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This chapter presents three sets of images as together constituting a prehistory of environmental icons: advertisements against nuclear testing produced by SANE (the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy); the Daisy Girl and other TV commercials produced for the 1964 Lyndon Baines Johnson presidential campaign; and pesticide imagery that followed publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and culminated with the 1972 federal ban on DDT. These images depicted the temporality of the environmental crisis by portraying the long-term risks of radioactive fallout and pesticides to the environment and the human body. This chapter explains how popular images challenged the Cold War emotional style by picturing innocent children as the prime victims of environmental danger. From SANE ads to the DDT ban, images helped popularize notions of the ecological body by explaining the ways that Strontium-90 and pesticides could enter the food chain and thereby threaten fragile ecosystems and human health.

This chapter considers whether Fukunaga was legally sane or insane when he killed Gill Jamieson, a lingering issue because of the ninety-minute examination given him by the three psychiatrists who testified he was legally sane. The chapter reviews the study by University of Hawai‘i professor Lockwood Myrick Jr., who contended Fukunaga was legally insane because he was compelled by a force he could not withstand—his desire for revenge against the Hawaiian Trust Co. Besides the inability to differentiate between right and wrong, being unable to resist a compelling force was another criterion of legal insanity according to Hawai‘i law. The chapter argues that, based on his actions and statements, Fukunaga appeared to know the difference between right and wrong and that killing Gill was wrong.

This chapter analyzes the issue of violence in recent South Korean “extreme” films, and focuses on three films: Oldboy (2003), H (2002), and A Bittersweet Life (2005). It questions the simplistic dichotomies of “us” (or “US”) versus “them,” “good” versus “evil,” and “sane” versus “sick.” It compares the three films with Hollywood melodrama and notes how a “threat” to social order propels the narrative in both South Korean “extreme” films and Hollywood melodrama, yet the “threat” functions differently in that the moral good is never fully restored in the former. It argues that such narrative structure is attributed to the recent history and national traumas of Korea, and that violence in Korean extreme films provides a revelatory moment, in which the sustained moral structure is reversed; the protagonist recognizes the “other” in him or her, dissolving the binary moral opposition between good and evil.

Most of the public sociology literature is about what public sociologists write and sometimes it addresses the policy work they do but far too little of the research addresses the actual political work activism that scholars do. This chapter lays out the story of Fromm anti-war, Socialist Party of America, human rights and Democratic Party campaigning he did in the 1960s and discusses three of his books that helped create the social movements of the New Left era (May Man Prevail? Marx’s Concept of Man, and The Revolution of Hope).

This chapter focuses on how images of children were used by antinuclear groups to spur change in American foreign policy. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, children were seen as likely casualties of nuclear attack, endangered by the foreign policies of the American and Soviet governments. In response, scientists, humanitarians, religious leaders, and concerned citizens formed a number of organizations whose goals were to halt nuclear testing, push for the normalization of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, and pressure governments on both sides of the Iron Curtain for the passing of a test ban treaty. To reach a wide audience with their message of needed change in Soviet and American Cold War nuclear policy, national activist groups like the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) and Women Strike for Peace (WSP) created images of America's youth in their publications, rallies, and speeches as diseased, disillusioned, and defenseless against the threats of nuclear attack and fallout.

This chapter examines how Erich Fromm’s politics coalesced in his prose, especially in The Sane Society (1955). Fromm, his money, his political activism, and his ideas helped form planks in the bridge of change from the conformity of McCarthyism and the early years of the Cold War to the more protean and rebellious 1960s. The Sane Society served as a theoretical guide or platform for the Committee for Sane Nuclear Policy, which Fromm helped to establish. He also worked to energize Amnesty International, the American Friends Service Committee, and the American Socialist Party. The Sane Society spoke to Cold War culture, consumerism, and a deteriorating democracy. This chapter also considers Fromm’s connections to Adlai Stevenson, J. William Fulbright, and John F. Kennedy.

This chapter chronicles the volunteer contributors’ lives to date as they continue to live with their schizophrenia. Not all of the anecdotes here are “success stories,” however, as many of the contributors still continue to cope with symptoms and other issues. Some of them still engage in unhealthy lifestyles, or are still searching for medications that can work for them, or they may simply have trouble with feeling like “themselves” again. Many still experience breakdowns and struggle with “staying sane,” while others notice considerable improvements to their health over time. Overall, these are stories of people trying to move on and cope with the dramatic changes in their lives as a result of their schizophrenia. These are stories meant to reassure rather than inspire, to point out that there is a life and a future beyond schizophrenia.

This chapter shows that, although much of the steam had gone out of the disarmament movement by the late 1980s, there were still battles to fight in Congress and plenty of the faithful still needed rallying all over the country. Coffin's role was to do the rallying and the speaking at SANE/Freeze while others administered the organization. It turned out not to be as happy a fit for him as he had hoped. Coffin's task was understaffed and he was therefore far less effective than he could have been. More to the point, however, was that while Coffin often talked to religious groups, for the first time in three decades, he was not employed to give sermons and did not have a regular congregation. Without a text, without a congregation, Coffin did not speak as well as he had done in the past; nor was he as creative. On the other hand, no one else in the peace movement spoke as well as he did on as many different subjects.

The Beat poet Gregory Corso, the Black Mountain poet Ed Dorn, and the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) staked out distinct cultural positions in response to the American government’s development of a hydrogen bomb. Together, these three positions embody the complex identity of the American Left during the late Cold War period. They also prefigure the major camps within the American antiwar movement during the Sixties to come: the hippies and the New Left of the radical youth counterculture, and the upper-middle-class liberals who were sometimes their allies and sometimes their antagonists. The appeals to anxiety and to scientific authority that characterized SANE’s liberal protest against the hydrogen bomb were consistent with the mood of the dominant culture of the period. More radically, Corso and Dorn each viewed the hydrogen bomb as symptomatic of a more general social pathology, and each used poetry differently to promote a different way of thinking and a different kind of knowledge.

This chapter looks at the sexual assault nurse examiner (SANE) programs aimed at improving post-rape medical care and forensic evidence collection. Despite compelling evidence indicating that SANE programs can and usually do improve individual victim experiences with medical care, they bring significant problems at an institutional level. SANE programs rely on a tight connection between medical, criminal justice, and rape care programs, permitting medical and law enforcement partners to define the goals of the program, often in ways that do not serve victim interests. Though often initiated by rape crisis centers (RCCs), these programs are vulnerable to co-optation by criminal justice actors who use them to justify tactics that delay, divert, and prevent the effective investigation and prosecution of rape cases.

This chapter looks at the sexual assault nurse examiner (SANE) programs aimed at improving post-rape medical care and forensic evidence collection. Despite compelling evidence indicating that SANE programs can and usually do improve individual victim experiences with medical care, they bring significant problems at an institutional level. SANE programs rely on a tight connection between medical, criminal justice, and rape care programs, permitting medical and law enforcement partners to define the goals of the program, often in ways that do not serve victim interests. Though often initiated by rape crisis centers (RCCs), these programs are vulnerable to co-optation by criminal justice actors who use them to justify tactics that delay, divert, and prevent the effective investigation and prosecution of rape cases.

Americans’ environmental anxieties were fueled by news reports of frequent aboveground nuclear bomb tests in the 1940s and 1950s, especially when a chemical element in fallout, strontium 90, was reported to lodge in the bones of mammals and cause cancer. Bomb tests in Nevada and the Soviet Union carried radioactive particles into the stratosphere, where they traveled in the jet stream and later rained down to become the first global pollutant. Residents of Nevada and Utah who received particularly heavy doses of fallout began referring to themselves as “downwinders.” Citizen groups, including the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) and Women Strike for Peace, responded with activism focused on nuclear testing’s threat to the environment and the body. Combined with increasing evidence that air pollution was also a carcinogen, the 1950s was a decade of increasing environmental awareness, anxiety, and activism.

This chapter traces the coalescence between pacifist and environmental concerns around the issue of nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s and early 1960s in the West. Scientists, health professionals, educators, and middle-class families grew increasingly concerned about the health hazards of fallout from nuclear testing. They built a grassroots movement that transcended the traditional Cold War divisions and ignored political warnings about the need for nuclear deterrence against the communist threat. Clean soil, clean air, and clean food, as well as the health of current and future generations of children, were at stake, making the cost of defense against an abstract communist enemy too high a price to pay for many. The struggle for peace thus expanded from political-ideological to the medical-environmental realm.