The Cold War and Popular Culture: How can we use popular culture as a historical source to learn about the Cold War?

Abstract

Over recent years popular culture has become widely appreciated as an important source for learning about the past. Whereas the study of history was for many years associated with dusty documents and dry old records, as fields of inquiry expanded from the 1960s onwards, so did the types of sources consulted broaden to include fields such as oral history and other forms of everyday life once considered not important enough to warrant serious study. The Cold War, beginning as it did in the late 1940s, coincided with the explosion of popular culture in the Western world as film, television, music and novels (to name just a few areas) catered to an increasingly affluent society. including the ever-increasing numbers of young people as a result of the post-World War II baby boom.