Welcome to our inaugural group of USIH-IUPUI Community Scholars! In partnership with the Institute for American Thought at IUPUI, we are proud to host such a fantastic array of scholars studying diverse aspects of the field. Please join us in welcoming our USIH-IUPUI Community Scholars: Cari S. Babitzke, Matthew Guariglia, Zachary Jacobson, Drew Maciag, L. Benjamin Rolsky, Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, and Rick Townsend. We’ll be introducing you to a new Community Scholar daily, so please stay tuned right here for their research finds and updates.
Zachary Jonathan Jacobson received his Ph.D. in U.S. history with a focus on the Cold War from Northwestern University. His forthcoming book is titled On Nixon’s Madness: An Emotional History, to be published by Johns Hopkins University Press in March 2023. His work has appeared in various outlets including The Washington Post, USA Today and The New Republic as well as journals including The Presidential Studies Quarterly, Cold War History and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Read on to learn more about Zachary’s scholarship and his plans as a USIH-IUPUI Community Scholar:
“My project, The Saints and the Navigators: A Storied History of the Early Cold War, traces how Americans’ understanding of their prime enemy transformed in the first decade of the superpower standoff from the terror-filled years of post-World War II Stalinism to Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s opening of détente. I draw from the accounts, diaries and letters of a cross-section of those rare Americans who traveled across the Iron Curtain to the Soviet Union to try to imagine the Russian narod (or “people”) and the Soviet state. During the great power standoff, how to map the Soviet Union, in other words, how to think of the Soviet Union was in critical dispute. Was the Communist experiment a “new Civilization,” a “new Jerusalem,” as fellow travelers proselytized? Or was it the Russian Empire, old Rus’, by another name? Was it the police-minded tomorrowland of 1984 or the corrupt, collectivized serf-scape of Animal Farm? In other words, the Soviets’ invented state was at once understood as a thrust into the future and mired in the past.
The question at the heart of this project is how people with next to no contact, their interactions heavily mediated, viewed each other. I explore the exciting, burgeoning fields of the history of emotions and history of the senses to craft a history of experience of my subjects in order to examine moments of encounter in what the scholar Mary Louise Pratt has called “contact zones.” Though long-ago voyagers like Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus and Bartolomé de Las Casas’s accounts of the East and West bequeathed limited understanding of those they met (or purported to have met) on their journeys, their stories have been mined nonetheless by scholars as vital nodes into the worldviews of early modern Europeans. For “even though their accounts may not have been observations in the strict sense of the word,” wrote the French historian Henri Baudet, “they created worlds surrounded by a faint aura of mystery, worlds which lent themselves to an endless variety of interpretations.” American encounters with the Soviet Union likewise were conceived as first-line accounts, written by those few Americans who braved to scout the Communist camp, and what Americans saw, how the Soviet Union smelled, the narratives they crafted, what conclusions they drew for their readers tells us a great deal about the sense-making, both figuratively and literally, of their time.”
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