Read more
When the American Bar Association recreated the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg on the fortieth anniversary of their execution, the jury acquitted the "mock Rosenbergs," finding that in today's courts they would not have been convicted of espionage.
The 1950s trial of the Rosenbergs on charges of "Atomic Spying" and "stealing the secrets of the Atomic bomb" was a major event of Cold War America, galvanizing public opinion on all sides of the question. Secret Agents presents essays by lawyers, cultural critics, social historians and historians of science, as well as a reconsideration of the Rosenbergs by their younger son, Robert Meeropol. Secret Agents gives new resonance to a history we have for too long been willing to forget.
List of contents
Introduction; One: Secrets; 1: Jell-O; 2: The Rosenbergs and the Crimes of a Century; 3: TV, the Bomb, and the Body; 4: The Secret about Secrets; 5: Censorship of American Uranium Mine Epidemiology in the 1950s; 6: The Trial of J. Edgar Hoover; 7: Strange Angel; 8: Flash Back, Flash Forward; Two: Agents; 9: Before the Rosenbergs; 10: Helplessness and Heartlessness; 11: The Rosenberg Case and the New York Intellectuals; 12: The Rosenberg Letters; 13: The Suffering Body; 14: A Bond of Sisterhood; 15: The Bell Jar and the Ghost of Ethel Rosenberg; Three: Testimonies; 16: Rosenberg Realities; 17: Some Remarks about Trials; 18: Jews and McCarthyism; 19: Contrasting Fates of Repression; 20: Arbitrary Convictions?; 21: The Work of the State
About the author
Marjorie Garber is Professor of English and Director of the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies at Harvard University; she and Rebecca Walkowitz are also co-editors of Media Spectacles (Routledge 1993).
Summary
When the American Bar Association recreated the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg on the fortieth anniversary of their execution, the jury acquitted the "mock Rosenbergs," finding that in today's courts they would not have been convicted of espionage.
The 1950s trial of the Rosenbergs on charges of "Atomic Spying" and "stealing the secrets of the Atomic bomb" was a major event of Cold War America, galvanizing public opinion on all sides of the question. Secret Agents presents essays by lawyers, cultural critics, social historians and historians of science, as well as a reconsideration of the Rosenbergs by their younger son, Robert Meeropol. Secret Agents gives new resonance to a history we have for too long been willing to forget.
