This thesis examines the function and presentation of “Nature” in American literature written between 1945 and 1971. It argues that the widespread presence of ecological representations of “Nature” within Cold War literature has been critically overlooked, as a result of Cold War literary criticism’s comparatively narrow concentration on the direct effects of political and ideological metanarratives on texts. It uncovers a plethora of ecological portrayals of the relationship between the human and the environment, and reveals the significance of the role played by non-Western and non-Anglocentric philosophies and spiritualties in shaping these presentations. This study is methodologically informed by the most recent developments in the field of ecocriticism, including Scott Knickerbocker’s work on ecopoetics and Timothy Morton’s explorations of the problems associated with the term “Nature”. It finds significant continuities within these ecological portrayals, which suggest that nuclear discourse had an influential effect on the presentation of “Nature” within Cold War literature. This influence is, however, heavily mediated by the role that non-Western and non-Anglocentric philosophies play in writers’ theorisations of relations of interdependence between the human and the environment. Such literary presentations challenge the understanding that the Nuclear Age represents a conquest of “Nature”. Rather, they reveal that a number of Cold War writers present human interdependence within an ecological system, capable of the annihilation of the human, and of the containment of the new nuclear threat. The thesis’s introductory chapter questions the characterisation of Silent Spring (1962) as the founding text of the modern environmental movement. It outlines this study’s intervention into the field of Cold War criticism, detailing its specific ecocritical methodology and engaging with the legacy of Transcendentalism. Chapter One looks at the work of Paul Bowles, with a primary focus on The Sheltering Sky (1949). It demonstrates the centrality of the landscape to the writer’s creative project, and reveals the substantial influence of the Sufi mysticism on Bowles’s presentation of the human’s relationship to the environment. Chapter Two focuses on the work of the New Mexican poet Peggy Pond Church. It establishes the influence of the writer’s familiarity with the Pueblo Native American worldview on her poetic portrayals of the human and the nuclear as interrelated parts within a greater ecological system. It also uncovers similar portrayals within the work of the “father of the atomic bomb”, J. Robert Oppenheimer. The third chapter analyses the effects of Chinese and Japanese literature and thought on the work of J. D. Salinger. It outlines the function of “Nature” in the work of the specific translators that Salinger names, arguing that this translated Taoism substantially informed the ecological vision present across his oeuvre. Chapter Four explores the impact of Simone Weil on the work of Mary McCarthy. It reads Birds of America (1971), demonstrating the governing influence of Weil’s concept of “force” on McCarthy’s presentation of the human as an interdependent part within a powerful ecological system.

With my dissertation entitled “Between the Flash and Fall of Turning”: “New York” School Poets, American Pragmatism and the Construction of Identity, I seek to account for the depiction of the anti-foundational self which emerges time and again in the poetry of John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler and Kenneth Koch. While theorizing the self as a contingent, provisional, and shifting construct is hardly new to a theoretically oriented academy transiting into the present century, scholars and critics have tended to ground such interpretations in “structural linguistics” and so-called “French philosophy.” One of the goals of this project, therefore, is to propose that the philosophical skepticism toward the self as a site of stable and enduring meaning has always been felt and articulated by American Pragmatism, specifically in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James and John Dewey. While a handful of critics have looked to Pragmatism to account for the protean self in the work of “New York” School Poets, these commentators have tended to focus their attention largely on O’Hara’s and Ashbery’s poetry. This project seeks, on the one hand, to round out this work with close readings of all the major “New York” School Poets, and extend it, on the other, by looking beyond poetry to visual art and classroom pedagogy to examine evidence of a Pragmatist orientation across the disciplines, despite the apparent interpretive consensus that American Pragmatism “goes silent” at mid-century.

My dissertation explores the history of America and the world, focusing on Chile and southern South America during the Cold War. It reworks and reinterprets the United States and Chile's Cold War experience through multiarchival, international Cold War history in an Atlantic, rather than inter-American, global-historical context. Eight, overlapping, chronologically-organized chapters reconstruct the two countries' relationship from the conflict's origins to Salvador Allende's inauguration in November 1970. I locate United States and Chilean history within the international community of nations and the Atlantic world rather than the narrower, United States-centered inter-American one, and I recognize Chile as a free and sovereign power and a nation among nations, rather than a subject of United States imperialism, formal or informal. The Cold War began in Chile when the Chilean labor movement arose responsive to globalization trends in the late-nineteenth century, and when communists and anticommunists appeared on the ground there in the 1920s, rather than with the American interventions that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. I thus offer an alternative, reimagined interpretation of the United States and Chile's Cold War experience. I argue that the United States and Chile's Cold War history was not primarily an expression of American influence in Chile, but rather Chileans' complex, contested, and often highly unstable transition from colony to nation in the fluid and evolving world-historical frameworks of the Atlantic revolutions and independence, the industrial revolution, the world wars, the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, the Cold War, and the Cuban Revolution. This enables historians to gain new insight into the already well-studied rise and fall of the Allende administration and the coup and dictatorship that followed it in the 1970s. It also reinterprets Chilean-American relations and, through this, supports those who challenge the characterization of the United States as an empire or otherwise the prime mover in recent global history. I conducted research in the National Archives in College Park, and Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon's presidential libraries, and I reviewed documents in the British National Archives in Kew Gardens, the Chilean National Library in Santiago, and the Chilean Nuclear Energy Commission's reading room in La Reina as well. I also relied on published primary sources, including the Department of State's Foreign Relations of the United States series, the Chile Declassification Project, and historian Olga Ulianova's Russian-to-Spanish translations of Soviet papers pertaining to the Chilean Communist Party.

The nuclear age provided U.S. soldiers and statesmen with unprecedented challenges. the U.S. military had to incorporate a weapon into strategic calculations without knowing whether the use of the weapon would be approved. Broad considerations of policy led President Dwight Eisenhower to formulate a policy that relied on nuclear weapons while fully realizing their destructive potential. Despite the belief that possession of nuclear weapons provided strategic superiority, the U.S. realized that such weapons were of little value. This realization did not stop planners from attempting to find ways to use nuclear weapons in Korea and Indochina.

This dissertation explores the role of religion in the origins of the Cold War from 1880 to 1948. Building on David Foglesong’s research into the role of religion in shaping American missionaries, businesspeople, and public intellectuals’ perceptions of Russia, as well as Andrew Preston’s insights into the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration’s use of religious tropes to justify intervention against Nazi Germany from 1939 to 1945, this project focuses on the White House and US State Department’s efforts to manage diplomatic tensions and public controversies surrounding religious repression in Russia during the origins of the Cold War from 1880 to 1948. The central finding of this project is that during the period from 1933 to 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his personal allies such as Joseph Davies sought to minimize popular and official criticisms of Soviet religious policies as a part of Roosevelt’s program of pragmatic cooperation with the USSR. Eventually, anti-communist officials in the State Department managed to undermine Roosevelt’s public relations program in order to justify a more confrontational approach to the Soviet regime. Roosevelt’s poor health, growing personal isolation, and neglect of personal relationships with American Catholic leaders after 1943, as well as his failure to create a bureaucracy committed to his vision of post-war cooperation, meant that after his death religion could be used by anti-communists in their campaign to denigrate the Soviet Union. To gain popular support for its containment and roll-back strategies, the Truman administration called for a worldwide Christian crusade to eradicate atheistic communism. By shedding light on how well the Roosevelt administration was able to overcome US-Russian religious tensions, this project supports the “missed opportunities” thesis that the Cold War was not inevitable. It also stands as an example of a growing body of scholarly research linking religion, diplomacy, and US foreign relations. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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The Teheran Conference, November 27- December 1, 1943, set the stage for the present-day Cold War. In that conference Sir Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of Great Britain, played a forceful, but unsuccessful, role.

The Cold War was a time of extreme conformity, with an equally extreme reaction against forced conformity. Representations of such reactions were not to be omitted in the literature of the time. Throughout the novels, the characters and society itself are repressed into an alternate state of being. This investigation analyzes the role that technology plays in this process in Fahrenheit 451, Sirens of Titan, 1984, Lord of the Flies, and A Clockwork Orange. The novels were all written during the Cold War and follow a dystopian society. Society is controlled and maintained in its respective disarray through the utilization of technology, whether it be pushed down upon them by their governments or by themselves. Through close analysis of the novels themselves and existing discourse related to the topic, it becomes evident that technology is able to manipulate and dictate the lives of people, diminishing their individualism. A dichotomy between creative expression and technology arises in all of the studied novels, pointing to the significance of individualism and its existence through creativity. This investigation concludes that such acts of expression, including creative writing and nonconformist acts, are vital to maintaining a stable societal system. The literature points to the ultimate evil that arises from technology and the power that inevitably comes with it, warning that humanity itself may be lost without the existence of free will and individual thought.

On the first day of August in 1961, the Health Ministry of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) announced the closure of the German-German border permanently, accusing the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) of neglecting its citizens and failing to properly administer vaccinations against poliomyelitis.1 This accusation sparked the ire of the West German and United States media, and the Federal Republic denied that there were outbreaks. The episode raises questions about common perceptions of healthcare in East Germany. The thought that East Germany might have an epidemic disease under control, which still caused problems in West Germany, contradicts the perception that East Germany lagged behind its western neighbor in every realm. While recent histories of international relations and healthcare emphasize collaboration between the US and the USSR, and their Cold War allies in this period, this dissertation presents a less constructive relationship. Despite the shared goal of polio control and eradication, East and West Germany used epidemic control as evidence of the successes of one system of healthcare governance, or the faults of the opponent’s system. The Berlin Wall announcement was the culmination of almost 15 years of government competition, speckled with individual collaboration, in the field of healthcare. This dissertation contributes to literature on healthcare in divided Germany, narratives which present the history of polio as an “American story,” and scholarship on healthcare and international relations. It shows how two separate healthcare systems were 1 “East Germany Curbs Travel: Blames Polio,” Chicago Tribune, 1 August 1961, 11. v constructed by Soviet and American occupiers with German collaborators between 1945 and 1947. These separate systems, established before the official division of Germany, laid the foundation for two separate states. During the first postwar polio epidemic in 1947, the United States showed its affluence and experience with polio through a robust response centered on technological solutions. The USSR, conversely, could not match the United States’ response due to inexperience with polio and lack of economic resources, garnering criticism from German citizens and US occupiers. In 1955, the introduction of Jonas Salk’s injected polio vaccine gave doctors and civilians in the US hope that polio would soon be a memory, but European responses were much more ambiguous. Albert Sabin’s forthcoming oral polio vaccine appeared to be a much more promising option to many physicians due to its ease of administration and cost-effectiveness. When Sabin chose to field test his vaccine in the USSR, his decision to collaborate with the US’s Cold War opponent demonstrated significant potential for collaboration. Nonetheless, the Soviet connections of Sabin OPV led to a crisis in divided Berlin. The history of polio is not an American story and recognizing the ways in which the fight against this disease went beyond the national, complicated by political boundaries but involving recognizable collaboration across those boundaries, helps expand the historical narrative of poliomyelitis. While vaccine diplomacy was indeed a form of soft power used in the context of the Cold War, promises of vaccines were not always received without question, and incorporating a deeper examination of recipient countries’ discourses helps complicate our understandings of diplomacy and hesitancy. / Thesis / Candidate in Philosophy / This thesis outlines the ways in which an infectious disease, poliomyelitis, was treated and prevented in divided Germany between 1945 and 1965, contextualizing medical history with the political context of the Cold War. The first two chapters examine the period from 1945 to 1953, when no vaccines against polio were available and Germany was occupied by the Allied powers. The German healthcare system was reconstructed differently in the Soviet and American zones. The political beliefs of each occupying power shaped the resulting systems: socialized and centralized medicine was a hallmark of the Soviet zone’s healthcare, while the American zone pursued a free market approach. Chapters three and four explain the introduction of two different vaccines, both developed in the United States: an injected vaccine created by Jonas Salk, and an oral vaccine developed by Albert Sabin. The United States championed the Salk vaccine, while the USSR was an early adopter of the Sabin vaccine. These chapters explain how a vaccine created in the US became known as a Soviet vaccine, and how this reputation affected western countries’ adoption of the medical innovation. The thesis concludes that doctors are not separate from the political contexts in which they live and shows how political ideology and cross-border rivalry affect healthcare provision.

No / Much of the scholarly literature on peacekeeping focuses on particular peacekeeping operations, or on the political bargaining between peacekeeping participants at both the institutional and national levels. However, there is very little published research on why nations commit forces to peacekeeping operations. As Sandra Whitworth noted in a book review of six books on peacekeeping in the "International Journal," "t"he important political questions thus far have not been asked: who benefits, who pays, and who is excluded?." "This book addresses that need. The authors focus specifically on the political and economic motivations that influence the decision to participate in peacekeeping. They consider how definitions of national interest frame the political debate, and what the reasons are for the military support or opposition for peacekeeping operations. They also explore the role of inter-agency politics, the role of public opinion in peacekeeping decisions, and the influence of pressure from other nations and non-nation actors to commit peacekeeping forces. Each chapter includes several recent cases of national peacekeeping to illustrate how national political debates framed their country's political decisions on the commitment of peacekeeping forces. The countries chosen for analysis are Australia, Argentina, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, the United States, Nigeria, Canada, India, and Austria.