Not long after the Allied victories in Europe and Japan, America's attention turned from world war to cold war. The perceived threat of communism had a definite and significant impact on all levels of American popular culture, from government propaganda films like Red Nightmare in Time magazine to Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle. This work examines representations of anti-communist sentiment in American popular culture from the early fifties through the mid-sixties. The discussion covers television programs, films, novels, journalism, maps, memoirs, and other works that presented anti-communist ideology to millions of Americans and influenced their thinking about these controversial issues. It also points out the different strands of anti-communist rhetoric, such as liberal and countersubversive ones, that dominated popular culture in different media, and tells a much more complicated story about producers' and consumers' ideas about communism through close study of the cultural artifacts of the Cold War. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

Seventy-five years ago, the Hollywood blacklist ruined lives, stifled creativity, and sent waves of proscription and censorship throughout United States culture. When the Hollywood Ten refused to answer the questions of the House Committee on Un-American Activities about their membership in the Communist Party, they were sentenced to prison, the five who were under contract were fired by their studios, and all were blacklisted from reemployment until they "purged themselves of their communist taint." By the 1950s, this blacklist publicly stigmatized nearly three hundred other Americans in the entertainment industry who invoked the First and Fifth Amendments in their refusal to apologize for their Communist ties or provide the names of other members. Dozens of others were graylisted as the result of rumors. The Hollywood Motion Picture Blacklist: Seventy-Five Years Later offers new insights on the origins of the blacklist, the characteristics of those blacklisted, and the probability of future proscriptions of the blacklist type. Author Larry Ceplair draws on previously published work while introducing new material to vigorously recount the events that took place between the US government, Hollywood unions, and motion picture studios. Ceplair thoroughly examines the role of Jewish identity in many anti-communist efforts—a concept that has never been fully examined by scholars—and analyzes the actions of subpoenaed witnesses who were forced to choose between cooperating with the House Committee or joining the blacklist. This fascinating book is an illuminating examination of a dark period in American history and the fragility of our rights to free speech and due process.

An essential and field-defining resource, this volume brings fresh approaches to major US novels, poetry, and performance literature of the twentieth century. With sections on 'structures', 'movements', 'attachments', and 'imaginaries', this handbook brings a new set of tools and perspectives to the rich and diverse traditions of American literary production. The editors have turned to leading as well as up-and-coming scholars in the field to foregroundmethodological concerns that assess the challenges of transnational perspectives, critical race and indigenous studies, disability and care studies, environmental criticism, affect studies, gender analysis, media and sound studies, and other cutting-edge approaches. The 20 original chapters include the discussionof working-class literature, border narratives, children's literature, novels of late-capitalism, nuclear poetry, fantasies of whiteness, and Native American, African American, Asian American, and Latinx creative texts.

Conventional wisdom holds that comic books of the post-World War II era are poorly drawn and poorly written publications, notable only for the furor they raised. Contributors to this thoughtful collection, however, demonstrate that these comics constitute complex cultural documents that create a dialogue between mainstream values and alternative beliefs that question or complicate the grand narratives of the era. Close analysis of individual titles, including EC comics, Superman, romance comics, and other, more obscure works, reveals the ways Cold War culture--from atomic anxieties and the nuclear family to communist hysteria and social inequalities--manifests itself in the comic books of the era. By illuminating the complexities of mid-century graphic novels, this study demonstrates that postwar popular culture was far from monolithic in its representation of American values and beliefs.

This volume offers readers the opportunity to see how the Cold War and McCarthy eras affected men, women, and children of varying backgrounds, providing a more personal examination of this important era. Studies of the Cold War often focus on the political power players who shaped American/Soviet relations. Cold War and McCarthy Era: People and Perspectives shifts the spotlight to show how the fear of a Soviet attack and Communist infiltration affected the daily life of everyday Americans. Cold War and McCarthy Era gauges the impact of McCarthyism on a wide range of citizens. Chapters examine Cold War-era popular culture as well as the community-based Civil Defense Societies. Essays, key primary documents, and other reference tools further readers' understanding of how official reactions to Communist threats, both real and perceived, altered every aspect of American society.

In this conceptually bold project, Heonik Kwon uses anthropology to interrogate the cold war's cultural and historical narratives. Adopting a truly panoramic view of local politics and international events, he challenges the notion that the cold war was a global struggle fought uniformly around the world and that the end of the war marked a radical, universal rupture in modern history. Incorporating comparative ethnographic study into a thorough analysis of the period, Kwon upends cherished ideas about the global and their hold on contemporary social science. His narrative describes the slow decomposition of a complex social and political order involving a number of local and culturally creative processes. While the nations of Europe and North America experienced the cold war as a time of "long peace," postcolonial nations entered a different reality altogether, characterized by vicious civil wars and other exceptional forms of violence. Arguing that these events should be integrated into any account of the era, Kwon captures the first sociocultural portrait of the cold war in all its subtlety and diversity.

"As the Western began to flourish in literature, it also began to appear in illustrations and early comic strips of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. William Grady charts the history of the genre in comic strips and books from its origins in this period through its mid-century heyday to its gradual decline in the 60s and 70s, ending with a brief look at the current "afterlife" of Western comics over the last few decades. In doing so, he also argues for the importance of comics in the development of the Western alongside both literature and film/television. He explains how the mythic-historical settings of Western comics allowed the young readers at whom they were aimed to explore different aspects of their contemporary society, wrestle with taboo topics, and envision different futures for the US. Grady begins by exploring the origins of the Western genre in the late 19th century and shows the importance of illustrated narratives and cartoons in helping readers visualize the West, thus establishing much of its iconic imagery of frontier life, including racist stereotypes of Indigenous Peoples. He moves forward in time to show how the West became mythologized and fantastic elements were introduced into the real landscape in comic strips such as Gasoline Alley and Krazy Kat, until the Great Depression, where strips emphasized the escapist adventures of the West in Red Ryder, Lone Ranger, and others. The postwar Western spread into comic books and was used alternately as positive and negative commentaries on the Cold War and America's place in the world, but in the era of Vietnam and Watergate, Western comics portrayed darker reflections of American culture and history and eventually more or less died out. Despite the genre's apparent demise, Grady ends by examining its ongoing influence over the last decades as its tropes are used to interrogate and subvert the idea of the mythic West and explore diverse perspectives on the genre"--

This book explores the intersection of food and foodways from global and local perspectives. The collection contributes to interdisciplinary debates about the role and movement of commodities in the historical and contemporary world. The expert contributions collectively address a fundamental tension in the emerging scholarly terrain of food studies, namely theorizing the relationship between foodstuff production and cuisine patterns. They explore a wide variety of topics, including curry, bread, sugar, coffee, milk, pulque, Virginia ham, fast-food, obesity, and US ethnic restaurants. Local Foods Meet Global Foodways considers movements in context, and, in doing so, complicates the notions that food 'shapes' culture as it crosses borders or that culture 'adapts' foods to its neo-local or global contexts. By analysing the dynamics of contact between mobile foods and/or people and the specific cultures of consumption they provoke, these case studies reveal the process whereby local foods become global or global foods become local, to be a dynamic, co-creative development jointly facilitated by humans and nature. This volume explores a vast expanse of global regions, such as North and Central America, Europe, China, East Asia and the Pacific, India, sub-Saharan Africa, the Atlantic Ocean, and the USSR/Russia. It includes a foreword by the eminent food scholar Carole Counihan, and an afterword by noted theorist of cuisine Rachel Laudan, and will be of great interest to students and researchers of history, anthropology, geography, cultural studies and American studies. This book is based on a special issue of Food and Foodways.

What is the soundtrack for a nuclear war? During the Cold War, over 500 songs were written about nuclear weapons, fear of the Soviet Union, civil defense, bomb shelters, McCarthyism, uranium mining, the space race, espionage, the Berlin Wall, and glasnost. This music uncovers aspects of these world-changing events that documentaries and history books cannot. In Atomic Tunes, Tim and Joanna Smolko explore everything from the serious to the comical, the morbid to the crude, showing the widespread concern among musicians coping with the effect of communism on American society and the threat of a nuclear conflict of global proportions. Atomic Tunes presents a musical history of the Cold War, analyzing the songs that capture the fear of those who lived under the shadow of Stalin, Sputnik, mushroom clouds, and missiles.

Drawing on new archival research into Hollywood production history and detailed analysis of individual films, Hollywood and the Invention of England examines the surprising affinity for the English past in Hollywood cinema. Stubbs asks why Hollywood filmmakers have so frequently drawn on images and narratives depicting English history, and why films of this type have resonated with audiences in America. Beginning with an overview of the cultural interaction between American film and English historical culture, the book proceeds to chart the major filmmaking cycles which characterise Hollywood's engagement with the English past from the 1930s to the present, assessing the value of English-themed films in the American film industry while also placing them in a broader historical context.