Tony Shaw

The Politics of Cold War Culture

This article examines the relationship between politics and culture in Great Britain and the United States during the Cold War, with particular emphasis on the period from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. The article critically examines several recent books on British and American Cold War cultural activities, both domestic and external. The review covers theatrical, cinematic, literary, and broadcast propaganda and analyzes the complex network of links between governments and private groups in commerce, education, labor markets, and the mass entertainment media. It points out the fundamental differences between Western countries and the Soviet bloc and provides a warning to those inclined to view Western culture solely through a Cold War prism.

Martyrs, Miracles, and Martians: Religion and Cold War Cinematic Propaganda in the 1950s

This article examines Cold War film propaganda in the 1950s, when the cin-ema was enjoying its last period as the dominant visual mass entertainment form in both the West and the East. I concentrates on the role that religion played as a theme of propaganda primarily in British and American movies, as well as some of the Soviet films released during the decade. The article ex-plores the relationship between film output and state propagandists to show how religious themes were incorporated into films dealing with Cold War is-sues, and considers how audiences received the messages contained within these films. The article therefore builds on recent scholarship that highlights the importance of ideas and culture during the Cold War by looking at the adoption and adaptation of religion as a tool of propaganda.

The British Popular Press and the Early Cold War

Britains role during the early years of the cold war has come under intense scrutiny in the past decade. As a result, it is now known that London rather than Washington played the leading part in forcing the pace towards confrontation with the Soviet Union in the late 1940s. However, relatively little is known still about the British publics reaction to this policy. By examining arguably the chief public opinion former during this period, the ‘popular’ press, this paper hopes to shed new light on the roots and development of cold war values in Britain. The attitudes of the main newspapers to certain key events overseas between 1945 and 1949 are outlined, as is the relationship between Attlees Labour government and the press in relation to foreign affairs. Ultimately, the chief purpose of the article is to assess the part played by the ‘popular’ press in the emergence, or orchestration, of a cold war ‘consensus’ in Britain by the beginning of the 1950s.

Introduction: Britain and the Cultural Cold War

Little more than a decade has elapsed since the Cold War came to an abrupt end and the Soviet Union passed into history. In that relatively short space of time, there have been two major developments in Cold War studies. The first, often termed ‘the new Cold War history’, is the attempt to correct the most obvious imbalance in Cold War historiography, the reliance on Western sources. Thus, scholars have capitalised on the rich, if sporadic, flow of declassified material housed in former Eastern bloc state archives, in order to deepen our understanding of policies and events behind the ‘Iron Curtain’. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (1997), written by the doyen of Cold War historians, John Lewis Gaddis, has emerged as the single most influential work using previously inaccessible sources from ‘the other side’. The trawling of former Communist bloc repositories has also helped spawn two specialist academic journals, together with regular heavy-duty Bulletins from the Washington, D.C.-based Cold War International History Project. The second development is the wealth of recent work focusing on the cultural and, to a lesser extent, social dimensions of the Cold War. This is less well known to nonCold War historians and is only just beginning to feed into general interpretations of the conflict. Advocates of this so-called ‘cultural turn’ argue that Cold War history, including its ‘new’ variant, has been excessively concerned with high politics, diplomacy and military affairs, producing a top-down approach that has privileged the role of political elites during the conflict over that played by the ordinary masses. What is needed, these scholars suggest, is research into the ‘everyday history’ of the Cold War, using state as well as non-state sources. By identifying key cultural components of the Cold War (among them education, propaganda, religion, consumerism, literature, music, sport, and the visual arts), these scholars have begun

British Feature Films and the Early Cold War

This essay focuses on the treatment of the Cold War by the British feature film industry between the years 1945 and 1955. The intention is not only to fill a gap in film historiography, but also to shed further light on the debate concerning the development of a Cold War consensus in Britain in the decade after the Second World War. As part of this, the essay explores the principal Cold War themes addressed by the films, the motives that lay behind their making and the relationship the films bore to official propaganda.

‘From Liverpool to Russia, With Love: A Letter to Brezhnev and Cold War Cinematic Dissent in 1980s Britain’

This article examines British Cold War cinematic output of the 1980s. It first presents an overview of how British-made films covered Cold War issues and events during the decade. Thereafter it concentrates on one particular movie, the Liverpool-based A Letter to Brezhnev, released in 1985. Unique in calling for an end to the Cold War, this film combined criticism of Thatcherism with an unusually sympathetic portrayal of Russians. The article looks at why and how the film was made, the messages it carried, and its impact. In exploring the relationship between the filmmakers, songwriters and theatre directors, the article shows the scope that existed for dissent in British provincial popular culture during the latter stages of the Cold War.

Cold War Sport, Film, and Propaganda: A Comparative Analysis of the Superpowers

Films and sports played central roles in Cold War popular culture. Each helped set ideological agendas domestically and internationally while serving as powerful substitutes for direct superpower conflict. This article brings film and sport together by offering the first comparative analysis of how U.S. and Soviet cinema used sport as an instrument of propaganda during the Cold War. The article explores the different propaganda styles that U.S. and Soviet sports films adopted and pinpoints the political functions they performed. It considers what Cold War sports cinema can tell us about political culture in the United States and the Soviet Union after 1945 and about the complex battle for hearts and minds that was so important to the East-West conflict.

An Act of War? The Interview Affair, the Sony Hack, and the Hollywood–Washington Power Nexus Today

This article has been published in a revised form in Journal of American Studies https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875817000512. This version is free to view and download for private research and study only. Not for re-distribution, re-sale or use in derivative works.

Hollywood’s Raid on Entebbe: Behind the Scenes of the United States-Israel Alliance

This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in Diplomatic History following peer review. Under embargo until 8 December 2018. The version of record: Tony Shaw, and Giora Goodman, ‘Hollywood’s Raid on Entebbe: Behind the Scenes of the United States-Israel Alliance’, Diplomatic History, dhx090, December 2017, is available online at: doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dhx090.

The Cold War on Film: Then and Now

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television on 18 February 2016, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/01439685.2015.1134105.