Jon WienerProfessor, History |
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Research Interests |
Recent American history; Cold War culture. | |
| URL | www.humanities.uci.edu/history/faculty_profile_wiener.php | |
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Research Abstract |
In my new book, How We Forgot The Cold War: A Historical Journey Across America (University of California Press, 2012), I report on visits to Cold War monuments, museums, and memorials to find out how the era is being remembered. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990-91, Democrats joined Republicans in launching an initiative to define those events as a victory comparable to the defeat of fascism — the defeat of the totalitarian enemy by the forces of freedom. This effort to shape public memory of the Cold War deployed powerful tools of political and cultural persuasion, seeking to establish museums and create monuments and identify historic sites at which the public could be told that the Cold War was, like World War II, a good war. The striking fact about this immense effort to shape public memory is that it failed. The monuments weren't built, the official sites have few visitors, and many of the museums have now shifted their focus to other topics. In the book I sort out the range of responses to Cold War commemoration, ranging from apathy to skepticism to resistance. I've also spent considerable time since 1983 in a Freedom of Information lawsuit against the FBI for their files on John Lennon. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court before most of the outstanding issues were settled in 1997. The story of the litigation, and its fruits, and the subject of "Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files," published by the University of California Press in 2000. Tom Carson wrote in the Washington Post, "As pure courtroom drama, Wiener's account of the fight to get the files released is often fascinating, with reversals and surprises." The London Independent called it "an extraordinary portrait of official paranoia." Since 1984, I have been a contributing editor of The Nation magazine, America's oldest weekly, where I write about campus issues, intellectual contrversies, and southern California politics. My articles have also appeared in the New York Times magazine, The New Republic, and the Los Angeles Times, as well as the American Historical Review and the Journal of American History. My previous book, "Professors, Politics and Pop," is a collection of these essays. "Wiener takes the modern university as his beat, and covers it like a police reporter," reviewer John Leonard wrote. "Wiener's mean streets are the think tank, the scholarly symposium, and the faculty lounge." At UCI teach a course on the history of American elections as well as graduate seminars on "Cold War Culture." |
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| Publications | How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey Across America. Univ. of California Press, 2012. | |
| Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud and Power in the Ivory Tower. New York: New Press, 2005. | ||
| Conspiracy in the Streets: The Extraordinary Trial of the Chicago Eight. Edited with an introduction by Jon Wiener; afterword by Tom Hayden; drawings by Jules Feiffer. New York: The New Press, 2006 | ||
| Come Together: John Lennon in His Time. New York: Random House, 1984. | ||
| Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. | ||
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"Radical Historians and the Crisis in American History, 1959-1980," Journal of American History (1989) |
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"The Responsibilities of Friendship: Jacques Derrida on Paul de Man's Collaboration," Critical Inquiry (1989) |
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Professional Society |
Society of American Historians |
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| Link to this profile | http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=2512 | |
| Last updated | 05/18/2012 | |