Nuclear Country

Catherine McNicol Stock's Nuclear Country argues that Americans' “experience of militarization and nuclearization” during the Cold War “were the historical developments most essential to the creation of the Rural New Right” (pp. 14–15). Stock is not the first historian to advance that idea, and she is careful to acknowledge the importance of other factors. But making her argument fresh is the way she reframes that “experience” within the longer histories of antiauthoritarian populism, imperialism, and settler colonialism in (primarily) North Dakota and South Dakota, two states in a region that has not exactly been at the forefront of scholars' imaginations over the years. Stock deftly blurs the traditional parameters of political, social, and cultural history, explains the racial and gendered implications of militarization in view of “southern diaspora” (as she and others have called it), and stretches the already vast historiography on modern American conservatism in several challenging and helpful

Archaeology · Colonialism · Conservatism · Diaspora · Historiography · Memorialization · Militarization · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Populism · Sociology · Stock (firearms · American Environmental and Regional History · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Twentieth Century Scientific Developments