Browsing by Subject "Cold War studies"

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Vernacular photography and the Cold War, 1945-1991
(2015-08-07) Gustavson, Andrea Dorothy; Hoelscher, Steven D.; Mickenberg, Julia L.; Cvetkovich, Ann; Lewis, Randolph; Doss, Erika
This dissertation examines snapshots taken by men and women who were active members of the military serving overseas during the Cold War period between 1945 and 1991. Not often collected by institutional archives, these vernacular photographs have been overlooked by scholars of war photography who tend to focus on professional photojournalism and iconic images of heroism or horror. By focusing on snapshot photography, I explore how Americans actively constructed the visual culture of the Cold War. Alongside the snapshots at the center of this dissertation, I examine oral histories, veterans’ publications, literary texts, letters, and diaries. Privileging sources from the latter half of the period, 1965 through 1991, this dissertation decenters a scholarly focus on the early Cold War. I consider the ways in which periodizations that fixate on designations such as postwar, Cold War, and post-Cold War might elide a history of US involvement in increasing militarization, halting decolonization efforts, and imperialism. Circulating back and forth between the war zone and the home front, service members’ snapshots were a primary way in which the remote space of the war zone enters the domestic space of the home front. Moreover, these snapshots served as vehicles for Americans to shape one another’s emotional responses to the wars of this period. Each chapter of this dissertation considers a different archival framing of service member snapshots—a large institutional archive dedicated to a single war, a single manuscript collection of a famous author, and a trade journal for a military association. Shifting from the realm of private sentiment to public feeling, these photographs became part of the many efforts to make sense of the Cold War period via memory, public history, and archival projects in the post-Cold War period. Situating service member photographs with respect to affect theory and public feelings scholarship, this dissertation moves beyond pathologized and medicalized discourses of PTSD and trauma studies by focusing on everyday forms of violence. These snapshots allow us to see the daily ways in which war takes place and to consider how Americans become accustomed to a culture of ongoing and seemingly unending war