Category Archives: Fall 2021 Essays

By Matthew Bisner (’22) In the summer of 2019, a billboard loomed over Memphis, Tennessee with a simple message: “Birds Aren’t Real.”  A representative of the eponymous organization, appearing on local news, maintained that leaders in the U.S. government had slaughtered all birds and replaced them with surveillance drones beginning in the 1950s.  Across theContinue reading “Birdwatching Goes Both Ways: An Analysis of Birds Aren’t Real”

By Ava DeLonais-Dick (’22) Romanticized in the paintings of Normal Rockwell and iconic Coca-Cola ads, the 1950s strike many today as a time when America was simpler and quaint. American nostalgia remembers the post-World War II “ideal” of the white, suburban, nuclear family. Yet, even as the culture of the suburbia came into maturity inContinue reading “Cultural Receptions of Disillusionment in 1960s Suburban America”

By Max Forbes (’23) For Americans, the COVID-19 pandemic has been devastating and caused many to fear for the safety of themselves and their families. It must also cause American policymakers and statesmen to worry about the safety of the country in an increasingly chaotic post-pandemic world. COVID has shed light on the real threatsContinue reading “Covid-19: The Latest Threat to American Democracy”

By Bridget Kelley (’22) When sharing his vision for America in the 20th century in “The American Century,” publishing magnate Henry Luce argued, “Blindly, unintentionally, accidentally, and really in spite of ourselves, we are already a world power in all the trivial ways – in very human ways” (1). Luce believed that the international dominanceContinue reading “The Fusion of Material and Symbolic Capital in the American Century”

By Fiona McMahon (’22) How was the CIA able to execute an American mind-altering project involving hallucinogenic drugs, administered to U.S. citizens, that affected human psychological and social behavior under a cloak of secrecy for decades? The American people discovered information regarding the CIA’s mind-control program titled MKUltra two decades after its execution. Followed byContinue reading “Mind Control: MKUltra and the Red Scare”

By Adriana Maria Perez (’22) After their beginnings in the late 1950s, the English band the Beatles came of age during the 1960s, a decade when psychedelic frenzy, Cold War paranoia, and anti-establishment sentiment had ripened American consciousness enough for unbelievable conspiracy theories to take hold (1). These came to include a rumor that PaulContinue reading “Paul is Dead: The Clash of Beatles Music, Drugs, and Conspiracy Theories in the Chaotic 1960s”