Condensing the Cold War

Reader's Digest and American Identity

Bibliographic Data

ID10032620
AuthorsSusan Schulten (0000-0003-1302-0062, University of Denver, corresponding author), Joanne Sharp (0000-0001-5805-4296, University of Denver)
Year2002
Volume89
Issue1
Pages289
Publication date2002-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeREVIEW
Review ofCondensing the Cold War: Reader's digest and American identity, Joanne P Sharp, 2000
VenueJournal of American History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314
PublisherOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2700903
OpenAlexW2080090480
LanguageEN

This is a brief study of the Cold War rhetoric of the Reader's Digest. Joanne P. Sharp chooses to focus on this magazine for a few reasons. First, the Digest had a circulation so high that it quickly became “the single most important voice in the creation of popular geopolitics in America in the twentieth century.” No other form of medium, she writes, “has been so consistent or influential as the Digest, and none has so effectively contextualized its geographies within the morality of the nation's historic destiny.” The author also wants to shift the focus away from elite sources of diplomatic history toward popular culture to understand how the latter becomes a repository for general American attitudes and values. Sharp frequently mentions the “geographical imagination” of the Digest, though the history and politics of cartography and geography are secondary to her main concern with identity and difference. Her findings will not be particularly surprising to students of Cold War culture or diplomacy. One of her persis-tent themes is the rhetorical role of the Soviet Union as the “other” or “alter ego” of the United States. To this end she relies on two kinds of sources: theory and the text of the Digest's articles. Sharp's close reading of those articles reveals the Digest's relentless emphasis on American individualism and a rather one-dimensional view of the enemy, but the absence of sufficient historical context for this rhetoric leaves the reader with an incomplete view. There is some background on DeWitt Wallace, who founded the Digest in 1922, but little mention of the existing work on the history of Cold War culture—especially mass media—and few references to specific events such as the Korean War and the Cuban missile crisis. A demographic profile of the Digest readership taken from 1991 and an analysis of the magazine's editorial content from 1990 are interesting, but one wonders how much these statistics apply to the years of the Cold War

Aesthetics · Art · Context (archaeology · Destiny (ISS module · Diplomacy · Elite · Geopolitics · Identity (music · Individualism · Literature · Media studies · Morality · Political science · Politics · Rhetoric · Rhetorical question · Sociology · American Political and Social Dynamics · Canadian Identity and History · History · Intelligence, Security, War Strategy · Law · Philosophy

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