In December 2010 the U.S. Embassy in Kabul acknowledged that it was providing major funding for thirteen episodes of Eagle Four—a new Afghani television melodrama based loosely on the blockbuster U.S. series 24. According to an embassy spokesperson, Eagle Four was part of a strategy aimed at transforming public suspicion of security forces into something like awed respect. Why would a wartime government spend valuable resources on a melodrama of covert operations? The answer, according to Timothy Melley, is not simply that fiction has real political effects but that, since the Cold War, fiction has become integral to the growth of national security as a concept and a transformation of democracy. In The Covert Sphere, Melley links this cultural shift to the birth of the national security state in 1947. As the United States developed a vast infrastructure of clandestine organizations, it shielded policy from the public sphere and gave rise to a new cultural imaginary, "the covert sphere." One of the surprising consequences of state secrecy is that citizens must rely substantially on fiction to "know," or imagine, their nation’s foreign policy. The potent combination of institutional secrecy and public fascination with the secret work of the state was instrumental in fostering the culture of suspicion and uncertainty that has plagued American society ever since—and, Melley argues, that would eventually find its fullest expression in postmodernism. The Covert Sphere traces these consequences from the Korean War through the War on Terror, examining how a regime of psychological operations and covert action has made the conflation of reality and fiction a central feature of both U.S. foreign policy and American culture. Melley interweaves Cold War history with political theory and original readings of films, television dramas, and popular entertainments—from The Manchurian Candidate through 24—as well as influential writing by Margaret Atwood, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, E. L. Doctorow, Michael Herr, Denis Johnson, Norman Mailer, Tim O’Brien, and many others.

In this book Virginia Carmichael offers a provocative new interpretation of the Rosenberg story. Carmichael argues that this social drama produced many stories serving multiple interests and functions, many of which confront the politics of both writing and reading. She also demonstrates that this story's resistance to closure-manifest in its repeated tellings in historiography, biography, literature, and the visual and performing arts-suggests its lasting cultural impact on a nation coming to terms with the end of the cold war era.

Beginning with the serpent in the Garden of Eden and ending with O.J. Simpson, author George Anastaplo offers an exploration of justice and the rule of law through well-known trials both ancient and modern, real and fictional. On Trial is a detailed and fascinating discussion of legal reason, moral judgment, political life, and the events that give them meaning.

Few politicians in our history have had the emotional impact of Joe McCarthy and acclaimed historian David Oshinsky’s chronicling of his life has been called both “nuanced” and “masterful.” Here, David Oshinsky presents us with a work heralded as the finest account available of Joe McCarthy’s colorful career. With a storyteller’s eye for the dramatic and presentation of fact, and insightful interpretation of human complexity, Oshinsky uncovers the layers of myth to show the true McCarthy. His book reveals the senator from his humble beginnings as a hardworking Irish farmer’s son in Wisconsin to his glory days as the architect of America’s Cold War crusade against domestic subversion; a man whose advice if heeded, some believe, might have halted the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia and beyond. A Conspiracy So Immense reveals the internal and external forces that launched McCarthy on this political career, carried him to national prominence, and finally triggered his decline and fall. More than the life of an intensely—even pathologically—ambitious man however, this book is a fascinating portrait of America in the grip of Cold War fear, anger, suspicion, and betrayal. Complete with a new foreword, A Conspiracy So Immense will continue to keep in the spotlight this historical figure—a man who worked so hard to prosecute “criminals” whose ideals work against that of his—for America.

Did Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti murder two men in South Braintree, Massachusetts on April 15, 1920? At their joint trial, alibi witnesses testified Vanzetti was selling fish that day in North Plymouth. Other alibi witnesses testified that they saw Sacco in Boston that day. What is the truth? Did the Dedham jury--12 men of New England culture--have evidence for conviction? Or did their guilty verdict in 1921 stem from a deeply rooted bias against these two Italian immigrants who militantly pursued their anarchist-communist goals? Were Saco and Vanzetti innocent men? Did Governor Fuller refuse to stop their execution in 1927 because Massachusetts wanted to strike back at radical aliens who set off bombs in U.S. cities in the Red Scare of 1919? Why did so many intellectuals believe the men innocent? Answers to these questions are in the transcripts of the trial. This handbook reprints all critical testimony from the trial as well as major items from the 80-year debate. 52 questions help you sort out the experts--those who are right and those who are wrong on the trial verdict. Kill Now, Talk Forever is cited in the 5th edition of AFTER THE FACT: THE ART OF HISTORICAL DETECTION (2005), by James West Davidson and Mark Hamilton.

The intellectual and the popular: Irving Howe and John Waters, Susan Sontag and Ethel Rosenberg, Dwight MacDonald and Bill Cosby, Amiri Baraka and Mick Jagger, Andrea Dworkin and Grace Jones, Andy Warhol and Lenny Bruce. All feature in Andrew Ross's lively history and critique of modern American culture. Andrew Ross examines how and why the cultural authority of modern intellectuals is bound up with the changing face of popular taste in America. He argues that the making of "taste" is hardly an aesthetic activity, but rather an exercise in cultural power, policing and carefully redefining social relations between classes.

"[This book] is a red flag to restore our historical consciousness about U.S.-Russian relations, and how denying this consciousness is leading to a repetition of past follies"--Amazon.com.

Reconstructs events leading up to the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on charges of espionage, features an analysis of the trial, and includes evidence that has come to light since their conviction and execution.