Cold War Culture
50:512:381:D1
Course Runs: 6/25/18 – 7/2/18
Note: This course is online, go to Sakai.rutgers.edu
In this seminar-style course, we will focus on the United States between 1941 and 1991. The Cold War, an era characterized by the superpower standoff between the United States and the former Soviet Union, provides a fruitful subject for cultural analysis. The focus of our exploration of this era will be the social and cultural changes wrought by atomic weapons and the threat of Communist expansion both abroad and at home. Such phenomena as television, suburbia, science fiction, rock and roll, the Civil Rights movement and the counter-culture are just a few of the trends and processes that emerged during these years. There will be no exams in this course. Students will be evaluated upon two criteria: 1) a series of short reaction papers and book reviews addressing essays and novels from, or about, the period and 2) class performance/participation. We will also have a lot of fun examining and discussing films, television programs, and commercial ads from the period which serve as rich primary source documents of how Americans processed the changing and threatening world around them.