American History Too!

On the thirteenth episode of American History Too! we embark on our very first sequel – picking up where episode six left off in our discussion of Nuclear Fallout.

Why did one researcher collect thousands of baby teeth and why are her results quite terrifying?  When and where did the US almost nuke its own citizens – and how was disaster averted?  Were fallout shelters a genuine attempt to help the population in the event of nuclear warfare or were they merely ‘for show’?  Our resident nuclear aficionado has all the answers.  

Finally, how was nuclear fallout represented in film and literature during the 1950s and 1960s?  We explore On the Beach, Dr Stangelove, and why the British government chose to censor Peter Watkins’ The War Game (1965) which depicted the impact of nuclear warfare on Great Britain. 

And always remember, ye cannae spend a dollar when your deid!

We’ll be back in a fortnight with a discussion of the contentious decade that was the 1980s. 

Cheers,

Mark and Malcolm

Reading List

Brown, JoAnne, ‘”A Is for Atom, B is For Bomb”: Civil Defense in American Public Education, 1948-1963,’ The Journal of American History, 75:1 (June, 1988), 68-90

Chapman, James, ‘The BBC and the Censorship of The War Game (1965),’
Journal of Contemporary History, 41:1 (January, 2006), 75-94

__________‘”The War Game” Controversy—Again,’
Journal of Contemporary History, 43:1 (January, 2008), 105-112

Cordle, Daniel, ‘Beyond the apocalypse of closure: nuclear anxiety in the postmodern literature of the United States,’ in Andrew Hammond (ed.), Cold War Literature: Writing the Global Conflict (Abingdon, 2006)

Davis, Tracy C., Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007)                                                              

Rosi, Eugene J., ‘Mass and Attentive Opinion on Nuclear Weapons Test and Fallout, 1954-1963’, The Public Opinion Quarterly, 29:2 (Summer, 1965), 280-297

Shaw, Tony, ‘The BBC, the State and Cold War Culture: The Case of Television’s The War Game (1965),’ The English Historical Review, 121:494 (December, 2006), 1351-1384

Wayne, Mike, ‘Failing the Public: The BBC, The War Game and Revisionist History, A Reply to James Chapman,’
Journal of Contemporary History, 42:4 (October, 2007), 627-637

Weart, Spencer, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988)

Winkler, Allan M., Life Under A Cloud: American Anxiety About the Atom (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1993)

Wittner, Lawrence S., The Struggle Against the Bomb, Vol.2: Resisting the Bomb: A history of the world nuclear disarmament movement, 1954–1970 (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1997)