Syllabus
Day 1: Introduction, the Arms Race, the Space Race
Module 1: Introduction
Can technologies have politics? And to what extent should we understand scientific research that took place during the Cold War to be “Cold War science”?
Required reading:
David C. Engerman “Social Science in the Cold War” in Isis Vol. 101, No. 2 (June 2010), pp. 393-400
Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” in The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 19-39
Optional reading:
Mëhilli, Elidor. “Technology and the Cold War” in Kalinovsky, Artemy & Daigle, Craig (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of the Cold War (London: Routledge, 2016) pp. 292-304
Doug Hill, Not So Fast: Thinking Twice about Technology (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2016), pp. 47-78
Naomi Oreskes, “Science in the Origins of the Cold War” in Naomi Oreskes & John Krige, Science and Technology in the Global Cold War, pp. 1-11
Module 2: The Arms Race
How did weapons spur hostilities and, on the contrary, foster international friendships during the global Cold War? How much autonomy did non-superpower states have when it came to shaping the Cold War through the development and export of weapons? And how were science and scientists harnessed by states engaged in the arms race?
Required reading:
Sonja D. Schmid, “Nuclear Colonization?: Soviet Technopolitics in the Second World” in Gabrielle Hecht (ed.) Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011) pp. 125-154
Daniela Richterova, Mikuláš Pešta, Natalia Telepneva, “Banking on Military Assistance: Czechoslovakia’s Struggle for Influence and Profit in the Third World 1955–1968” in International History Review, Vol. 43, No. 1 (2021) pp. 90-108
Optional reading:
Sara Bridger, Scientists at War: The Ethics of Cold War Weapons Research (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015)
Philip Muehlenbeck, Czechoslovakia in Africa, 1945-1968 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) pp. 87-123
Harold James, Krupp: A History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), pp. 226-295
Module 3: The Space Race
What was at stake in the space race? How were the space race and the arms race linked? And how was the space race harnessed to mobilize populations, East and West, behind the Cold War goals of the camps in which they lived?
Required reading:
Gabrielle Cornish, “Music and the Making of the Cosmonaut Everyman” in Journal of Musicology, Vol. 36, No. 4 (2019), pp. 464-499
Erik M. Conway, “Bringing NASA Back to Earth: A Search for Relevance During the Cold War” in Naomi Oreskes & John Krige, Science and Technology in the Global Cold War, pp. 251-273
Optional reading:
Volf, Darina, “Evolution of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project: The Effects of the ‘Third’ on the Interplay Between Cooperation and Competition” (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11024-021-09435-8)
Day 2: Energy, the Environment, and Medicine
Module 4: The Environment
How did science and technology come to shape the environment during the Cold War? What were the ambitions of those undertaking such projects? How did Cold War rhetoric serve to justify and dispute such shifts?
Required reading:
Richard Tucker, “Containing Communism by Impounding Rivers: American Strategic Interests and the Global Spread of High Dams in the Early Cold War” in J. R. McNeill & Corinna Unger (eds.), Environmental Histories of the Cold War, pp. 139-164
Optional reading:
Matěj Spurný, Making the Most of Tomorrow: A Laboratory of Socialist Modernity in Czechoslovakia. Prague: Karolinum Press, 2019, pp. 279-351
Thomas Fleischmann, Communist Pigs: An Animal History of East Germany’s Rise and Fall (University of Washington Press, 2020)
Module 5: Energy
What role did energy play in shaping Cold War geopolitics? How did Cold War geopolitics underwrite “ordinary people’s” everyday experiences of traveling, going about their work, and heating their homes?
Required reading:
Frank Bösch, “Energy diplomacy: West Germany, the Soviet Union, and the oil crises of the 1970s” in Historical Social Research, Vol. 39, No. 4 (2014), pp. 165-184
David S. Painter. "Oil and Natural Resources" in Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. I (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 486-507
Optional reading:
David S. Painter. "From Linkage to Economic Warfare: Energy, Soviet-American Relations, and the End of the Cold War” in Cold War Energy: A Transnational History of Soviet Oil and Gas, edited by Jeronim Perovic (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 283-318.
Matěj Spurný, Making the Most of Tomorrow: A Laboratory of Socialist Modernity in Czechoslovakia. Prague: Karolinum Press, 2019, pp.145-189
Module 6: Health and Medicine
What impact did the Cold War have on medical research and treatment? Which communities of healthcare professionals were created and/or disrupted by Cold War conflict?
Guest lecture: Ema Hrešanová
Required reading:
HREŠANOVÁ, Ema - MICHAELS, Paula. “Socialist Science across Borders: Investigating Pain in Soviet and Czechoslovakian Maternity Care.” Revue d'Etudes Comparatives Est-Ouest. 2018, 49(1), 45-69
Dora Vargha (2021). Technical assistance and socialist international health: Hungary, the WHO and the Korean War. History and Technology, 36(3-4), 400-417
Optional reading:
Marcos Cueto, Cold War, Deadly Fever: Malaria Eradication in Mexico, 1955-1975 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007)
Day 3: Psychology, Media, Consumer Culture
Module 7: Cold War Subject Formation
How did human psychology become a terrain on which the Cold War was to be fought? How did the claims that governing elites made on the minds of their citizens differ from those that had preceded the Cold War? What did such claims mean for different specific social groups such as soldiers, scientists, and patients?
Required reading:
*Ana Antic, “Raising a true socialist individual: Yugoslav psychoanalysis and the creation of democratic Marxist citizens,” Social History, February 2019, pp. 86-115
Optional reading:
Monica Kim, The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019) pp. 1-31
Rebecca Lemov, “’Hypothetical Machines’: The Science Fiction Dreams of Cold War Social Science,” in Isis, Vol. 101, No. 2 (2010), pp. 401-411
Module 8: Media
How did the Cold War shape media networks and infrastructures? To what extent can belief in Communism and anti-Communism elucidate why and how people engaged with media during the Cold War? To what extent are media responsible for the end of the Cold War?
Field Trip to the TV Tower in Žižkov
Required reading:
Rosamund Johnston, “Listening in on the Neighbors: The Reception of German and Austrian Radio in Cold War Czechoslovakia” in Central European History, Vol. 54, no. 4 (December 2021) pp. 603-620
Optional reading:
Melissa Feinberg, Curtain of Lies: The Battle over Truth in Stalinist Eastern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017)
Alice Lovejoy and Mari Pajala (eds.) Remapping Cold War Media: Institutions, Infrastructures, Translations (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2022)
Kristin Roth-Ey, Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire that Lost the Cultural Cold War (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 2011)
Module 9: Consumer Culture
How important were consumers and consumer industries to scientists and government ministers in socialist states? How was the scientific-technological revolution, in Susan Reid’s words, “domesticated?” And what can consumer artifacts from this period reveal of the functioning of the socialist societies in which they circulated?
Required reading:
Susan Reid, “The Khrushchev Kitchen: Domesticating the Scientific-Technological Revolution” in The Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 40, No. 2 (2005), pp. 289-316
Optional reading:
Eli Rubin, Synthet
Annotation
This course examines the centrality of science and technology to everyday life and political rhetoric during the Cold War, exploring the reasons for the faith in and simultaneous fear of science and technology articulated at the time. It asks how science and technology shaped the Cold War and, conversely, how the Cold War shaped scientific research and technological innovation. Importantly, it questions the extent to which research and development undertaken during the period should be understood as “Cold War science,” examining whether other frameworks (such as modernization, industrialization, decolonization, and automatization) better explain the transformations discussed.
While stressing parallels on both sides of the Iron Curtain, this class focuses on thematic case studies from Eastern Europe--an area frequently overlooked by historians of science and technology. Science and Technology in the Cold War combines guest lectures and secondary reading with an introduction to primary source analysis.