The impetus for Project Cirrus lay in the earlier project of de-icing airplane wings. Now, however, rather than looking to react to the weather, the United States military was looking for a means of controlling it. The rationale for the... Continue Reading →
Bernard Vonnegut was born on August 29, 1914 to Kurt Sr. and Edith Vonnegut in Indianapolis, Indiana. At the time, Edith was a brewing heiress and Kurt Sr. was a successful architect, and both were from wealthy families of German... Continue Reading →
The end of the Second World War saw a rise in both government sponsored corporate research and corporations, such as General Electric, influencing the mentalities of both scientists and ordinary Americans. The General Electric Company had been a fixture in... Continue Reading →
Edited collections provide a useful space for history graduate students to witness different historical approaches to similar topics in a way that single author texts do not allow. I found that the ability to pick and choose which pieces to... Continue Reading →
If the readings which we have done so far have taught me anything, it is that there is much in the very idea of an American culture that is constructed and fabricated. The idea of homogeneity in the 1950s, as... Continue Reading →
What I see as the most beneficial part of reading Norbert Wiener’s 1950 book The Human Use of Human Being: Cybernetics and Society is a really strong counterpoint to much of the literature and film which I have been consuming... Continue Reading →
I believe that Kim Phillips-Fein succinctly says what she sets out to do at the end of the introduction to Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal and that is an attempt to shift the focus from cultural... Continue Reading →
I found the approach that Jenifer Van Vleck took to Empire of Air very interesting, because while it seemed that there was a lot going on (national and global history, a history of a specific technology, economic and military history,... Continue Reading →
This is the first real comparative history which we have looked at so far. Unlike the Cold War histories which we read at the beginning of the semester, it is not broadly looking at the United States and the Soviet... Continue Reading →
Émilie to Emily 