| | Oh, yeah. I have a blog. I vaguely remember that. I'm beginning to question whether or not I have the level of devotion required by such an endeavor, as my eight-month break might have led one to believe. However, I dug out my master's thesis -- "Die, Dig, or Get Out: The Evolution of American Civil Defense, 1948-1963" -- this past weekend and I'm inspired. What can I say? I have that effect on, well, me. And so CONELRAD is back -- at least for now! I revisited my thesis because at the time of my writing it I actually, consciously put an effort into making it fun and interesting to read for people who were not on my thesis committee and therefore being paid to do so. And, in short, I wanted to go back to it with somewhat fresh eyes and see how it's holding up. Maybe (just maybe) even do a little more on my perpetual project of turning it into an actual (dare I say it?) book. It's not that bad, if I do say so myself. I did a decent job of exorcizing the passive voice (thanks to early-on advice from historian/author George Herring, who also told me it didn't matter what tense I used in historical writing as long as I just picked one), a demon that has rendered much of my undergraduate writing painful to read. Passive voice, truly, is to be avoided.  I found I laughed in the right spots; it's a sort of dark comedy for the scholarly set. I also only made it a few pages in before finding a glaring typo -- unless, of course, the Japanese actually did bomb Pear Harbor, perhaps on their way to their ultimate target. I did much of the research prior to 9/11, and the research process, regardless of how impartial one might claim to be, still in the end influences greatly the overall direction of the work. Even though I did the writing post-9/11 (the attacks took place just a couple of weeks into my first semester of grad school), I realize now that the context for the entire civil defense topic had shifted a great deal more than I accounted for. In the conclusion, I wrote that the then-fledgling Homeland Security initiative could learn a great deal from the lessons of Civil Defense, but I didn't realize at that point how closely the two were going to end up mirroring each other just five years out. That would probably constitute an entire new chapter were I writing my thesis today. Also, I was struck during my discussion of NSC-68 (United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, commissioned by Truman on January 31, 1950) by just how closely the language parallels that in use today at the top levels of the government. The text of NSC-68 I used for my thesis was included in a book (American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC-68, edited by Ernest R. May) which also included essays by a number of prominent historians. One of them, cultural historian Emily Rosenberg, wrote that NSC-68 served to establish a new militant nationalism by "trying to forge a national consensus through creation of a symbolic 'other' with mirror-opposite characteristics" (p. 162). Specifically, the authors of NSC-68 declared that "[t]he Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world" (text of NSC-68 in the May book). It's an enlightening process to go back and read such contemporary denouncements of communism in general and the Soviet Union in particular, substituting 'terrorist' for 'communist.' That, too, would make a good chapter -- perhaps even an entire book. I envision a lot of side-by-side comparisons; I think given the time and resources I could probably find a recent facsimile of nearly every period quote I used. Maybe Santayana was right -- we are condemned to repeat it.
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