Communication
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Item COLD WAR II: UKRAINIAN SOVEREIGNTY AND IDENTITY(2017) McCloskey, Thomas Laurence; Parry-Giles, Shawn J; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Ukraine’s 2014 Revolution of Dignity showcases tensions between nationalism and internationalism in a post-Cold War era. Ukraine’s political leaders and ordinary citizens express opposing views about the identity and sovereignty of their nation, as some want closer ties with the European Union, while others seek closer relations with the Russian Federation. The myths and memories of Ukraine’s Cossack past, as well as its time in the former Soviet Union, animate discourses throughout the conflict. These debates result in no clear consensus about Ukrainian identity. The inability of Ukraine to find a unified nationalist identity in the conflict highlights a post-Cold War paradox. Ukraine is unable to articulate a unifying identity because the myths and memories of the Cold War continue to circulate in public discourse. International organizations are largely unable to legitimize either side’s claims of identity in the conflict. This chaos has invited outside intervention, as both the Russia Federation and the United States attempt to influence Ukraine’s decisions about sovereignty and identity in ways benefitting Russian or American interests. These discourses mirror Cold War debates over Soviet satellite countries, as a propaganda battle for the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian people rage on in political speeches, online forums, and in international organizations. Ukraine is thus mired in a cycle of unrest, as corruption and language issues continue to prevent the nation from articulating a unified nationalist identity. Ukraine’s crisis showcases the inherent conflict within notions of sovereignty, as both self-determination and freedom from outside intervention often contradict the expected obligations of nations to protect not only their citizens but also those of other nations whose human rights are threatened. This project challenges the notion that post-Cold War states can easily move beyond the legacies of the Cold War, as their past myths and memories continue to define their sovereignty and identity well after the conflict ends.Item J. EDGAR HOOVER AND THE RHETORICAL RISE OF THE FBI: THE PUBLIC CAMPAIGNS AGAINST VERMIN, THE FIFTH COLUMN, AND RED FASCISM.(2012) Underhill, Stephen Michael; Parry-Giles, Shawn J; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project examines J. Edgar Hoover's rhetorical leadership of the Federal Bureau of Investigation during the Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S Truman administrations (1933-1953). Hoover launched and sustained a concerted domestic propaganda program that helped enhance his own political power and invented the FBI as a central force in domestic and international matters. In the process, he re-envisioned conceptions of U.S. citizenship by promoting notions of idealized citizenship. Hoover entered law enforcement and U.S. politics during the early decades of the twentieth century--a time of increased use of public campaigns sponsored by the U.S. government and presidential administrations to alter public opinion on important policy matters. This period witnessed, for example, the country's experimentation with domestic propaganda during World War I. While the Soviet Union and Germany used disease, vermin, parasite, and body metaphors to organize their own domestic propaganda campaigns in the following decades, Hoover used these same metaphors to advance the need to purify America and exterminate its social pariah. Through his public campaigns against vermin (1933-1939), the Fifth Column (1939-1945), and Red Fascism (1945-1953), Hoover constructed a reality in which corruption and subversion were immutable elements of democratic life. Increasingly, Hoover's tactics of threat and intimidation began to mimic the tactics of threat practiced by America's enemies, moving the country closer to what many at the time called a police state. Hoover's coupling of propaganda and coercive tactics ultimately helped him to rapidly expand the FBI and undermine his superiors and counterparts in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. Whereas Roosevelt benefited politically from building up a secret police force, Truman inherited a cunning FBI director eager to use his power to expand and exploit the rhetorical presidency during the Red Scare.Item (Re)Placing America: Cold War Mapping and the Mediation of International Space(2011) Barney, Timothy; Parry-Giles, Trevor; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The United States emerged from World War II as an undeniably global power, and as the Cold War unfolded, America faced decisions about where to place and display its power on the globe. The Cold War was a battle between two ideologies and competing world systems, both of which were vying for space and had the tools and technologies to control those spaces. Maps became a central vehicle for the testing of these new boundaries. Mapping projects and programs emerged from a variety of popular cartographers, foreign policy strategists, defense leaders, Congressional representatives, scientists, oppositional movements, labor unions, educational publishers, even everyday citizens. As each of these sources confirms, the scope of American commitments had expanded considerably; to account for this expansion, a cartographic impulse underwrote the continually evolving Cold War, and the tensions of art and science, realism and idealism, and space and place inherent in this impulse helped form the fault lines of the conflict. (Re)Placing America looks largely at the ways that cartography adapted to such changes and tensions in the second half of the twentieth century, and how the United States marshaled the practice of mapping in a variety of ways to account for the shift to internationalism. This dissertation explores how cartography mediated visions of space, and particularly, how it defined America's place within those spaces. Treating cartography as a complex rhetorical process of production, display, and circulation, the five chapters cover major geopolitical thematics, and the responding evolution of maps, from World War II until the Cold War's end in the early 1990s. Some of these driving themes include the "air-age" expansion of visual perspectives and strategic potential in journalistic maps; the appropriation of cartography as a medium for intelligence and national security objectives; the marshaling of maps as evidential weapons against the Soviet Union in diplomatic exchanges, Congressional reports, and government-sponsored propaganda; the shifts from East/West antagonisms to North/South ones as cartography was drafted into the modernization efforts of the U.S. in mapping the Third World; and the Defense Department's use of maps to argue for nuclear deterrence, while protest groups made radical cartographic challenges to these practices of state power. (Re)Placing America reads closely the maps of the forty-years-plus conflict and considers the complexity of their internal codes (in colors, shapes, icons, etc.), while also reaching out externally to the intersecting interests and visions of the cartographic producers and the Cold War contexts in which they emerged. The project seeks out and explores particular nodal points and thematics where maps consolidated and shaped changing shifts in perception, where cartographic fragments cohered around the defining moments, but also sometimes in the everyday politics of the Cold War. Ultimately, this project offers four conclusions about and conduct and operation of American mapping during the complex, ideologically charged time of the Cold War. First, the function of the map to both "fix" and "unfix" particular perceptions of the world is relevant to assessing how America sought to stabilize its place in a rapidly changing world. Second, the internationalism of the Cold War was bound up in the capacities for cartography to document and adapt to it. Third, the humanistic notion of a geographical imagination is central to understanding why particular Cold War agents and institutions continually drew on cartography to represent their interests. Finally, combining an ideological approach to reading maps as articulators of contextual tensions and historical ideas with an instrumental approach to maps as material, strategic documents can best help to situate cartography as an ongoing process of production, circulation, and display.