Jay Mechling

The atom according to Disney

The broadcast of Disneys 1957 film, “Our Friend the Atom,” a Tomorrow land segment for the Disneyland television show, was a significant moment in the rhetorical history of the naturalization of atomic energy. Disneys interpretation of the peaceful atom, both in the televisual text and in the theme park narratives, had much in common with other mid‐century texts, from worlds fairs to popular science books, but the particular contribution of Disney was the metaphor and visual icon of the Genie who grants three wishes. The Genie metaphor offered an optimistic twist on a traditionally ironic story, helping naturalize the peaceful atom.

The campaign for civil defense and the struggle to naturalize the bomb

A key element in the governments attempt to get Americans to accept nuclear deterrence strategy in the 1950s and 1960s was the campaign for civil defense, especially the building of private fallout shelters, as a form of civic duty. A critical approach to the campaign “in the pragmatic attitude” reveals that the campaign really was the site of several competing texts, including mass‐media narratives and pacifist social movement discourse resisting civil defense. The public debate over civil defense programs reveals cultural contradictions between some of these texts and the practices of everyday life, especially the tension between competitive individualism and cooperative community.

Sweet Talk: The Moral Rhetoric against Sugar.

This essay explores the notion that entire American belief systems are played and displayed in communication about sugar. Drawing on the work of symbolic anthropologists and Kenneth Burke, it probes the deep structure of meanings beneath surface communication about sugar in “popular science” writings.

BOY SCOUTS AND THE MANLY ART OF COOKING

Since its founding in 1910, the Boy Scouts of America has socialized tens of millions of boys in what it means to be masculine, but a paradoxical aspect of this gender socialization has been the instruction of boys (ages 11 through 17) in cooking and serving meals to others and cleaning up the mess. This article examines Boy Scout handbooks, pamphlets, commercial publications, the material culture of campout cookery, photographic evidence, and ethnographic fieldwork with a troop of Boy Scouts in California, to discover how the Boy Scout experience manages to teach boys an ethic of caring for others while, at the same time, still constructing that caring as masculine and not feminine.

Hot pacifism and cold war: The American friends service committee's witness for peace in 1950s America

The 1955 pamphlet, Speak Truth to Power, written by a working party of the American Friends Service Committee, stands as one of the most important pacifist statements of the twentieth century. The authors of the pamphlet faced rhetorical dilemmas particular to an American audience in the mid‐1950s, which led them to adopt rhetorical strategies that have come to be characteristic of the discourse of New Class social movements.

Editors' introduction: Putting animals in the picture

Like Poe’s famous ‘‘purloined letter’’, animals are nearly invisible to us precisely because they are so visible. Animals are so much a part of our taken-for-granted lives and we carry so much common sense about them that is has taken a surprising amount of time for scholars to step back from this familiarity to cast a more critical gaze at animal–human relationships. The publication of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation in 1975 conveniently marks the beginning of a quarter century’s flood of scholarship on animals and society. Singer’s book is the bible of the Animal Rights movement and raises interesting questions about what animals ‘‘really are’’. The book struck a responsive chord in the United States in part because its moral arguments could be read against the emerging ‘‘culture wars’’ that have so shaped contemporary American political and intellectual discourse. Coming in the wake of the end of the Vietnam War and in the midst of increasingly heated debates about abortion, poverty and affirmative action, Singer’s controversial claims about the moral entitlements of animals struck right at the heart of the question, ‘‘what do we owe others?’’ And who or what should be encompassed by these obligations anyway?

The Jung and the restless: The mythopoetic men's movement

The attractiveness of the “mythopoetic mens movement,” especially as represented by poet Robert Blys Iron John (1990), to the American “New Class” invites the rhetorician of social movements to account for the movements appeal for cultural revitalization of American masculinity in the late 1980s. Bly creates an oral‐based “speakerly text” that introduces pieces of metaphoric clusters (e.g., dark/light, wounded/healed, soft/hard, savage/wild) attractive to men experiencing the discontents of the New Class. The narratives of the movement offer the power of stories, the power of status, and the power of essentialism. The argument for essentialism signals the greatest departure of this movement from previous New Class social movements and creates a gender division in the class.

The photographed cat

Photography’s Orientalism advances a refreshingly nuanced approach to the exploration of photographs from the Orient as well as their present-day uses and realities. It shows with much clarity that colonial-era photographs of the Orient were made and circulated by different European and native political powers, as well as by individual subjects whose involvement with photography was either not entirely, or at all, dominated by these authorities. Either way, one of the key strengths of the book is that the case studies it presents help readers to see that, although both independent as well as official photographers operated in the Orient within and in relation to similar networks of local and foreign photographers, the production of photographs in the colonised Orient contributed to the fulfilment of diverse public and private aspirations, within multi-layered political, cultural, social, economic and artistic environments. In this respect, the volume lives up to the promise of its editors to rescue colonial-era photographs of the Orient from their assimilation into purely imaginative histories and stagnant theories about the European imagination.