Spacefarers
Subtitle: images of astronauts and cosmonauts in the heroic era of spaceflight
By: edited by Michael J. Neufeld
Series: A Smithsonian contribution to knowledge; Smithsonian contribution to knowledge
Publisher: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press
Published: 2013
Language: eng
Number of pages: 256
ISBN-13: 9781935623199; 9781935623960
Subjects: Social aspects; Astronautics and state; Astronautics; Astronautics in mass media; Astronauts
Other titles: Space farers :
Description: Historians, political scientists and others have extensively examined the technical, programmatic and political history of human spaceflight from the 1960s to the 1980s, but work is only beginning on the social and cultural history of the pioneering era. One rapidly developing area of recent scholarship is the examination of the images of spacefarers in the media, government propaganda and popular culture. How was space travel imagined in the visual media on the cusp of human spaceflights? How were astronauts and cosmonauts represented in official and quasi-official media portraits? And how were those images reproduced and transformed by in the imagination of film-makers, movie producers, popular writers, and novelists? Spacefarers addresses these questions with nine contributions from scholars in the field of aerospace history, Russian and American history, and English literature. These essays are preceded by an introduction by the editor, who discusses their place in the historiography of spaceflight and social and cultural history. The book will have potential appeal to a wide variety of scholars in history, literature and the social sciences and will include a number of striking visual images.
Notes: Various printings.

"This volume had its origins in a conference held at the Headquarters of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in Washington, D.C. in April 2011. 1961/1981: Key Moments in Human Spaceflight commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the first human spaceflights by the Soviet Union and the United States, and the thirtieth anniversary of the first Space Shuttle launch, which took place exactly twenty years after Yuri Gagarin's pioneering orbit on 12 April 1961. This book, however, does not present most of the papers that were given, nor are all the chapters based on papers read at the conference."--Introduction.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 229-238) and index.
Table of contents: title: Setting the scene for human spaceflights : men into space and the man and the challenge / Margaret A. Weitekamp; title: "Capsules are swallowed" : the mythology of the pilot in American spaceflight / Matthew H. Hersch; title: Nostalgia for the right stuff : astronauts and public anxiety about a changing nation / James Spiller; title: The fiftieth jubilee : Yuri Gagarin in the Soviet and post-Soviet imagination / Andrew Jenks; title: Astronauts and cosmonauts into Frenchmen : understanding space travel through the popular weekly Paris match / Guillaume de Syon; title: They may remake our image of mankind : representations of cosmonauts and astronauts in Soviet and American propaganda magazines, 1961-1981 / Trevor S. Rockwell; title: Bringing spaceflight down to Earth : astronauts and the IMAX Experience / Valerie Neal; title: You've come a long way, maybe : the first six women astronauts and the media / Jennifer Ross-Nazzal; title: Warriors and worriers : risk, masculinity, and the anxiety of individuality in the literature of American spaceflight / Margaret Lazarus Dean.