Reviving Religion

2021 ◽  
pp. 15-43
Author(s):  
Uta A. Balbier
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Planning Process ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Revival ◽  
Political Discourses ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Altar Call ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Cold War

This book uses Graham’s crusades in London, Berlin, and New York as a prism through which to explore the powerful dynamics of the transatlantic revival of the 1950s. It was a movement that affected political discourses, theological debates, and ordinary faith, and witnessed a tremendous exchange of ideas and issues, hopes and fears, people and practices. It produced intense national debates about the future of faith under the threat of secularization. It was shaped by transnational ideological frameworks such as the Cold War and consumerism, and it strengthened the international awareness of German, British, and American Christians within and beyond the evangelical community. These were the dynamics, changes, and processes that came together during Graham’s altar call in Europe. This first chapter embeds Billy Graham’s revival meetings in the religious landscapes of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany in the 1950s, a time characterized by secularization fears and hopes for a religious revival. It introduces the planning process behind Graham’s revival meetings, which was marked by lively transnational exchanges between American, British, and German organizers. In the wake of World War II, the so-called crusades provided a focus for contemporary debates among church officials, theologians, and ordinary Christians about faith, politics and society, and a possible modernization of religious life. The chapter shows how the endorsement and criticism developing around Graham split congregations and denominations, meanwhile allowing an ecumenical community of Graham supporters to emerge. Graham’s revival style challenged the evangelical communities in particular to embrace a more worldly faith.

scholarly journals Politicizing Religion

2021 ◽  
pp. 73-99
Author(s):  
Uta A. Balbier
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Media ◽  
Media Discourses ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter defines Graham’s crusades in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom in the 1950s as powerful cultural orchestrations of Cold War culture. It explores the reasons of leading political figures to support Graham, the media discourses that constructed Graham’s image as a cold warrior, and the religious and political worldviews of the religious organizers of the crusades in London, Washington, New York, and Berlin. In doing so, the chapter shows how hopes for genuine re-Christianization, in response to looming secularization, anticommunist fears, and post–World War II national anxieties, as well as spiritual legitimizations for the Cold War conflict, blended in Graham’s campaign work. These anxieties, hopes, and worldviews crisscrossed the Atlantic, allowing Graham and his campaign teams to make a significant contribution to creating an imagined transnational “spiritual Free World.”

Altar Call in Europe

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uta A. Balbier
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Altar Call ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
International Ministry

This book provides a transnational history of Billy Graham’s revival work in the 1950s, zooming in on his revival meetings in London (1954), Berlin (1954/1960), and New York (1957). It shows how Graham’s international ministry took shape in the context of transatlantic debates about the place and future of religion in public life after the experiences of war and at the onset of the Cold War, and through a constant exchange of people, ideas, and practices. It explores the transnational nature of debates about the religious underpinnings of the “Free World” and sheds new light on the contested relationship between business, consumerism, and religion. In the context of Graham’s revival meetings, ordinary Christians, theologians, ministers, and church leaders in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom discussed, experienced, and came to terms with religious modernization and secular anxieties, Cold War culture, and the rise of consumerism. The transnational connectedness of their political, economic, and spiritual hopes and fears brings a narrative to life that complicates our understanding of the different secularization paths the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany embarked on in the 1950s. During Graham’s altar call in Europe, the contours of a transatlantic revival become visible, even if in the long run it was unable to develop a dynamism that could have sustained this moment in these different national and religious contexts.

Method Acting and the Cold War

2000 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-68
Author(s):  
Bruce McConachie
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Method Acting ◽  
Acting Theory ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Group Theatre ◽  
Moscow Art Theatre

Triumphalist accounts of the spread of “the Method” in post-World War II America generally explain its success as the victory of natural truths over benighted illusions about acting. In Method Actors: Three Generations of An American Acting Style, for instance, Steve Vineberg follows his summary of the primary attributes of “method” acting with the comment: “These concerns weren't invented by Stanislavski or his American successors; they emerged naturally out of the two thousand-year history of Western acting.” Hence, the final triumph of “the Method” was natural, even inevitable. Vineberg's statement, however, raises more questions than it answers. Why did it take two thousand years for actors and theorists of acting to get it right? Or, to localize the explanation to the United States, why did more American actors, directors, and playwrights not jump on the Stanislavski bandwagon and reform the American theatre after the appearance of the Moscow Art Theatre in New York in 1923 and the subsequent lectures and classes from Boleslavski and others? The Group Theatre demonstrated the power of Stanislavski-derived acting techniques in the 1930s, but their substantial successes barely dented the conventional wisdom about acting theory and technique in the professional theatre. Yet, in the late 1940s and early fifties, “method” acting, substantially unchanged from its years in the American Laboratory and Group theatres, took Broadway and Hollywood by storm.

Post-Revisionist Cold War - Ambiguous Partnership: Britain and America, 1944–1947. By Robert M. Hathaway. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981. x, 410 pp. - From War to Cold War, 1942–48. By Roy Douglas. New York: St. Martin's, 1981. ix, 224 pp. Photographs. $22.50. - The United States, Great Britain, and the Cold War, 1944–1947. By Terry H. Anderson. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1981. xi, 256 pp. $18.00. - The End of an Alliance: James F. Byrnes, Roosevelt, Truman, and the Origins of the Cold War. By Robert L. Messer. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982. x, 282 pp. Illustrations. $19.95. - Witnesses to the Origins of the Cold War. Edited by Thomas T. Hammond. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982. 318 pp. $22.50. - Bitter Legacy: Polish-American Relations in the Wake of World War II. By Richard C. Lukas. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982. 191 pp. $16.00. - American Intervention in Greece, 1943–1949. By Lawrence S. Wittner. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. xii, 445 pp. - Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy. By John Lewis Gaddis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. xi, 432 pp. $9.95, paper. - Stalin's American Policy: From Entente to Détente to Cold War. By William Taubman. New York: Norton, 1982. xii, 291 pp. $18.95. - Soviet Foreign Policy Since World War II. By Joseph L. Nogee and Robert H. Donaldson. New York: Pergamon Press, 1982. vii, 320 pp. $35.00, cloth. $10.95, paper.

Slavic Review ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 662-668
Author(s):  
Vojtech Mastny
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
World War ◽  
University Of Missouri ◽  
Soviet Foreign Policy ◽  
The Cold War

Children in LGBT Political Discourses in the United States

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Mccreery
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Political Discourses ◽  
Gay Parents ◽  
Normative Identity ◽  
The 1950S

The role of the symbolic child figure has shifted substantially within discourses of LGBT politics and activism in the United States since World War II. From the 1950s well into the 1980s, the putatively heterosexual child was portrayed as the potential victim of homosexuality—victimized by influence, predation, and infection. By the early 21st century, the child had become a figure who was often represented as benefiting from LGBT civil rights—either as the child of lesbian or gay parents whose union was strengthened by the acquisition of civil benefits and protections or as a young gay or trans person struggling to accept a non-normative identity. This cultural shift both reflected and helped generate specific governmental and institutional policies—from the sexual psychopath laws of the 1950s, to the emergence of school-based Gay-Straight Alliances in the 1990s, to the central role of the child in debates over same-sex marriage in the 2000s.

Louis Menand: The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. 2001. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 546 pp.

2003 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 201-204
Author(s):  
Lance Kenney
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cold War ◽  
William James ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Cultural Impact ◽  
Oliver Wendell Holmes ◽  
History Of ◽  
Charles Peirce ◽  
The Cold War

Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club, daunting in its choice of subject matter, closely aligns itself with the ancient sense of the word ‘history’ as a fluid, almost epic narrative. The Metaphysical Club of the title was a conversation group that met in Cambridge for a few months in 1872. Its membership roster listed some of the greatest intellectuals of the day: Charles Peirce, William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Chauncey Wright, amongst others. There is no record of the Club’s discussions or debates—in fact, the only direct reference to the Club is made by Peirce in a letter written thirty-five years later. Menand utilizes the Club as a jumping-off point for a sweeping analysis of the beliefs of the day. The subtitle of the book belies its true mission: ‘a story of ideas in America.’ Menand discusses the intellectual and social conditions that helped shape these men by the time they were members of the Club. He then shows the philosophical, political, and cultural impact that these men went on to have. In doing so, Menand traces a history of ideas in the United States from immediately prior to the Civil War to the beginning of the Cold War.

Cold War Exiles and the CIA

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Tromly
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
West Germany ◽  
United States Government ◽  
Home Base ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Secret War

During the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, the United States government unleashed covert operations intended to weaken the Soviet Union. As part of these efforts, the CIA undertook support of Russian exiles, populations uprooted either during World War II or by the Russian Revolution decades before. No one seemed better prepared to fight in the American secret war against communism than the uprooted Russians, whom the CIA directed to carry out propaganda, espionage, and subversion operations from their home base in West Germany. Yet the American engagement of Russian exiles had unpredictable outcomes. Drawing on recently declassified and previously untapped sources, Cold War Exiles and the CIA examines how the CIA’s Russian operations became entangled with the internal struggles of Russia abroad and also the espionage wars of the superpowers in divided Germany. What resulted was a transnational political sphere involving different groups of Russian exiles, American and German anti-communists, and spies operating on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Inadvertently, CIA’s patronage of Russian exiles forged a complex sub-front in the wider Cold War, demonstrating the ways in which the hostilities of the Cold War played out in ancillary conflicts involving proxies and non-state actors.

Lincoln Kirstein’s Social Modernism and the Cultural Front

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Harris
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Relevance ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Biographical Approach ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Political Economic

This chapter takes a biographical approach to Lincoln Kirstein’s creation of a modernist theory of ballet to situate its development in the 1930s cultural wing of the Popular Front and explore its evolution through and after World War II. Fueled by the cultural front’s belief in the role of the arts in social revolution, Kirstein seized the opportunity to decouple ballet from existing biases about its elitism and triviality, and formulate new ideas about its social relevance in the Depression period. After exploring the development of Kirstein’s social modernism in the cultural front, chapter 2 then turns to the challenges posed to the 1930s belief that art could be productively combined with politics through two major turning points in Kirstein’s life. These are his experiences in World War II, and the erosion of his own artistic role in the ballet company after the formation of the New York City Ballet and the ascendance of George Balanchine’s dance-for-dance-sake aesthetic in the late 1940s. The chapter illustrates Kirstein’s attempts to negotiate the social modernist aesthetic he crafted under the wing of the cultural front within the volatile political, economic, and artistic circumstances of World War II, anticommunism, and the Cold War.

scholarly journals Social Sensing of Heatwaves

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (11) ◽  
pp. 3717
Author(s):  
James C. Young ◽  
Rudy Arthur ◽  
Michelle Spruce ◽  
Hywel T. P. Williams
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
Measured Temperature ◽  
Social Sensing ◽  
Public Response ◽  
Environmental Consequences ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Social Reaction ◽  
Twitter Activity ◽  
The Uk

Heatwaves cause thousands of deaths every year, yet the social impacts of heat are poorly measured. Temperature alone is not sufficient to measure impacts and “heatwaves” are defined differently in different cities/countries. This study used data from the microblogging platform Twitter to detect different scales of response and varying attitudes to heatwaves within the United Kingdom (UK), the United States of America (US) and Australia. At the country scale, the volume of heat-related Twitter activity increased exponentially as temperature increased. The initial social reaction differed between countries, with a larger response to heatwaves elicited from the UK than from Australia, despite the comparatively milder conditions in the UK. Language analysis reveals that the UK user population typically responds with concern for individual wellbeing and discomfort, whereas Australian and US users typically focus on the environmental consequences. At the city scale, differing responses are seen in London, Sydney and New York on governmentally defined heatwave days; sentiment changes predictably in London and New York over a 24-h period, while sentiment is more constant in Sydney. This study shows that social media data can provide robust observations of public response to heat, suggesting that social sensing of heatwaves might be useful for preparedness and mitigation.

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