© Columbia University Press
Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture
Paper, 320 pages, 43 photos
ISBN: 978-0-231-12953-4
$24.00
/ £14.00
November, 2003
Cloth, 320 pages, 43 photos
ISBN: 978-0-231-12952-7
$73.50
/ £43.00
"Explores TV's wonders and skillfully exposes the power of pressure groups on the new medium, which acted out the psychosis that dominated the 1950s. Relying on thorough and enlightening research, Doherty notes the ironies, anti-Semitism and class prejudices that underlined Senator Joseph McCarthy's ascension. . . . Doherty chronicles the medium and its players with style and scholarship." — Publishers Weekly
"[A] seriously intelligent history." — Library Journal
"A wide-ranging, impressionistic portrait of the era . . . Mr. Doherty, a professor of American studies at Brandeis University and a noted film historian, deftly recaps this familiar story." — New York Observer
"A witty, often riveting account of the simultaneous rise of television and McCarthy." — Film Comment
"Doherty's excellent Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture [is] more timely than its title suggests. . . . [Doherty] has penned an engaging revisionist account of mass hysteria, forcefully arguing against critics who cast television in its early days as a co-conspirator in conducting witch hunts and stifling dissent. . . . Doherty's history of the early political uses of television is never less than fascinating." — Reason Magazine
"Thomas Doherty's groundbreaking new volume, Cold War, Cool Medium, [is] a sweeping examination of the collision of television and McCarthyism, and one of the most searching looks at the intersection of popular and political culture in years." — Boston Globe
"Invigorating and wide-ranging scholarship . . . The heart of Cold War, Cool Medium is a lively and compelling retelling of the effect of McCarthyism on television." — Cineaste
"Doherty succeeds in illuminating both the history of television in the US in the 1950s and television's relationship to the era's anticommunist crusade. . . . this volume carefully examines the often-overlooked political side of 1950s television. Essential." — Choice
"Cold War, Cool Medium, by Thomas Doherty, ranks as one of the seminal books ever written about the history of television and politics in the USA. . . . .Doherty brilliantly challenges this conventional wisdom and indeed turns it upside down. He skillfully, systematically, and clearly demonstrates that early television helped the USA become a more tolerant nation, and provided for more open discussion." — Douglas Gomery, Television Quarterly
"Doherty's Cold War, Cool Medium earns its place as a subtle new map of America's politics during television's toddler years. It offers fine-grained images for television's political pontification and purifications from the late 1940s to mid-1950s. . . . For the study of this awkward period in America's television culture, it is hard to imagine a better text for discussions with students. Colleagues who lived in that era will read it with pained appreciation." — John Shelton Lawrence, Journal of American Culture
"fresh and important insights...an accurate and engrossing account for the nonspecialist, and its methodology provides a revealing context for the specialist as well" — Brenda Murphy, The Journal of American History
"thoughtful and nuanced" — Michael C. C. Adams, Film & History
"Cold War, Cool Medium is an excellent overview of television and American culture at a pivotal moment in United States history. It is also wittily written, with Doherty's sense of humour and irony coming through on nearly every page." — Jennifer Frost, Australasian Journal of American StudiesUniversity of Auckland
"It is not only readable, enlightening and amusing, it does what all good books on the televisual Cold War should do: it can distinguish between hype and substance." — Adam Piette, Journal of American Studies
Richard M. Fried, American Communist History
"Doherty delivers an enlightening and critical reassessment of television, culture, and politics in the early 1950's." — Michael Curtin, American Historical Review
"Cold War, Cool Medium is an engaging and complex account of US commercial television during the 1950's." — Megan Mullen, Technology and Culture
"[A] superbly written analysis of the link between the rise of American television and the fall of Senator McCarthy." — Vincent Brook, American Studies
"Cold War, Cool Medium is engagingly written, offering prose that is brimming with wit and insight." — Christine Becker, Film Quarterly
"A learned and astute historian (and also something of a poet), Thomas Doherty has written an extraordinary book about the close relationship between the Cold War and the rise of television...Doherty has demonstrated that the medium—a various and even feisty forum in its early days—would often challenge the prevailing creed of paranoid anti-communism....An exhilarating work of scholarship, revealing that there was another, livelier, and more complex dimension to the period of 'brinksmanship' and blacklists." — Mark Crispin Miller, New York University, and author of Boxed In: The Culture of TV
"For those who think that too many words already have been written about McCarthyism and television, this book will come as a most welcome surprise. Cold War, Cool Medium connects these two vital currents of modern American history in remarkably perceptive ways, demonstrating the impact of television upon the rise and fall of extremist politics in this era, and the powerful legacy that survives to this day. Cold War, Cool Medium is a wonderful read—riveting as a cultural history, perfect as a teaching tool." — David M. Oshinsky
George Littlefield Professor of History
Un, University of Texas at Austin, and author of A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy