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)
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