Cultural History Commons^™

Children Of The Grave: The Rise, Fall, And Experience Of Heavy Metal Music During The Latter Cold War From 1969-1991, Shelby Sibert

All Theses

The Cold War era saw the emergence of many different pop culture phenomena. Some were political, such as the Punk Rock and Hippie movements. Others were fashionable trends like Disco. However, Heavy Metal music is unique due to its opaque origins, skyrocketing popularity, and final disappearance after the end of the Cold War. Heavy Metal had a direct relationship with reflecting the fears and anxieties of the late Cold War period. It was a direct response to the Hippie activist counterculture rock n' roll of the 1960s, and it charters a new path of rock n' roll in the process. …

The Gray Area: Sexuality And Gender In Wartime Reevaluated, Natalie Pendergraft

War, Diplomacy, and Society (MA) Theses

These three works, two academic papers and one screenplay, challenge traditional notions of gender and sexuality during wartime. Queer Vietnam service members did not all experience oppression, all the time, but rather carved out a space for themselves amongst their peers. Female nurses in the early cold war could keep their careers in the medical field due to its unique gendered history despite demobilization efforts across the country in different industries. Finally, through the medium of historical fiction, a Civil War soldier’s fears and desires are questioned as he experiences the phenomenon of the Angel’s Glow, a blue light that …

A Dazzling Détente: Exploring The Cultural Facets Of The Kennedys’ 1961 Visit To Paris And The Instrumental Role Of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Maxwell Riley Toth

Senior Projects Spring 2022

This project is an exploration into John and Jackie Kennedy’s 1961 trip to Paris, France, only four months after the former was inaugurated as the 35th President of the United States. In discussing this state visit, scholars often analyze it through a political lens—specifically, the gravity of the issues a novice President Kennedy (1917–1963) and an avuncular President de Gaulle (1890–1969) discussed tête-à-tête, and the visit’s role as a stepping stone to Kennedy’s weighty conversation with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna days later. Yet, outside of the conference room at the Élysée, cultural moments and gestures throughout the sojourn offer insights …

Weaponizing Ballet: An Episode In American Cold War Diplomacy, Remy Laray Naumann

Senior Projects Spring 2022

In October 1962, as American citizens were building bomb shelters in their backyards, the New York City Ballet toured the Soviet Union, receiving raving applause from Soviet audiences. The tour is just one example of the many ballet exchanges in the late 1950s and early 1960s between the United States and the Soviet Union. In these acts of cultural diplomacy, ballet companies became ideological weapons, selling their country's achievements to audiences abroad.

Tours such as the New York City Ballet’s 1962 trip have been acknowledged in analyses on cultural diplomacy between the US and Soviet Union in the Cold War …

Collective Hockey Against The Grit And Grind: Ice Hockey As A Reflection Of Cold War Differences, Sarai Dai

Senior Theses

Although the 1980 Miracle on Ice has been thoroughly examined from both the American and Soviet viewpoints, these studies set the game upon a pedestal of its own, a one-off incident that persists in American sports memory today because of its improbability and the subsequent public reaction. However, hockey played a role in Cold War tensions long before the Miracle and exemplified international dynamics and tensions on multiple levels. Through a review of existing literature, this thesis holistically examines the sport of ice hockey as a microcosm of the Cold War. Differences between communism and capitalism produced differences in the …

Bondmania: Spy Films, American Foreign Policy, And The New Frontier Of The 1960s, Luke Pearsons

All Master's Theses

The topic of this thesis are spy films that were produced during the Cold War, with a specific focus on the James Bond films and their numerous imitators. The goal is to explore why these films were popular, particularly during the decade of the 1960s, and how these films and characters were used to address a number of anxieties that faced the United States in this period. The character of James Bond in these films established the dominance of a particular character type and provided a sense of wish fulfillment for a certain segment of the audience. His presence asserted …

Remembering An Invasion: The Panama Intervention In America’S Political Memory, Dave Nagaji

Senior Theses

In December of 1989, the United States launched Operation Just Cause, a military invasion of the country of Panama, capturing Manuel Noriega and overthrowing his government. This research project examines how Colin Powell, Richard Cheney, James Baker, and George H.W. Bush presented Operation Just Cause in their memoirs. It attempts to determine how these senior leaders’ depictions of this invasion incorporated it into the Bush administration’s overall foreign-policy strategy. The research finds that their general approach was to present the Panama intervention as an isolated incident which had no intentional link to other major events at the time, was not …

Built Ford Tough: Masculinity, Gerald Ford's Presidential Museum, And The Macho Presidential Style, Dustin Jones

Major Papers

In Cold War America, spanning roughly from 1945-1991, masculinity was in crisis. The rise of Communism and the Soviet Union had led to a fear of spies, infiltrators, and defectors known most commonly as the Red Scare. Americans were encouraged to be hyper vigilant in sussing out deviant behaviour. Alongside this scare came the Lavender Scare. It was suggested that homosexuals were deviant peoples and were therefore more susceptible to being turned Communist than their heterosexual counterparts. This led to a crisis of masculinity where even the smallest suggestion of femininity could lead to accusations of potential compromise, an effect …

Surviving Fallout In Appalachia: An Examination Of Class Differences Within Civil Defense Preparation In West Virginia During The Early Years Of The Cold War, Tristan Miranda Williams

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Civil defense and West Virginia are not likely to be considered in tandem. What would make West Virginia significant during the Cold War? West Virginia is a state that has been synonymous with family feuds, hillbillies, moonshine, and coal mining. Few have considered West Virginia beyond these stereotypes and scant work has been done beyond that. The impact of the Cold War has been looked at through multiple angles but few have looked at the significant role West Virginia played during this time. Possibly, few have even considered that it played a role at all. Through examination of primary sources …

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 11^th 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

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 …

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

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 …

Green Berets And Gay Deceivers: The New Left, The Vietnam Draft And American Masculinity, Anna L. Zuschlag

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

When masculinity is predicated on violence and military service is a man’s civic duty, then draft resistance becomes a doubly radical act. Men who refuse to take up arms for their nation threaten, at least potentially, both its political and gender order. This dissertation explores American masculinity during and after the Vietnam War, by analyzing cultural representations of, and responses to, the U.S. Selective Service System. At a time when mainstream Hollywood would not touch the Vietnam War, a generation of independent filmmakers, artists and agitators produced a number of remarkable films and documents dealing with the war, the draft …

Fidel Castro’S Cultural Armament Of Cold War Cuba: Developing Education, 1960 – 1969, Maya Steinborn

History Theses

Through Castro’s speeches and secondary educational scholarship, this research explores the following question: In what ways was Cuban education constructed in the 1960s to promote a revolutionary cultural consciousness, and how did that education grow over time to support the Cuban position in the Cold War? This question rose from the educational policy studies of Rolland G. Paulston, whereby he declared post-revolutionary Cuba successful in its educational reform because Castro created “new social institutions and a basic social and cultural realignment [using a] ‘societalcentric’ [model] that morally rewards [the working masses].” Grounded in seminal definitions of the revolution as an …

Beneath The Surface: American Culture And Submarine Warfare In The Twentieth Century, Matthew Robert Mcgrew

Master's Theses

Cultural perceptions guided the American use of submarines during the twentieth century. Feared as an evil weapon during the First World War, guarded as a dirty secret during the Second World War, and heralded as the weapon of democracy during the Cold War, the American submarine story reveals the overwhelming influence of civilian culture over martial practices. The following study examines the roles that powerful political and military elites, newspaper editors and Hollywood executives, and ordinary citizens – equal players in a game larger than themselves – assumed throughout the evolution of submerged warfare from 1914 to 1991. In each …