Module Information

Academic rationale of the proposal:

The module will examine the relationship between Britain and the USA during the quarter century following the Second World War. During this period America loomed large in the British consciousness at a number of levels. In terms of geo-politics the USA was establishing itself in its expanding Cold War role, while Britain was adjusting to the loss of Empire and an adjusted world role. In the fields of technology and industry, including the aerospace, computing and nuclear sectors, a prolonged struggle for leadership unfolded. Against this background a range of cultural interactions and influences developed, ebbing and flowing across the Atlantic – including youth cultures and alternative ideologies, in music, fashion, cinema and theatre, and TV for example. The course will confront the methodological and historiographical challenges involved in unraveling the precise relationship, at a number of levels, between the USA and Britain during this key transitionary period. Students will be introduced to key primary and secondary sources relating to a range of histories from political, cultural and social fields.

Brief Description:

The module will be comprised of a series of ten sessions which will outline various aspects of the unfolding relationship between Britain and the USA, at a number of inter-related levels in the decades following World War Two. Clearly Britain and America have a great deal of historical interconnection, maybe even synergy. The so-called ‘Special relationship’. Yet this relationship has ebbed and flowed in terms of its utility, strength, understanding etc., and has historically been a question of intense debate. The period examined here is a central one in this relationship which saw the USA seemingly in the ascendency, and accelerating away from Britain, in for example, world political influence, science, technology and military power, and, importantly, in terms of popular culture. This is a process spanning the twentieth century and beyond, but the years in question threw this process into sharp focus, as the USA either challenged Britain, or provoked adulation, on all fronts from aerospace to rock ‘n’ roll. Reaction in Britain was complex, and it is this complexity which forms the basis of the module. Combining political histories and sources with those of social and cultural perspectives the module will attempt to delineate the real influence of the USA in British society in the decades after 1945.

Content:

1. Introduction: The rise of the USA, the decline of Britain?
2. War and reconstruction, science and technology. The USA and Britain’s White Heat.
3. The media is the persuader; film, TV, advertising and the transmission of TransAtlantic culture after 1950.
3. Dressing the part – TransAtlantic fashions and the Americanisation of teenage in the 1950s.
4. The Rock ‘n’ Roll Hegemony: US influences on popular music cultures in the 1950s.
5. The Empire Strikes Back? I. Pop music and the British invasion of the 1960s.
6. The Empire Strikes Back? II. Fashion and the British invasion of the 1960s
6. Make Love Not War?: The British peace movement from Aldermaston to Grosvenor Square.
7. Opening the Doors: Drugs, Religion and the Eastward Gaze.
8. Playing Greece to America’s Rome. Global political ambitions in Britain in the 1960s
9. Fighting off the American Challenge. Alternatives to US multinational capitalism in Britain.
10 Conclusions: Was it really the American Century?