The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!: Pageantry and Patriotism in Cold-War America

ISBN-13: 9780195134179 / Angielski / Miękka / 1999 / 240 str.

Richard M. Fried

Opis

This book explores a widely lived yet little remembered facet of America's cultural and political history: the Cold War as experienced at the grassroots level. Here, Fried traces the cresting of modern patriotic observance during World War II and then shows how patriotic and civic activists afterwards labored to recreate a remembered unity and commitment in the tension-filled Cold War era. A variety of national and local entities mounted campaigns "to sell America to the Americans" through "rededication" celebrations like Know Your America Week and Freedom Week. The American Heritage Foundation wheeled out the Freedom Train, which carried seminal documents of the nation's past to railroad depots across the US. Fried revisits the 1950 "Communist invasion" of Mosinee, Wisconsin, when ersatz Stalinists harassed and bullied citizens and the town's eateries served only potato soup and black bread. He also depicts the creation and inauguration of new patriotic events like Loyalty Day and Armed Forces Day.

Meticulously researched, this book recreates a colorful, sometimes comical, and always revealing dimension of our history.

Recenzje

Richard M. Fried's new book ... illuminates the public spectacles and pageantry which underlie the most colourful notions of the epoch between the end of the Second World War and the rise of a counter-culture. Fried ... uncovers the surprising partnership between national ideology and private civic associations that fuelled the era's patriotism. he skillfully traces the quasi-professional networks of concerned citizens who engineered many star-spangled extravaganzas. Without surrendering a sense of the comedy of Cold War pageantry, Fried brings historical rigour to a piece of social history that is too often exploited as camp. A fine picture emerges of the "soft", everyday propaganda that existed alongside the more widely documented, malign culture of McCarthyism.

O autorze

Richard M. Fried is Professor of History, University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of Nightmare in Red.