Andrew J. Huebner

The conditional optimist: Walt Disney's postwar futurism

This article reconsiders popular and scholarly estimations of Walt Disney by exploring six short futuristic films he made in the 1950s and 1960s. Rather than blithe optimism or heavy‐handed conservatism, these productions peddled a conditional optimism. They expressed the hope that futuristic technologies – embedded in a robust space program and the imagined community of EPCOT in Florida – might deliver humanity from urban blight, overpopulation, plundered habitats and natural resources, and the damaging forces of weather. In doing so, Disney entered the fray of contemporary debates and anticipated later ones over the relationship between humankind and nature, the proper uses of technology, the dangers and opportunities of atomic energy, and the social pathologies of urban, industrialized America.

Secret identity crisis: comic books and the unmasking of Cold War America

by Matthew J. Costello, New York, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009, 293 pp., US

Book Review: Boggs, Carl, and Tom Pollard. (2007). The Hollywood War Machine: U.S. Militarism and Popular Culture. Boulder, CO: Paradigm

24.95 (paperback), ISBN 978‐0‐8264‐2998‐8 Matthew Costello’s Secret Identity Crisis joins several other...

The Warrior Image: Soldiers in American Culture from the Second World War to the Vietnam Era

Moreover, these cases illustrate the important differences between starting an insurgency and engaging in civil war, and point out that the roles of grievance and opportunity should differ at these different stages of conflict. Second, the case study analyses lead the reader to question an underlying assumption of the CH model, that the effect of various factors on civil war outbreak are similar and continuous (i.e., unit homogeneity). Collier and Sambanis identify this challenge as a goal for the volumes in their introduction, and the subsequent chapters highlight its importance. In addition to illustrating the difficulty in defining a “civil war,” the cases reveal a multitude of different types of conflicts and how the CH covariates affect conflict processes differently based on type. These include conflicts with varying ethnic, religious, and ideological dimensions, as well as disputes with varying economic and regional dynamics. In his conclusion, Sambanis points out the unexplained role of heterogeneity of conflicts as an important avenue for future research. This may be where grievance critically intersects with opportunity to rebel, and considering the type of conflict is one way to explore the theoretical link between the CH covariates and war outbreak. The goals of theory development and improved causal inference are advanced in large measure by the questions that these volumes raise. The qualitative analysis provides concrete examples of how the CH covariates caused various changes in the conflict behavior and these are not necessarily consistent across cases. As such, the volumes have uncovered critical areas for the CH model or further research to address that make up the connective causal tissue underlying patterns of civil war outbreak. In sum, this book is an excellent complement to the large-N statistical analyses that have dominated this field, providing rich insight into the nuances of particular cases within a sound theoretical framework.