honors classes & Conversion

course description

There is little argument that the practices and events we have come to understand as the Cold War were and are significant and complex. This course attempts to enter into that complexity and trace the discourse that worked to construct, maintain, and shape the Cold War.  This course asserts that the Cold War was and is a cultural practice—that is that the Cold War constructs and is constructed by the cultural contexts from which it emerged and by which it is sustained. We can “find” the cold war in the discursive field that circulates around the events that reference it (forward and backward in time).  The course opens with the dropping of the atom bomb and from that point engages atomic policy, the cold war “Red Scare,” with particular focus on Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities, the particular case of the Rosenbergs, and, finally, the 1950’s nuclear family, organized in many ways around the new and domestic technology of the television.  The Cold War functions as a popular culture text from its beginning and clearly as it became a televisual experience.  Throughout the semester we will examine the motivating symbols of the Cold War and its primary relational construct --Us vs Them--as we acknowledge that the Cold War was (and is) primarily concerned with (and about) difference.