Chapter 1 situates Plath’s work within McCarthyism (anti-Communist witch-hunt) and looks at her knowledge of the Salem witch trials, from American literature to her encounters with contemporary political discourses. The chapter examines Plath’s poems inspired by the early modern witch-hunt, such as ‘Witch Burning’ and ‘The Times Are Tidy,’ and considers her employment of the witch figure as a metaphor for political and gender nonconformists during the Cold War, seeking inspiration the trials of witches and the Rosenbergs. The chapter then comparatively reads Plath’s novel The Bell Jar (1963) and Arthur Miller’s drama The Crucible (1953), arguing that Plath draws on the concept of witch-hunt as an abuse of institutional power, which was parallelled with McCarthyism and the return to Puritanical morals in post-war America. The chapter reviews Plath’s historical, literary, and political engagement with the legacies of the Salem witch trials and offers an understanding of her poetic deployment of the witch figure.

This chapter explores how Cold War liberalism’s emphasis on individualism ultimately led architects to reject an alternative vision of American modernity centered on public housing. Through a case study of Pueblo del Rio, a 1940s Los Angeles housing project designed by Paul R. Williams, the chapter reveals how progressive architects merged New Deal planning with racial uplift ideology in ways that could have complemented Cold War liberalism’s faith in expertise and managed democracy. While these California modernist architects believed government-funded, communal housing would become the template for postwar city building, McCarthyism and an emphasis on private property derailed their vision. The case of public housing demonstrates how social democratic policies in postwar America often depended on wartime imperatives. Initially legitimized as essential for housing defense workers, public housing projects became politically untenable once they became associated with socialism during the Red Scare. By the mid-1950s, modernist architects who began their careers devoted to public housing ended them building private homes for the wealthy, as the “midcentury modern” aesthetic was stripped of its progressive political vision and incorporated into a Cold War liberalism that accepted social inequality as inevitable.

As a socially and politically engaged composer, Leonard Bernstein created works for the stage that dramatize and explicate the changing status of women, gender relations, and heteronormative sexuality in the society around him. His Trouble in Tahiti (1951), for all its parodic hilarity, constitutes a powerful critique of bourgeois marriage under McCarthyism and establishes the garden as a recurring trope in his subsequent theatrical compositions. The woman-authored Wonderful Town (1953) turns a nostalgic eye on working women in 1930s Greenwich Village, and, elsewhere in Manhattan, West Side Story (1957) both advances the garden trope and gives us Anita, the wise and powerful Latina. In Trouble in Tahiti’s sequel, A Quiet Place (1983) the garden returns musically and textually to prompt a loving reconciliation between non-binary characters and the family patriarch, brokered by a woman.

For Americans, the Cold War (1947−91) and the rivalry that resulted between the United States and the Soviet Union were real and constant. One celebrated figure affected by the shadows and triumphs of the Cold War was Leonard Bernstein. Yet, throughout his career, even through the worst conflicts, Bernstein steadfastly embraced the ideal of hope and a strong patriotic belief in peace, freedom, and democracy. From the outset, and both privately and publicly, he spoke about the importance of American leadership in upholding these ideals, even when governments (his own included) dismally failed to safeguard them. When his personal circumstances were at risk, he nevertheless continued to dedicate himself to these hopeful ideals in letters, writings, and popular media. In the end, when governments failed, he embraced the dignity and potential of the American people themselves with the responsibility to sustain these values through the Cold War climate.

At the Third Session of the Fiscal Commission, developed and developing countries agree on general rules to apply in tax relations between developed and developing countries; however, Britain adapts the Commission’s resolution to serve its preferences. The United Nations falls out of favour with the United States, and McCarthyism infiltrates the organization. The UN Secretariat ceases to promote tax treaties in its technical assistance activities.

This chapter traces the history of the limited but nonetheless significant transnational contact between Americans and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) before 1969. The chapter posits that these earlier interactions acted as a precursor to the far more numerous and frequent – but in other ways not wholly dissimilar – exchange visits of the 1970s. The chapter also places these earlier Sino-American contacts in two broader contexts: the PRC’s overall people-to-people and exchange diplomacy before 1971, and the role of cultural exchanges in the Cold War era foreign relations of the United States. The chapter reviews a substantial historiography that demonstrates that the governments of both the PRC and the United States saw exchanges as a critical part of their country’s relations with the outside world before 1971. The chapter concludes with a section detailing the context in which, in the mid-1960s, the National Committee on US-China Relations and the Committee on Scholarly Communication with Mainland China (later the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China) were founded.

Chapter 1 introduces the concept of the censor’s dilemma: the notion that censors in America may wield significant power for a limited time, but ultimately are undone by the principles of free expression embodied in the First Amendment. Because of this, reformers seek to avoid the label of “censor,” even when their goal is to suppress speech. The urge to censor comes from both the political left and the right, yet both sides claim that only their antagonists engage in censorship. Paradoxically, censors exude sanctimony and a sense of certainty, but cannot shake off the taint of illegitimacy in societies devoted to freedom of expression.

The postwar years through to 1960 can be viewed as a Golden Age for American drama as distinctly American new plays, staging, and acting styles emerged. Changing social and political forces in the nation inspired dramatists to rewrite what was possible on an American stage, expanding themes, styles, and character types previously depicted. Women and minorities were finding their voices and making progress in writing, directing, and producing drama in mainstream theatres. Many of the period’s theatrical successes and innovations were fueled by groups of artists, whose collective vision helped bring new scripts, scores, and aesthetics to the American stage. During this period, Broadway established its primacy in musical and nonmusical theatre, but economic changes and artistic aspiration also fueled the growth of Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway, and regional theatre helping create an even more vibrant American theatre.

One of the individuals Mailer most frequently cited as an influence was writer and Marxist intellectual Jean Malaquais, who he met just after publishing The Naked and the Dead. Malaquais’ influence is perhaps most evident in Mailer’s second novel, Barbary Shore (which, somewhat ironically, Malaquais himself did not care for). As the years went on, Malaquais’ influence waned as Mailer’s own philosophies began to diverge from those of his mentor, though the two remained close, with the exception of a falling out in the 1990s. In fact, in his preface to Malaquais’ novel The Joker, Mailer also wrote that the author “had more influence upon my mind than anyone I ever knew.”

Widely regarded as one of the earliest examples of Asian American literature, Younghill Kang’s 1937 novel East Goes West wields many of the signifiers of the immigrant novel, including an incisive critique of American racism and capitalism. However, East Goes West is only a part of his body of work, the majority of which goes ignored by Asian American scholarship. It is an understandable neglect, for Kang’s biography and writing resists conforming to the neat contours of existing paradigms. In one period, he traveled among New York’s literati as a writer, genial native informant, and advocate for Korean liberation from Japanese colonialism, and in another period toiled in obscurity as a journeyman intellectual. Yet even as he did so, glimpses of his ambivalence – veiled criticism of the US literary scene, open admiration of Japanese poetry, and increasing alarm regarding the US empire – complicate the narrative. This chapter frames the entirety of Kang’s work and life through a transpacific lens to fully comprehend his multivalent writerly projects.