David Ray Papke is Professor of Law at Marquette University. He is the author of Narrative and the Legal Discourse and Framing the Criminal: Crime, Cultural Work, and the Loss of Critical Perspective, 1830-1900.
""One Nation Underground" vividly evokes a fast-fading era of U.S.
history when millions of Americans contemplated the prospect of
huddling in underground shelters to escape the blast and radiation
of thermonuclear war. Kenneth D. Rose brings into sharp focus these
years when nuclear fear pervaded American public life and culture,
gripping Pentagon Strategists, civil-defense planners, theologians,
magazine editors, and the authors of comic books and
science-fiction stories. Beautifully written, copiously
illustrated, and drawing upon an amazing range of sources, this
engrossing book should be read by anyone interested in the domestic
fallout of the Cold War nuclear arms race."-Paul S. Boyer, author
of "By the Bomb's Early Light and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic
Age"
"Kenneth Rose's One Nation Underground explores U.S. nuclear
history from the bottom up--literally. . . . Rose deserves credit
for not trivializing this period of our history, as so many
retrospectives of the Cold War era have tended to do."-"Journal of
Cold War Studies",
"Rose critically nails the ambivalence of the general population
toward sheltering."-"Technology and Culture",
"This compelling chronicle of the civil defense debate during the
early years of the Cold War shows how discussions of the pros and
cons of fallout shelters forced Americans to face the possible
consequences of nuclear war and what kind of world any survivors
would inhabit. In the national soul-searching that ensued, citizens
confronted their deepest fears, values, and attitudes about
themselves, their neighbors, and their world. One Nation
Underground reminds us of the real terror that gripped the world in
the tense years of nuclear brinksmanship."-Elaine Tyler May, author
of "Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era"
"This fascinating and illuminating study ably traces Civil Defense
from Bert the Turtle's school drills in the 1950s to backyard
family shelters in the early sixties. As Kenneth Rose insightfully
shows, Americans, panicked over Cold War tensions and the threat of
thermonuclear incineration, talked inordinately about fallout
shelters, but few were ever built. That discrepancy reveals much
about American society, culture, and psychology. This book almost
glows in the dark."-W. J. Rorabaugh, author of "Berkeley at War:
The 1960s"
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