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Heather Cox Richardson United States Department of Defense graphic in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston. The Cuban Missile Crisis lasted for thirteen tense days in October 1962. During those days, the USSR faced off against the U.S. over the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba. President Kennedy vowed not to permit missiles so close to America; Premier Krushchev vowed to put them in Cuba anyway. The two week standoff was the closest the Cold War ever came to erupting into a hot war. And with nuclear weapons widespread, it would have been a hot war, indeed. The J.F.K. Library has put together a website that enables a viewer to experience each day of that crisis.

Randall Stephens The November 24, 1954 episode of Longines Chronoscope featured Henry Steele Commager (video embedded here).  That was not unusual for the news and views program , which regularly featured heads of state, intellectuals, novelists, and other notables.  But the subject of the discussion is particularly interesting all these years later.  Maybe that's especially poignant because Commager was one of America's foremost historians at that time. Here he weighs in on American identity, the pressures of conformity, the post-war economic boom, and freedom of expression.   This was filmed in the wake of the Korean War, the hydrogen bomb test on Bikini Atoll, and not long after the historic Brown vs. Topeka Supreme Court decision.  Red Scare paranoia remained strong. The coming month of December would see the US Senate reprimand Joseph McCarthy, by a vote of 67–22, for "conduct that tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute." Here are some...

Alastair Jamieson, "Germany's Angela Merkel teaches history class on Berlin Wall anniversary," NBC World News, August 13, 2013 German Chancellor Angela Merkel drew on her Communist-era experiences to teach a history class at a school on Tuesday - the 52nd anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall. Merkel, who is campaigning ahead of next month’s general election, gave a 45-minute lesson as a "substitute teacher" for a 12th-grade class in east Berlin. >>> Sacha Cordner, "Lawmaker Considering Legislation To Cut Down 'Islam-Bias' In Fla. School Textbooks," WFSU-Tallahassee, August 5, 2013 A Florida lawmaker is considering legislation that would give the public input on the content found in Florida school textbooks. His overall aim is to cut down on what he calls the “Islam-bias” in state schools. Melbourne Republican Representative Ritch Workman says Prentice Hall’s “World History” book not only puts an inaccurate spin on Islam,...

Heather Cox Richardson I have heard talk of the exportation of modern American art during the Cold War as a means of proselytizing, but I’d never considered the mechanics of that propaganda. It seemed to me a wing of art theory, and while that’s a subject that always entertains me, it’s something for which I have very little brain space during the school year. From Life magazine , August 8, 1949. A recent article by Frances Stonor Saunders in The Independent explains exactly how the CIA promoted American abstract expressionism worldwide in the 1950s and 1960s. Their goal was to highlight the openness and experimentation possible in America’s capitalist system, contrasting it with the rigid conformity of state-censored socialist realism ( some of which , to my Philistinic eye, seems worth looking at even if Soviet state officials thought so, too.) At first, the CIA tried to promote work by Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko at home. Qui...

Heather Cox Richardson In 1938 Superman sped into this galaxy from the planet Krypton to save humanity.  He and his superhero friends oversaw the chaos of the late 1940s, as America first fought World War II and then struggled to adjust to demobilization. Superman and his friends then swept through the skies as the U.S. armed for the Cold War. While Superman matured, the late 1940s and early 1950s brought chilling fear to Americans that the nation was slipping, losing ground to the Russians, falling apart. So many children—and adults—were reading comics that critics carped that comics themselves were part of America’s moral decline. In 1953, 6.5 comics were sold for every one person in the country. More than 90% of children admitted to reading them. In 1954 the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham published The Seduction of the Innocent , detailing how comic books dragged impressionable youths into crime, violence, and homosexuality. The book used anecdotes to prove that Batman, for exampl...