authored writings published under the auspices of the MSA Women's Committee between 1963 and 1980. Aspirational in scope and pedagogical in approach, MSA women's literature shifts conceptions of the MSA's political and religious priorities during this period, from one of detachment to one of selective engagement with American culture. This article makes three main interventions. First, it demonstrates that a focus on the publications of MSA female members yields a more robust understanding of how this important group of American Muslims envisioned daʿwa as a local and global project of religious revival during the Cold War. Second, it shows that, to achieve their revivalist aims, female MSA members identified points of affinity with certain religious non-Muslim Americans, namely, upwardly mobile Christians and Jews. For these authors, the ground on which they found affinity with families of other faiths was not theology or Abrahamic lineage but, rather, a shared gendered and classed vision of raising devout children to meet the unique threats posed by modernity. Finally, this article examines how female MSA authors conceived of the patriarchally organized yet maternally driven nuclear family as essential for reinvigorating Muslim practice.

Opinion Research and the Counter-Revolution in American Political Science

1992 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 679-694 ◽  
Author(s):  
John S. Dryzek
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Political Context ◽  
University Of Michigan ◽  
Historical Reconstruction ◽  
Psychological Model ◽  
Critical Scrutiny ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The University ◽  
American Political Science

The identity of political science, its tenuous orthodoxies and continuing divisions, is bound up with its history. The historical subject of this essay is the rise of one particular orthodoxy, the socio-psychological model of opinion research and voting behaviour originally associated with the University of Michigan. This rise helps constitute a conservative defence of American liberal democracy in the early cold war, owing much to the peculiar politics of that era. The contemporary payoff of this historical reconstruction is an identification of the vulnerabilities and invulnerabilities of the model as highlighted by its struggles with the understandings it superseded and the contingent political context of these struggles. The substantial legacy for the discipline as a whole merits careful critical scrutiny, especially given changes in the political context since the 1950s, and the end of the cold war.

The Cold War and the University

2000 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 151-156
Author(s):  
Deborah Welch Larson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The University

COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE USES OF TRADITION: ROBERT REDFIELD AND ALTERNATIVE VISIONS OF MODERNIZATION DURING THE COLD WAR

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 565-595 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICOLE SACKLEY
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Modernization Theory ◽  
Talcott Parsons ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Alternative Vision ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The University

The history of the rise and fall of “modernization theory” after World War II has been told as a story of Talcott Parsons, Walt Rostow, and other US social scientists who built a general theory in US universities and sought to influence US foreign policy. However, in the 1950s anthropologist Robert Redfield and his Comparative Civilizations project at the University of Chicago produced an alternative vision of modernization—one that emphasized intellectual conversation across borders, the interrelation of theory and fieldwork, and dialectical relations of tradition and modernity. In tracing the Redfield project and its legacies, this essay aims to broaden intellectual historians’ sense of the complexity, variation, and transnational currents within postwar American discourse about modernity and tradition.

scholarly journals Extending Humanity’s Reach: A Public-Private Framework for Space Exploration

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 75-98
Author(s):  
Jack B. Chaben
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Space Shuttle ◽  
Outer Space ◽  
Space Station ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Space Race ◽  
The Cold War

The Cold War initiated not only rapid weaponization campaigns within the United States and the Soviet Union, but launched a space race between the ideological opponents. The Soviet Union claimed an early victory by becoming the first nation to launch a satellite into space. Despite the United States' rough start, the country triumphed during its Apollo Program to become the leader in space. Treaties and international norms emerged throughout this time to prevent these technologically raging nations from weaponizing the expansive environment of outer space, but the resulting protections against national ownership of space limited incentives for future deep space travel. As the U.S. Space Shuttle program came to an end in 2011, the United States forfeit its capabilities to transport humans to the International Space Station. This apparent abandonment of outer space, however, began to reveal the seminal role of the commercial space industry and its revolutionary technologies. This article traces the transition from the Cold War-era space race to today’s robust public-private expansion into space. It highlights the foundational importance of international cooperation to protect the interests of private companies, and presents a model of cooperative succession between space agencies and companies to send humans to Mars.

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