Samantha Smith in the Land of the Bolsheviks: Peace and the Politics of Childhood in the Late Cold War

Peacock, Margaret

doi:10.1093/dh/dhy092

Cited by 4 publications

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“…Margaret Peacock correctly noted that while the Soviets saw childhood as a stage of communist character formation, Reaganite conservatives dismissed it as a period of dangerous "fables and fanciful dreams" about coexistence and world peace to be cured by experience and moral clarity. 84 The American entertainment industry, however, treated childhood as a marketing opportunity as America's youth was fast evolving into the MTV generation with enormous commercial clout-ready to consume and be manipulated into consuming.…”

Section: Stardommentioning

confidence: 99%

Andropov's Gamble: Samantha Smith and Soviet Soft Power

Fedyashin

2020

jras

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IntroductionOn a November evening in 1982, a ten-year-old fifth-grader from Manchester, Maine-population just above two thousand-became concerned about world peace under the impression of news stories about the Soviet nuclear threat. To alleviate her daughter's fears, Jane Smith sat down with Samantha to read a Time magazine article about Yuri Andropov who had just succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as General Secretary of the CPSU. The introductory paragraph read: "When Joseph Conrad wrote about the place, he called his novel Under Western Eyes because he wanted his readers to understand that his history was told by an outsider, meaning that no non-Russian could ever hope to see into that particular heart of darkness with any clarity or certainty. It is the same now. With Leonid Brezhnev gone, where are Western eyes to look, at the man or at the space he left, for an understanding of this moment?" 1 Samantha decided to write a letter to penetrate that darkness, addressed it to Andropov, and received a reply from the Kremlin inviting her to visit the Soviet Union and report what she saw. The most successful Soviet PR campaign of the late Cold War, the Smith visit demonstrated a creative, albeit short-lived, variation on the rich history of Soviet public relations. 2 This surreal epistolary exchange and visit have attracted limited scholarly attention. 3 And this article will add to the conversation by exploring some important but overlooked details in the context of evolving political narratives emerging out of Moscow and Washington in the early 1980s-the clash between the Soviet quest for legitimacy founded

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Section: Stardommentioning

confidence: 99%

Andropov's Gamble: Samantha Smith and Soviet Soft Power

Fedyashin

2020

jras

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The Other Kitchen Debate: Gender, Microwave Safety, and Household Labor in Late Cold War America

Gamber¹

2022

Enterp. Soc.

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“The Other Kitchen Debate” places the history of the microwave oven in the context of Cold War anxieties and gender politics. Discrepancies between Soviet and U.S. safety standards, Soviet deployment of microwave espionage, and the prospect of nuclear war triggered fears about the possible dangers of kitchen appliances powered by low-level radiation. During the 1970s and early 1980s, politicians, government regulators, industry representatives, advertisers, home economists, media, and consumers engaged in lively debates over oven safety and the merits of microwave cookery. By the late eighties and early nineties, as East–West tensions waned and record numbers of American women entered the paid labor force, American media perceived fewer distinctions between the hazards posed by electronic ovens and those presented by their conventional counterparts. New definitions of safety redefined microwave ovens as purely domestic appliances, leaving questions about the potential risks of nonionizing radiation unresolved.

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Children Are Hiding in Plain Sight in the History of U.S. Foreign Relations

Rouleau¹

2019

Mod. Am. Hist.

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All kinds of peoples, previously marginalized in favor of the actions and thoughts of elite policy makers, now fill foreign relations histories. African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, women, workers, and many others have been shown to be indispensable—if informal—diplomatic assets. And yet, diverse as this cast of characters has become, notice one thing they share in common: their adulthood. It is as if human experience with foreign affairs only begins with the age of majority. What might be gained once we appreciate the influence of young people, as both audience and agent, in the long history of America's entanglement with the wider world?

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Samantha Smith in the Land of the Bolsheviks: Peace and the Politics of Childhood in the Late Cold War

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Andropov's Gamble: Samantha Smith and Soviet Soft Power

Andropov's Gamble: Samantha Smith and Soviet Soft Power

The Other Kitchen Debate: Gender, Microwave Safety, and Household Labor in Late Cold War America

Children Are Hiding in Plain Sight in the History of U.S. Foreign Relations

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