Slices of History

List two or three distinct aspects of the history or culture of Cold War America which your central text references. Check out the topics covered for Unit One: Second-Wave Feminism, Imagining Nuclear War, etc. But you may find you need to tweak an existing topic to better suit your central text—or you may need to invent a new one out of whole cloth: as for example someone writing on Shane might want to look into gun ownership and gun control.

For each topic or “slice” of history that you identify as potentially of interest, you should specify where and how your central text interacts with it: what page, what character(s), what attitude the novel/film expresses about that aspect of life in the 1960s. You should also specify how your slice might need to be tweaked to serve the needs of your central text, and if you’re inventing a new slice, give some thought to naming it, and to how you might go about researching it. (I will, as promised, help you get started.)

For the next assignment, you will narrow your choice to one particular slice of Cold War culture and research that topic.

Invoking the Historical Context

Read Louis Menand, “Cat People: What Dr. Seuss Really Taught Us,” an essay published some years ago in The New Yorker. Mark passages where Menand grounds his analysis of Seuss in the historical context. What does Menand do to set this past era before his reader?