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Space is the ultimate canvas for the imagination, and in the 1950s and '60s, as part of the space race with the United States, the solar system was the blank page upon which the Soviet Union etched a narrative of exploration and conquest. In Picturing the Cosmos, drawing on a comprehensive corpus of rarely seen photographs and other visual phenomena, Iina Kohonen maps the complex relationship between visual propaganda and censorship during the Cold War. Kohonen ably examines each image, elucidating how visual media helped to anchor otherwise abstract political and intellectual concepts of the future and modernization within the Soviet Union. The USSR mapped and named the cosmos, using new media to stake a claim to this new territory and incorporating it into the daily lives of its citizens. Soviet cosmonauts, meanwhile, were depicted as prototypes of the perfect Communist man, representing modernity, good taste, and the aesthetics of the everyday. Across five heavily illustrated chapters, Picturing the Cosmos navigates and critically examines these utopian narratives, highlighting the rhetorical tension between propaganda, censorship, art, and politics.

Historians have established a norm whereby President Eisenhower's actions in relation to the dawn of the space age are judged solely as a response to the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite, and are indicative of a passive, negative presidency. His low-key actions are seen merely as a prelude to the US triumph in space which is largely bookended first by President Kennedy’s man-to-the-moon pledge in 1961, and finally by Neil Armstrong’s moon landing eight years later. This book presents an alternative view of the development of space policy during Eisenhower’s administration, assessing the hypothesis that his space policy was not a reaction to the heavily-propagandized Soviet satellite launches, or even the effect they caused in the US political and military elites, but the continuation of a strategic journey. This study engages with three distinct but converging strands of literature and proposes a revised interpretation of Eisenhower’s actions in relation to rockets, missiles and satellites: namely that Eisenhower was operating on a parallel path to the established norm that started with the Bikini Atoll Castle H-bomb tests; developed through the CIA's reconnaissance efforts and was distilled in the Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 which set a policy for US involvement in outer space that matched Eisenhower’s desire for a balanced budget and fundamental belief in maintaining peace. President Eisenhower was not interested in joining a “space race”: while national security underpinned his thinking, his space policy actions were strategic steps that actively sidestepped internecine armed forces rivalry, and provided a logical next step for both civilian and military space programs at the completion of the International Geophysical Year. In reassessing the United States’ first space policy, the book adds to the revisionism under way in relation to the Eisenhower presidency, focusing on the “Helping Hands” that enabled him to wage peace.

\\u201cLet's go!\\u201d With that, the boyish, grinning Yuri Gagarin launched into space on April 12, 1961, becoming the first human being to exit Earth's orbit. The twenty-seven-year-old lieutenant colonel departed for the stars from within the shadowy world of the Soviet military-industrial complex. Barbed wires, no-entry placards, armed guards, false identities, mendacious maps, and a myriad of secret signs had hidden Gagarin from prying outsiders-not even his friends or family knew what he had been up to. Coming less than four years after the Russians launched Sputnik into orbit, Gagarin's voyage was cause for another round of capitalist shock and Soviet rejoicing. The Cosmonaut Who Couldn't Stop Smiling relates this twentieth-century icon's remarkable life while exploring the fascinating world of Soviet culture. Gagarin's flight brought him massive international fame-in the early 1960s, he was possibly the most photographed person in the world, flashing his trademark smile while rubbing elbows with the varied likes of Nehru, Castro, Queen Elizabeth II, and Italian sex symbol Gina Lollobrigida. Outside of the spotlight, Andrew L. Jenks reveals, his tragic and mysterious death in a jet crash became fodder for morality tales and conspiracy theories in his home country, and, long after his demise, his life continues to provide grist for the Russian popular-culture mill. This is the story of a legend, both the official one and the one of myth, which reflected the fantasies, perversions, hopes and dreams of Gagarin's fellow Russians. With this rich, lively chronicle of Gagarin's life and times, Jenks recreates the elaborately secretive world of space-age Russia while providing insights into Soviet history that will captivate a range of readers.

This paper reexamines African socialism, the Ghanaian political economy under Kwame Nkrumah (1957–1966), Nkrumah’s intellectual genealogical heritage, and African intellectual history as a genre that transcends the bounds of the Atlantic world. First, I sketch the lives of Black Marxists—Nkrumah, C.L.R. James, George Padmore, and Bankole Awoonor-Renner—from Africa and the Americas, to the Soviet Union, to England and Ghana, to rethink Black bodies not merely as theorists of racial and decolonial questions but also as sites, carriers, and manipulators of political-economic theories. In constructing connected and overlapping histories, I demonstrate how controversial and contested Soviet ideas became key sites of interrogation among global Black Marxists. By reframing travel as an intellectual process, I reconceptualize the movements of Black Marxists to the USSR, the United States, England, and Ghana as critical intellectual and historical processes in their understandings of Lenin’s state capitalist ideas. Second, I revisit the Ghanaian political economy under Nkrumah to argue that combining socialist and capitalist development paths was not a contradictory Marxian policy but was embedded within Black Marxist understandings of Lenin’s state capitalist ideas. In so doing, I argue that we must situate African political ideologies not solely within a romanticized Afrocentric origin but as ideas that emerge out of contemporaneous global political and ideological struggles. I draw on global Black Marxists’ correspondence; newspaper and magazine articles; British and American espionage files; and Ghanaian, American, and British state and inter-state departmental documents in imperial, colonial, and postcolonial British, Ghanaian, American, and Russian archives.

At a time when no other country enjoys the advantages that the United States currently reaps from space, some U.S. officials argue that U.S. space defenses will be needed to protect access to critical military and civilian assets in orbit. Others argue that space should be a valuable \"sanctuary\" from deployed weapons and military conflict. To inform this debate—and develop meaningful guidelines for the future—Clay Moltz has undertaken the only comprehensive study of the first 50 years of space security, highlighting the main trends in military space developments, their underlying causes, and the factors that are likely to influence their future course. What emerges is a picture of surprising military restraint shown by the United States and the Soviet Union in space, and the inescapable conclusion that the only way forward is through a multilateral commitment to interdependent, environmentally focused space security.

one photo of Sputnik 1

\"This week [October 4] in 1957, the Soviet Union made a historic announcement. The Soviet Union, or U.S.S.R, was a group of countries in Eastern Europe and Asia controlled by Russia. The Soviet Union broke up in 1991. On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union announced that it had launched a satellite into outer space. This satellite was called Sputnik. A satellite is any object that travels around, or orbits, another object.\" (NewsCurrents Read to Know) Learn more about the Sputnik satellite.

one photo of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin

\"This week in 1957, the Soviet Union, or U.S.S.R. made a historic announcement. The Soviet Union was a group of countries in Eastern Europe and Asia controlled by Russia, until it broke up in 1991. On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union announced that it had launched a satellite called Sputnik into outer space. A satellite is any object that travels around, or orbits, another object.\" (NewsCurrents Read to Know) Read more about the launch of Sputnik in 1957.