front cover of A Kinder, Gentler America
A Kinder, Gentler America
Melancholia and the Mythical 1950s
Mary Caputi
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
“In the Norman Rockwell paintings of the 1940s and 1950s,” wrote Newt Gingrich, “there was a clear sense of what it meant to be an American.” Gingrich’s words underline what Mary Caputi sees as a desire of the neoconservative movement to set a foundation for modern America that ennobles the past. 

Analyzing these competing uses of the past, A Kinder, Gentler America reveals how longing for the era of “the greatest generation” actually exposes a disillusionment with the present. Caputi draws on the theoretical frameworks of Julia Kristeva and Walter Benjamin to look at how the decade has been portrayed in movies such as Pleasantville and Far from Heaven and delves further to investigate our disenchantment’s lost origins in early modernity through a reading of the poetry of Baudelaire. What emerges is a stark contrast between the depictions of a melancholic present and a cheerful, shiny past. In the right’s invocation of the mythical 1950s and the left’s criticism of the same, Caputi recognizes a common unfulfilled desire, and proposes that by understanding this loss both sides can begin to accept that American identity, despite chaos and confusion, lies in the here and now. 

Mary Caputi is professor of political science at California State University, Long Beach, and is author of Voluptuous Yearnings: A Feminist Theory of the Obscene.
[more]
front cover of Knowledge Regulation and National Security in Postwar America
Knowledge Regulation and National Security in Postwar America
Mario Daniels and John Krige
University of Chicago Press, 2022
The first historical study of export control regulations as a tool for the sharing and withholding of knowledge.

In this groundbreaking book, Mario Daniels and John Krige set out to show the enormous political relevance that export control regulations have had for American debates about national security, foreign policy, and trade policy since 1945. Indeed, they argue that from the 1940s to today the issue of how to control the transnational movement of information has been central to the thinking and actions of the guardians of the American national security state. The expansion of control over knowledge and know-how is apparent from the increasingly systematic inclusion of universities and research institutions into a system that in the 1950s and 1960s mainly targeted business activities. As this book vividly reveals, classification was not the only—and not even the most important—regulatory instrument that came into being in the postwar era.
[more]

Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter