Bibliographic record
Abstract
On 29 August 1949, the Soviet Union conducted its first successful detonation of a nuclear weapon, ending the American monopoly on atomic technology and introducing the threat of imminent nuclear annihilation to the American homeland. This essay explores the effect of Cold War atomic culture on the school lives of elementary-aged American children during the early 1950s. In examining this cohort schoolchildren, this study emphasizes the potency of the nuclear beliefs, fears, and concerns that led legislators, educators, and activists to forcefully push for even the youngest of children to meaningfully learn about the atomic threat. I focus on curricular guidelines produced by the Federal Civil Defense Administration and the states of North Carolina and Michigan, as well as the landmark film Duck and Cover. These teaching resources shared four major themes: they attempted to conventionalize the new atomic threat; urged children to obey authority figures; emphasized the importance of self-reliance for survival; and characterized nuclear attack as unavoidable. Ultimately, this research demonstrates that what was taught to schoolchildren about nuclear weapons in this period was indicative of the nuclear attitudes and beliefs of their educators, parents, and communities. Thus, in seeking to understand school curricula it is necessary to understand the broader historical context from which the curricula emerged; similarly, school curricula can reveal the major issues and concerns of society that were deemed so important as to permeate the lives of the youngest of children.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.047 | 0.018 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".