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Full-Text Articles in History

The Anxious Shadow Of A Coldwar: Affect, Biopower & Resistance In Fiction & Culture In The Period Of Intra-Anxiety 1989-2001, Kate Adler Sep 2016

The Anxious Shadow Of A Coldwar: Affect, Biopower & Resistance In Fiction & Culture In The Period Of Intra-Anxiety 1989-2001, Kate Adler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel Underworld stands as the framing text for this study of fiction, cultural affect, and resistance in the later part of the 1980’s – the exhausted, waning years of the Cold War – and the 1990’s, the period immediately following its collapse. DeLillo’s book is situated in the 1990’s, a period of what I term “intra-anxiety” following the Cold War and prior to the attacks of September 11th and the ensuing “War on Terror.” The Cold War had provided an organizing myth for America and American culture, absorbing and structuring anxieties and governing affect. “The Cold …


Shaken, Not Stirred: Espionage, Fantasy, And British Masculinity During The Cold War, Anna Rikki Nelson Aug 2016

Shaken, Not Stirred: Espionage, Fantasy, And British Masculinity During The Cold War, Anna Rikki Nelson

Master's Theses

This project seeks to define and explore the development of Cold War British masculinity and national identity in response to decolonization. Following World War II, Great Britain experienced a time of political and cultural rebuilding. This project argues that following World War II, Britain had to renegotiate gender and national identity within the context of decolonization, the rise of the welfare state, and Britain’s diminished role in global politics, and the tensions within gender and national identity were expressed in Britain’s interest in espionage narratives both real and fictionalized. British spy novels by Ian Fleming, Desmond Cory, and John Le …


Haiti And The Heavens: Utopianism And Technocracy In The Cold War Era, Adam M. Silvia Jun 2016

Haiti And The Heavens: Utopianism And Technocracy In The Cold War Era, Adam M. Silvia

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examined technocracy in Haiti in the Cold War era. It showed how Haitian and non-Haitian technicians navigated United States imperialism, Soviet ideology, and postcolonial nationalism to implement bold utopian visions in a country oppressed by poverty and dynastic authoritarianism. Throughout the mid-to-late twentieth century, technicians lavished Haiti with plans to improve the countryside, the city, the workplace, and the home. This study analyzed those plans and investigated the motivations behind them. Based on new evidence discovered in the private correspondence between Haitian, American, and Western European specialists, it questioned the assumption that technocracy was captivated by high-modernist ideology …


We Need A Little Christmas: The Shape And Significance Of Christmas In America, 1945-1950, Ellen D. Blackmon May 2016

We Need A Little Christmas: The Shape And Significance Of Christmas In America, 1945-1950, Ellen D. Blackmon

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

As soon as the weather turns cold, countless commercial, domestic, and cultural landscapes across the United States begin their collective metamorphosis into Christmas wonderlands. Christmas is such a force that, not surprisingly, it has received considerable scholarly attention. Numerous historians have traced the evolution of Christmas from a pre-Christian pagan winter festival to a staid Victorian domestic holiday, citing the latter period as the final stage of its development. Christmases since the Victorian Era, they argue, have not deviated significantly enough to warrant further analysis. Others have recognized the uniqueness of Christmas’s twentieth-century form but have not paid sufficient attention …


Export / Import: The Promotion Of Contemporary Italian Art In The United States, 1935–1969, Raffaele Bedarida Feb 2016

Export / Import: The Promotion Of Contemporary Italian Art In The United States, 1935–1969, Raffaele Bedarida

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Export / Import examines the exportation of contemporary Italian art to the United States from 1935 to 1969 and how it refashioned Italian national identity in the process. I do not concentrate on the Italian art scene per se, or on the American reception of Italian shows. Through a transnational perspective, instead, I examine the role of art exhibitions, publications, and critical discourse aimed at American audiences. Inaugurated by the Fascist regime as a form of political propaganda, this form of cultural outreach to the United States continued after WWII as Italian museums, dealers, and critics aimed to vaunt the …