Cold War America Research Articles

The view from outer space: Science fiction and political fantasy in the Cold War United States

The view from outer space: Science fiction and political fantasy in the Cold War United States

Sequentialized Samson: Five postwar (1949–1956) comic retellings of the Judges’’ tale

This essay examines comic book adaptations of the biblical story of Samson within the socio-political context of post-World War II and Cold War America. Challenging the notion that religious narratives in comics are inherently conservative, this study employs a history of interpretation approach to analyze five different adaptations, each illuminating the era’s complex cultural landscape. Themes such as distrust, binary morality, the value of duty over individualism, defiant autonomy, and nuanced masculinity are explored, revealing how these comics were not merely religious retellings but cultural artifacts shaped by the broader societal concerns of the late 1940s and 1950s. The paper argues that comic creators were acutely influenced by Cold War-era ideologies and anxieties, thus adapting the Samson narrative to address contemporary challenges. The essay contributes to the understanding of comics as both interpretive tools for ancient narratives and reflective historical documents of postwar America.

The “Kitchen Debate” Revisited: Abundance and Anti-domesticity in Cold War America

ABSTRACT This article examines two conflicting perspectives on home cooking in Cold War America. The 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow featured a vocal exchange between Richard Nixon and his Soviet rival Nikita Khruschev, during a tour of a model American home. This “Kitchen Debate,” positioned American food and cooking as part of an outpouring of consumerism, demonstrating capitalist superiority by providing for the conveniences and comforts of housewives. In contrast, humorist Peg Bracken’s 1960 I Hate to Cook Book argued that American women could pursue a lifestyle and self-identity that didn’t focus on daily meals or culinary panache. Although her recipes (relying on mixes and canned ingredients) were similar to other popular cookbook authors and relied on the same products showcased at the Moscow exhibition, Bracken differed from mainstream food writers and political ideologues, insisting that cooking was a tedious chore that should be side-stepped whenever possible.

What’s an Expert, and Why? A comment on Christian Dayé, Experts, Social Scientists, and Techniques of Prognosis in Cold War America

What’s an Expert, and Why? A comment on Christian Dayé, Experts, Social Scientists, and Techniques of Prognosis in Cold War America

“White Male Experts, Cultural Insecurity and Knowledge Production in Cold War America”

“White Male Experts, Cultural Insecurity and Knowledge Production in Cold War America”

A counselor and an artist: John Steinbeck’s dialogue with Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam war

ABSTRACT This article explores the dialogue that unfolded between the noted American novelist John Steinbeck (1902–1968) and President Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973) during the 1960s. In an era in which many American writers and intellectuals loudly protested Johnson for escalating the Vietnam War, Steinbeck stood out as a writer who supported the president’s domestic policies on civil rights as well as his foreign policy in Southeast Asia. Drawing on archival documents held in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library and the Library of Congress, the article explores how Steinbeck’s years-long dialogue with Johnson linked liberal ideals for literature and government that are more often held apart in studies of Cold War America. Ultimately, this approach reveals that the unusual bond that formed between novelist and president articulated a measure of the complexity of Cold War American liberalism itself, which in the 1960s promoted the noble cause of civil rights at home while at the same time justifying disastrous military interventions against communism in the name of “freedom” abroad.

Lost on the Freedom Trail: The National Park Service and Urban Renewal in Postwar Boston

Lost on the Freedom Trail: The National Park Service and Urban Renewal in Postwar Boston

“I think of Chaplin”: Poetry and the Tramp in Cold War America

AbstractThis essay explores how Charlie Chaplin’s tribulations under McCarthyism, which culminated in his exile from the US in 1952, occasioned a minor chorus of poetry on the American Left. Through case studies of Bob Kaufman, Edwin Rolfe, and Louis Zukofsky, this essay explores how radical poets from across different literary groupings were drawn to Chaplin in the Cold War’s early years out of personal and political solidarity, while also finding in him a figure through whom they could collectively register and resist the Left’s broader postwar decline. The article also sheds light on the much longer history of Chaplin’s connections with poetry and poets. It traces his relationship with socialist writers back to the 1910s and suggests how postwar poetry’s imaginative investment in Chaplin as a political figure has a deeper layer of significance, given that the filmmaker had for decades been influenced by his friendships with poets on the Left. The essay proposes that poetry’s unique potentiality as a form through which to oppose Chaplin’s struggles under McCarthyism is a consequence of poets having fostered his political consciousness in the first place.Reading [texts] . . . about Chaplin’s postwar political isolation comparatively and cumulatively, what emerges is a poetry whose shared references bespeak a form of fraught solidarity and whose full force resides in their being understood as a kind of communal response.

Delta of Power: The Military-Industrial Complex by Alex Roland

Reviewed by: Delta of Power: The Military-Industrial Complex by Alex Roland Jonson Miller (bio) Delta of Power: The Military-Industrial Complex By Alex Roland. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021. Pp. x + 291. Delta of Power is partly an updating of Alex Roland's 2001 Military Industrial Complex, published in the joint AHA/SHOT Historical Perspectives series. The second half of the book is a new analysis of the military-industrial complex (MIC) after the Cold War. As part of the SHOT/Johns Hopkins University Press Technology in Motion series, Delta of Power is directed significantly at students, providing a full, detailed history of the MIC, as well as presenting the state of the field by engaging the principal historiographic questions and debates. The book succeeds in that purpose, but Roland goes further, also contributing an argument about the continuation of a transformed post–Cold War MIC. Though there have been many books and articles identifying military-industrial complexes in pre–Cold War America and around the world, Roland pushes back on them, saying America's MIC was unique. It "cut a swath through American history unmatched by the experience of any other nation." Moreover, "no country was shaped as forcefully by the science and technology of war" (p. 39). Drawing on policy and social science literature, Roland argues that the MIC survived the Cold War but as a smaller part of the American economy, contributing much less research and development and provoking fewer concerns among an increasingly promilitary American [End Page 632] public. Despite decreased spending relative to gross domestic product, the current MIC is in fact bigger than ever, spending more money in real dollars and having expanded to include a post-9/11 intelligence-industrial complex. Roland argues that while the MIC continues to be wasteful and corrupt, it nonetheless works. It has produced expensive, unnecessary weapons systems, but it has also produced real successes, including the AEGIS ship defense system, drones, MRAP vehicles to protect troops from improvised explosive devices, and intelligence-gathering and processing systems that have protected the United States from foreign terrorist attacks. Echoing military historian Russell Weigley's argument about the "American Way of War," via Thomas Mahnken's 2010 Technology and the American Way of War, Roland places technological decision-making in a post–World War II American military culture that emphasized the quality of the military over quantity. Being unable or unwilling to build a military the size of Soviet or Chinese adversaries, the United States overcame the differences by remaining a generation ahead in weapons design. Moreover, in the post–Cold War period, the United States used an overwhelming technological advantage to minimize American casualties with the use of "stand-off" weapons, such as drones and guided missiles that avoided putting servicemembers in harm's way at all. Nonetheless, the United States recently lost its generational leap over potential peer adversaries, such as China, which now produces "good enough" weapons systems, partly through industrial espionage against the United States. Delta of Power is not, however, primarily a history of technology, or at least it does not make an argument about the construction of technology. Instead, Roland draws on the history of technology to engage and contribute to the MIC literature of journalists, policy scholars, and American political and military history. To do so, he draws on the work of several historians of technology, including Paul Edwards, Paul Forman, David Hounshell, Thomas Hughes, Stuart Leslie, David Noble, Merritt Roe Smith, and, of course, his own considerable contributions, having previously written about the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), military aerospace programs, and military technology in general. Nonetheless, there is no thorough argument in this book about the nature of technology that is equivalent to his 2010 Technology and Culture article, "Was the Nuclear Arms Race Deterministic?" Instead, Roland briefly draws on insights about technological momentum, nontechnical factors in technological decision-making, path dependency in technological development, and more to generate insights into decision-making within the MIC. Although Delta of Power does not—nor do I think it is intended to—provide an argument about technology itself, it is an essential book for historians of technology interested in either...

"The Warmth of His Continuing Interest": Henry K. Beecher, the Bioethics Revolution, and Pharmaceutical Industry Funding of Academic Medical Science in Cold War America.

This paper examines anesthesiologist Henry K. Beecher's funding relationship with pharmaceutical manufacturer Edward Mallinckrodt, Jr. Beecher is a familiar figure to both medical ethicists and historians of medicine for his role in the bioethics revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, his 1966 article "Ethics and Clinical Research" is widely considered a turning point in the post-World War II debate about informed consent. We argue that Beecher's scientific interests should be understood in the context of his funding relationship with Mallinckrodt and that this relationship shaped the direction of his work in important ways. We also argue that Beecher's views on research ethics reflected his assumption that collaboration with industry was a normal part of how academic science is conducted. In the conclusion of the paper we suggest that Beecher's failure to consider his relationship with Mallinckrodt as worthy of ethical deliberation has important lessons for academic researchers who collaborate with industry today.

‘Politics of fear’: An analysis of the effects of divisive political propaganda in Nazi Germany and Cold-War America as reflected in Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols” (1958) and Nena’s “99 Red Balloons” (1985)

Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols” (1958) is a short story that baffled its readers when it was first published in The New Yorker in 1948 and continues to be an enigma to many readers. The compact style, lack of plot and backstories, and the enigmatic mental disorder of the protagonist largely constitute this enigma, and makes the short story a writerly text open to multiple interpretations. While it has been interpreted from diverse perspectives for the past seventy years, its engagement with the ‘politics of fear’ in Nazi Germany and Cold-War America has not been subjected to critical scrutiny. ‘Politics of fear’ is a theory developed by Wodak (2015) to conceptualize right-wing political discourses and strategies. This paper uses this theory as a critical perspective to analyze how the protagonist’s mental disorder, ‘referential mania,’ reflects the nationalist and divisive right-wing political strategies of German and American populists of World War II and the Cold War. It also compares this portrayal with the reflection of ‘politics of fear’ in “99 Red Balloons” (1985), a protest song produced by Nena in Cold-War Germany.

‘Politics of Fear’: An Analysis of the Effects of Divisive Political Propaganda in Nazi Germany and Cold-War America as Reflected in Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols” (1958) and Nena’s “99 Red Balloons” (1985)

Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols” (1958) is a short story that baffled its readers when it was first published in The New Yorker in 1948 and continues to be an enigma to contemporary readers. The compact style and lack of plot and backstories are partially responsible for this enigma, which makes it a writerly text open to multiple interpretations. While the text has been interpreted from multiple perspectives for the past seventy years, its engagement with the ‘politics of fear’ in Nazi Germany and Cold-War America has been overlooked. ‘Politics of fear’ is a term coined by Wodak (2015) to investigate right-wing political discourses and strategies. This paper uses it as a critical perspective to analyse how the protagonist’s mental disorder, ‘referential mania,’ reflects nationalist and divisive right-wing political strategies used by populists in Germany and United States during World War II and the Cold War. It also compares this portrayal with the reflection of ‘politics of fear’ in “99 Red Balloons” (1985), a protest song produced by Nena in Cold-War Germany.

Social Science and Its Frontiers

Social Science and Its Frontiers Myron P. Gutmann (bio) Mark Solovey,Social Science for What? Battles over Public Funding for the “Other Sciences” at the National Science Foundation. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2020. X+ 398pp. Figures, notes, index. $50.00. Americans often date the emergence of a strong commitment to government support of science to the launch of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik 1 satellite in October 1957. That event certainly spurred policy decisions that increased federal investments in education and science, and thus is an appropriate starting point for the popular narrative about science. At the same time, policy developments of the Sputnik era built on earlier events, widely recognized by historians of science. That perspective starts the story with the presentation in July 1946 of Vannever Bush’s report, Science, The Endless Frontier, to President Truman, advocating for a large, organized federal investment in scientific research, based on the role of science and technology in the Second World War. Early efforts to enact legislation based on the Bush report failed (Truman vetoed the first bill that passed because it lacked presidential control over the appointment of the Foundation’s leadership), but in 1950 Truman signed the National Science Foundation Act, establishing an enduring basis for publicly—especially federally—funded scientific research in the United States. The debates about the creation of the National Science Foundation pitted progressives against conservatives and advocates of public and congressional control of science against advocates of exclusive control by scientists.1 One of the topics of debate—although hardly the loudest—was whether the social sciences would be included in the Foundation’s charge.2 Vannever Bush was opposed to their inclusion, sometimes arguing that they should be supported by a separate organization; on the other side, Democratic West Virginia Senator Harley M. Kilgore, a leading sponsor of a more progressive approach, supported their inclusion in the Foundation’s mission. In the end, the compromise legislation that Truman signed in 1950 did not include support for the social sciences, but at the same time did not prohibit such support. The Foundation did not totally exclude the social sciences for long; it hired sociologist Harry Alpert in 1953, and in 1954 introduced a first, extremely modest, program to support the linkage between the social and natural sciences. [End Page 396] The first Social Sciences Division was not established until 1960 (in an era in which the Foundation was divided into four scientific divisions reflecting major disciplinary categories). Later, when the Foundation was reorganized into seven directorates (three of them disciplinary, one for education, and three for administrative activities) in 1975, the Divisions of Social Sciences and Behavioral and Neural Sciences were part of an expanded Directorate for Biological, Behavioral and Social Sciences (p. 179). Only in 1991–92 did the Foundation establish a separate Directorate for the Social, Behavioral and Economic (SBE) Sciences, an organizational status that still exists today. The road from the origin of the Foundation to the creation of the SBE Directorate was not linear, with ups and downs in support for the social and behavioral sciences mostly reflecting political and institutional challenges. This history spanning the period from the first discussions of the National Science Foundation through the end of the 1980s (with an added discussion of recent events and recommendations for the future) is the topic of Mark Solovey’s Social Science for What? Battles over Public Funding for the “Other Sciences” at the National Science Foundation. In this book he builds on his earlier book, Shaky Foundations: The Politics-Patronage-Social Science Nexus in Cold War America (2013), on extensive archival research, and on interviews with surviving participants. Social Science for What? is an impressive accomplishment, capturing the connections between partisan politics, scientific inquiry, tensions among scientific disciplines, and the institutional development of the Foundation. It is instructive for all readers, including for me, who served for four years (2009–13) as one of the Foundation’s Assistant Directors and head of the Directorate for Social Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). Social Science for What? articulates consistent themes that define social science at NSF, along with a lively narrative arc. To define that arc, Solovey divides the main...

Ow! Bam! Good Grief!: Comics and Politics

Ow! Bam! Good Grief!: Comics and Politics Lori Clune (bio) Blake Scott Ball, Charlie Brown’s America: The Popular Politics of Peanuts. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. xii + 256 pp. Images, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95. Paul S. Hirsch, Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. 344 pp. Images, notes, bibliography, and index. $30.00. A few weeks ago, I needed a new pair of sneakers. Responding to social media ads, I explored the touted Cariuma shoes website. The first to pop up was emblazoned with Snoopy atop his iconic doghouse. Why did this mod, eco-friendly footwear company choose to display Snoopy and other recognizable Peanuts characters not seen in new comic-strip format in more than twenty years? Why are Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and Woodstock still popular well into the twenty-first century? Why do some comics resonate? What do they reveal about American society? And how, in light of all of those questions, can historians use comics? The scholar Eric Avila defines cultural history as “the history of stories, their origins, transmission, and significance in time. Lost voices,” he explains, help widen the “definition of what constitutes historical evidence” and highlight culture as “a driving force in history.”1 Comics are an example of a relatively overlooked cultural historic source. In both the book and strip format, comics are accessible cultural products that succeed or fail in how much they resonate with readers. They provide unique insights into politics and culture, both in the United States and abroad. They are compelling avenues for scholarly exploration for historians and our students. The Venn diagram of politics and culture has become the sweet spot for an increasing number of scholars. Many U.S. historians have shifted to looking at war, death, racism, sexism, and nukes through the lens of cultural products. While these scholars may look longingly at seemingly lighthearted historical sources—such as cartoons, television shows, and games—the dark side of humanity can seep into any crevice. The role sexism played in the creation of Monopoly (The Landlord’s Game, 1904); childhood polio and iron lungs and [End Page 416] the gameplay in Candyland (1948); how Johnny Carson groping Eva Gabor on The Tonight Show sparked the popularity of Twister (1966); racism and sexism in the original Oregon Trail (1971); strategically planning nuclear destruction in Balance of Power (1985).2 Cultural products can help historians tell a richer, fuller social and political story. Scholars Blake Scott Ball and Paul S. Hirsch each embrace this overlap of culture and politics and take what is often seen as populist and disposable foolishness—Peanuts and comic books—in their capable hands to create compelling and enlightening lenses through which to view modern American history. In Charlie Brown’s America, Blake Scott Ball provides a “biography of Peanuts’ cultural life” by examining the popular comic strip. Neatly covering 1950 to 2000, Ball uses Peanuts as an effective lens through which to view Cold War America (p. 3). In addition to the strips themselves, Ball makes great use of thousands of pieces of fan mail and other letters sent to Peanuts creator Charles Schulz. By capturing the voices of these ordinary folks, Ball is able to add their opinions and give an indication of how the comic strip was received. Ball argues that through Peanuts’ characters Schulz was able to channel “Americans’ dreams, hopes, fears, and worries” and comment on social and political issues in post-WWII America (p. 3). Chapter Two, for example, explores the Cold War origins of Peanuts. As someone who grew up reading Peanuts, I was surprised how deftly Schulz reflected the Cold War in his strips. It is now difficult to see Linus’s omnipresent blanket as anything but an expression of Cold War anxiety. And J. Edgar Hoover really had signed original Peanuts strips hanging in his office? One wonders which ones! On June 18, 1954, just two years after the United States tested its first hydrogen bomb, Peanuts characters grappled with fear of the bomb by integrating it into their play. Charlie Brown explains, “We’re playing ‘H-Bomb test.’” Three panels later Lucy roars...

The Radical Civil Rights Movement: The Highlander Folk School and the Legacies of the Left in Cold War America

Abstract In the spring of 1965, hundreds of billboards arose across the American South purporting to show Dr Martin Luther King Jr at a ‘Communist training school’. By tracing the history of that infamous image, this article examines how civil rights activists fought against racist propaganda, and argues that the legacies of the American Left remained vital to the civil rights movement despite Cold War repression. At the centre of this story is the Highlander Folk School, an integrated institution in the hills of Tennessee, at which the photo was taken. Highlander’s democratic approach to education created a space in which Leftist ideas and strategies could coalesce, a space that stood in sharp contrast to both the fantasy of a ‘Communist training school’ and the anti-communist segregationists who propagated that fantasy. Both in the content of its workshops and the manner in which they were organized, Highlander preserved the heritage of the American Left in ways that help to explain how many civil rights activists came to reject Communism and the Red Scare, to embrace civil liberties and economic justice, and to respect local traditions of African American resistance and expansive anti-colonial solidarities.

Han, B. M. (2020). Beyond the Black and White TV: Asian and Latin American Spectacle in Cold War America. Rutgers University Press.

Han, B. M. (2020). Beyond the Black and White TV: Asian and Latin American Spectacle in Cold War America. Rutgers University Press.

Han, B. M. (2020). Beyond the Black and White TV: Asian and Latin American Spectacle in Cold War America. Rutgers University Press.

Han, B. M. (2020). Beyond the Black and White TV: Asian and Latin American Spectacle in Cold War America. Rutgers University Press.

In Transit: The Changing Nature of Cities, Suburbs and Modes of Communication in Cold War America

This article is concerned with the study of urban spaces, such as cities, suburbs and modes of transportation, and their changing social and political dimensions in Cold War America. To do so, the essay will try to understand how cities and suburbs, post- World War II, evolved in terms of demographic composition and how domestic and foreign policies of the two power blocks impacted this demography. American sociologist, Louis Wirth’s (1996) ideas of expansion of cities and formation of suburbs have been examined against the actual development of American metropolises alongside an exploration of domestic policies, especially those of ‘containment’ and ‘conformity’, and referenced to works of Cold War historians- Robert Genter and Nadel. Having identified the forces governing these spaces, the essay then delves forward to account for the implications of the ‘third space’ in Cold War America. It considers ‘third space’ as a geographic entity, as propounded by historian of urban planning- Edward Soja, and compares the representation of the ‘third space’ in Cold War literary texts to derive its conclusion.

냉전기 미국에서 아프리카-아시아 연대와 정치적 상상력— 중국계 미국인 여성 그레이스 리 보그스(Grace Lee Boggs)의 급진적 흑인 정치 활동 —

This article explores how Grace Lee Boggs participated in radical black political movements in Cold War America as a Chinese American woman. Her marriage to an African American labor activist, James Boggs, and her activist career in radical Black politics provides a good example of Afro-Asian political alliance in the United States. Grace continuously sought for the meaning of her American citizenship by being a part of the Black community and the Black power movement. Despite or because of being a race and gender minority in the radical black politics, Grace could raise criticism of its male-centered politics.

Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions That Changed American Politics by Rebecca L. Davis

Reviewed by: Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions That Changed American Politics by Rebecca L. Davis Benjamin Baker (bio) Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions That Changed American Politics. By Rebecca L. Davis. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2021. 248 pp. Public Confessions appeared as the United States was experiencing Covid-19 quarantines and pitched battles over national identity. Among Americans, the pandemic raised—or revealed, depending on how one looks at it—fierce disputes about the nature of freedom, democracy, and partisanship, while on other fronts Americans just as vigorously debated race, gender, sexuality, and cancel culture. Appropriately, then, Rebecca Davis's volume explores these very issues from the lens of high profile religious conversions of last century. What do Clare Boothe Luce, Whittaker Chambers, Sammy Davis, Jr., Muhammad Ali, Marilyn Monroe, Eldridge Cleaver, and Chuck Colson have in common? According to Davis, all experienced religious conversions ("confessions") in Cold War America that "moved claims of religious authenticity to the center of American political debates" and raised "questions of whether and how different kinds of faith variously anchored or undermined American freedoms" (4). Davis does not provide a working definition of the contested term "conversion," although there is rich material throughout the work to grapple with its meaning(s). Instead, in the prologue, Davis suggests that religious conversions discussed in the volume may be seen as "self-discovery," "self-invention," "self-transformation," or a kind of authenticity (1–11). [End Page 309] These notions of conversion are evident in Davis's treatment of religious conversion as not a single event, but rather a whole life lived up to the conversion event. This is in keeping with the long tradition of conversion narratives, with the requisite mention of St. Augustine, exemplar of the genre. However, discrete developments always seem to precipitate conversion, at least in retrospect. Consider Davis's subjects. Luce's daughter tragically died in a car accident in 1944, and Luce was nearing a mental collapse and attempted suicide twice. Chambers felt tremendous pressure from his double life as a Soviet spy and gay man. Davis, Jr. was nearly killed in a car accident in Los Angeles in 1954. Ali grappled with identity issues around being black in America. Colson was mired in the Watergate scandal and awaiting a legal verdict. Davis shows how these celebrities adroitly curated their personal religious conversions for the American public to further political ends. Luce presented Roman Catholicism as a democratic check to the peril of communism, with "Catholic converts [holding] the future for American power and democracy" (13). Likewise, Chambers claimed his conversion to Christianity caused him to inform on his Communist conspirators and champion conservatism. Davis, Jr. practiced and literally performed Judaism to achieve civil rights for African Americans. Ali used his conversion to the Nation of Islam to promote black power and freedom and critique American involvement in the Vietnam War. Colson parlayed his conversion to evangelical Christianity to promote white neoliberal masculinity. In an era when Americans questioned the compatibility of some faiths with democracy, namely, any faiths other than mainline Protestantism, these figures argued that their new faiths were quintessentially democratic. Public Confessions excels in demonstrating how these celebrity conversions, though from diverse backgrounds and varied faiths, all revealed essential aspects of American politics and ultimately shaped American identity. Luce shows how an America that was largely male chauvinist and anti-Catholic was moved, if only incrementally, to view women as serious religious figures and more than sexual objects, and to a consideration that Catholics could be genuinely American. Ali and Davis, Jr. defy the narrow possibilities that racism imposed on blacks and widened religious heterodoxy and political expression for African Americans. Colson demonstrates how white Christian men had the privilege to reinvent themselves despite epic wrongdoing and contributed to the rise and dominance of the Religious Right in the Reagan era and beyond. Public Confessions's strength is that it takes a complex era, group of individuals, and subject matter, and produces an intriguing volume for scholarly and non-scholarly audiences. It is the latest offering in a [End Page 310] growing literature that treats religious conversions as more than religious, per se, demonstrating their...