The TOPOI

Ok, I have a confession to make. 

The topic I wrote about in my previous post was not quite so simply arrived at as it may have seemed. In fact, i struggled for a while to figure out how exactly i wanted to attack the cultural issues I was seeing, wondering how I was going to unpack them and make them accessible to people who weren't necessarily thinking the way i was. 

So I used a tool that I just recently learned about called the Topoi. Topos is Greek for place, and basically the topoi is a set of tools that allow you to take your argument to different places, to look at it through different lenses until you find one that is the clearest, the most interesting and the most relevant for you and your audience. The topoi helped me get specific, and helped me narrow down my examples to the On The Beach ones I mentioned before. I was on Leave it to Beaver, The Honeymooners, academic discourse on family structure and partridges in a pear tree before that. And if nothing else, the topoi is just fun. It's a really enjoyable mental exercise, almost like a game to tease out a concept and just see what you can do with it. 

I'm having a thought...

Just recently, I have become extremely interested in nuclear history. Not just the science end of it, but the cultural effects of the bomb, especially in the United States and the way it's mere existence impacted our foreign and domestic policy. And what I'm finding is very interesting. I'm actually using this information or at least this line of argument in 2 separate papers I'm writing this semester. 

The atomic bomb created an incredibly deep seated atmosphere of guilt, suspicion and fear. So powerful were these emotions that they actually managed to culturally convince this country that we were still in a state of active warfare. The Cold War, like the twenty years between world wars I and II may not have been a war with explosions and fire, but it was a war nonetheless, and it's effect on American culture was palpable. 

I've been finding a bifurcation in culture after the dropping of the bomb. The dominant culture became a "Leave it to Beaver" crowd, white, middle class, clean cut, with no problems with drugs, sex, confusion, doubts or broken families. It was the perfect united front; like a never-ending Coke commercial. The other half were the rebels, the questioners, who rather than defend themselves against the fear, coped by exploring and probing it. These were often the people who were blacklisted, labeled as lunatics or traitors to America. Even in cultural products there is a distinction. I'm currently comparing the Nevil Shute's counterculture novel On The Beach to the movie version of it made in 1959. The movie was a dominant cultural product, and the differences are vast. 

The implications of this argument for our own time are also interesting to consider. We are in the middle of a recession. We are fighting an expensive war against an abstract concept that we'll never really be able to destroy. And yet, we project our image to the world as clean, vital, prosperous and capable of caring not only for ourselves, but for anyone in the world who needs or wants our help... even some that don't yet know they need it, or just forgot to ask. Are we still at war, then? Have we really not matured beyond this intense fear, self-suspicion and squeaky clean defense?

Check out my Pageflake!

My technological education continues, folks... now I'm onto a content aggregator site known as Pageflakes. And trust me, that's a lot simpler than it sounds. A content aggregator just takes information from many different sites and gives you access to it from a single location, in this case, Pageflakes.com.
I just completed building my own page, filling it with very specific things that interested me. That's the single greatest thing about the site. There is an almost unlimited number of flakes, more commonly known as widgets to choose from and they range all over the map. In addition to the flakes that are tied to the site, though, you can add RSS feeds from any other website that has the capability. So while there isn't a New York Times flake on Pageflakes, nytimes.com has RSS capability, and by clicking on the RSS icon, you can add that URL to your page and have access to it every time you log in (By the way, the mere fact that I'm using all this jargon and understanding it is a huge step for me. So huge it's almost frightening... any thoughts?).
My Pageflake is therefore tailored to the kind of stuff that I want access to. The most prominent thing you see when you first log in is a game based on Tetris. I am (more than) a little obsessed with this game, and I think it gives the page a nice break from the pattern of small information boxes. Just down from that is a Webpage flake that I've set to give me Wikipedia, because I use that resource a lot more than I should. Under that I've got another Webpage flake to an annotated bibliography I've created on Citeline.com. I am currently working on some papers, and having access to my bibliographic materials from any computer has been a huge help. Under that, I've got a tool that one of my professors introduced me to, the Topoi. I know that I'll forget how to use it if I don't have it to hand... so there it is. :-)
The other two columns are filled mostly with RSS feeds that I want to have access to. I included my bookmarks from Diigo, and those of my social bookmarking soulmate Elsamary. The New York Times is there, along with The Onion... one does need a balanced perspective on the news. I have Epicurious, which is one of the greatest recipe websites ever. If you're ever hungry, check it out. Trust me. Then I have some helpful career feeds like Variety, and Playbill. And naturally, some of the blogs I follow from Blogger are on there. Finally, I included an online poetry archive that I have been visiting and really enjoying for years. If I'm ever at loose ends, bored, tired, I can go there and just cruise the poetry for as long as I want. I encourage you, perhaps above all the other widgets on the page, to check out this one.
Finally, at the top right of the page I have the Universal Blogsearch and Universal Newssearch flakes from the Pageflakes arsenal. Now, I don't even have to go to Google to search for things I'm looking for. There is a definite question about whether this almost horrifying level of convenience is a good thing or not, but I'm at least oing to learn how to use it. Take a look at my page. Maybe you can build one of your own!

2 More Cool Sources

A couple other fun sources I've found in my hunt... 

"Please Don't Steal The Atomic Bomb," by Alan Adelson-  “The most powerful club in the Universe”- that’s the marketing of possession of the atom bomb in this primary source article. The article then goes on to detail just how easy it is to come into possession of all the different elements necessary to make an atom bomb. There is a simple description of how an atomic explosion works, and a good set of descriptions about how the AEC and the media were dealing with the knowledge of how unsecured their intelligence was at that time. The article approachably discusses nuclear secrecy, legal enforcement, and the dark possibilities of a proliferated nuclear world. 

The History of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes-  Richard Rhodes is one of the foremost historians on the history, implementation and ramifications of the atomic bomb. This book is one of if not the definitive volume on the history of the bomb, written like a detailed character study of every major figure involved it it’s research, construction and use. The book is huge, but very well-researched in terms of pscychology and science. 

It's difficult to choose which sources to tell you about... there are so many wonderful books out there about the making, the history, the science, the politics and even the culture of the atomic bomb. One, Hiroshima by John Hersey, was originally published as a series of articles in The New Yorker very shortly after the bombs were dropped on Japan. It's a fabulous read, and very quick. 

Another interesting angle is to look at the leisure culture surrounding the time of the bomb. David Hogan does this in his book Science Fiction America: Essays on SciFi Cinema. With a chapter on Flash Gordon and his role in the propaganda of World War II, Walt Disney and even the sexuality of nuclear science as portrayed through the media, Hogan approaches his topic humorously but with a high level of credibility and interest. 

The more you look, the more you find, it seems. :-) 

Happy hunting! Again...

Fun new sources!

My recent blossoming love affair with internet technology has led me to absolutely ransack the online resources available through my university. And I have found some truly cool stuff, along with some truly cool Web 2.0 applications to make the whole thing work! 

I found these through the library, I bookmarked them using Diigo, and then I saved and annotated my bookmarks through Zotero, a website I (can't believe I'm admitting this) have become addicted to. Take a look at the sources, and happy hunting yourself! 

Atomic Power Leads

 This source is a primary source, a science newsletter from December 1945. The title “Atomic Power Leads” refers to the fact that atomic power was the single most important scientific advance of the year 1945; not only a scientific but a political and social advance as well, with the power to shorten or even prevent future war. Also, the authors mention that earlier issues of the newsletter would have to be amended and expanded because of some pertinent atomic information that had recently been released or declassified. Useful to establish the multidimensional nature of atomic power… it’s almost treated as a deitical panacea here. It’s like a miracle.

Triangular Mutual Security-

not primary, a fundamentally academic document detailing through the study of the triangular nature of the Cuban Missile Crisis the potential dangers and harms of a bipolar post-Cold War system. They’re trying to show the need for a triangular system where each party has a check and balance as well as a possible ally, so that each alliance undergoes some kind of scrutiny. Relates to atomic power in that the atom bomb is the foundation of the arms race that produced the cold war and the missile crisis, the atom bomb is what created the american superpower at all. Fear of losing that power and uniqueness is what drove the arms race. 

American Interests: Really interesting perspective

I've been following a blog called American Interests, published by a man named Ottavio who calls himself Al. His stance is unlike most that I have found in the blogosphere, especially when I'm doing searches driven by history rather than politics. He believes in the necessary and healthy primacy of the American superpower. His most recent post actually talks about threats to that primacy as presented by cultural opposition from around the world, a really interesting way of looking at how exactly a nation maintains hegemony. This is what I said to say to that post... maybe you should go check him out, too!

What you say about the primacy of american culture is fascinating. I have been lately researching the development of American culture as implicitly tied into the changing nature of power in this country. Most recently, the power that we've come to rely on is a cultural power, supported by economic, military and diplomatic powers, etc. But now that we're in a depression, our military is overextended and unpopular and our government has some serious recovering to do, what chance does culture, does propaganda have on its own? It is just propaganda without the genuine nature of a superpower behind that culture.

Some other blogs around here

There are a lot of history blogs out there... which, I know, I've said before. What's so interesting to me is how differently all these other bloggers approach discussing history. In looking around, I've found a few that take a very academic bent; the American Historical Society being the clearest one there. I enjoy reading this blog because even though they could potentially sound esoteric or unaccessible, they somehow manage to avoid both of those things and instead just give a real impression of credibility and knowledge. Maybe this is my inner student coming out, but I always feel just a little smarter after I've read a post. :-) Rod Adam's Atomic Insights blog is another pretty academic one, but sometimes with him I feel a bit lost. That academic voice is a tough line to walk between clarity and authority.
Then there are the blogs that take a more personal approach. One of the blogs I follow on Abraham Lincoln falls into this category, with a voice so casual you almost feel that the poster, brdirck, has had face-to-face conversations with the man. The interesting part there, I guess, is that the author is a professor of history. Talk about academic.
The last type of blog I've found (if we're talking in terms of categories) is the type without a single poster, but more where the blog serves as a forum for posting articles, paper abstracts etc and opening them up for peer review. Religion in American History is one such blog, where people who really study this stuff, or people who are really curious can post their information and have it commented on by a like-minded community. I personally like getting to know one author, but an occasional guest poster is a nice way to shake things up. Maybe I'll have a friend write something for me someday. :-)