Twentieth-Century U.S. and Soviet Popular Culture
In this comparative history seminar we will examine the United States and Russia from the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 through the Cold War. Popular culture provides rich material and suggests analytical frameworks for examining American and Soviet perceptions of each other. It also invites critical analysis of each society's "way of being": their cultural values, political priorities, assumptions, and their personal and national identities. Students will examine the ways popular culture informed social movements and international relations, paying close attention to changes and continuities across the 20th century. Of particular interest is the way that popular culture, which initially was used to drive a wedge between American and Soviet peoples, eventually became an unexpected force of rapprochement in the 1970s and 1980s. Throughout the seminar students will consider how race, class, and gender shape cultural understandings of identity. This course is equivalent to IGST 0450.