Eric Martell

The Eastman Kodak company, based in Rochester, New York, was one of the first companies in the world to popularize the precious art and exact science of photography to most Americans. Similarly, it was also one of the first American companies to become an internationally recognizable product among large swaths of the world’s population. From its very conception in the late-19th century, Eastman has held a transnational history and needs to be re-told as such, thereby avoiding the historian’s vacuum.
This study, on the other hand, looks at how Kodak saw its own products, how it marketed them, the advertisements it used, as well as who they marketed to and why. Taking a transnational approach, it argues that Eastman targeted women in particular during the interwar period with themes of motherhood, wifely duty, traditional gender and sex roles, and most importantly, family, throughout both North and South America. It identifies nuanced differences between advertising and marketing in how the company advertised to white English-speaking women in the United States and to Spanish-speaking women throughout Latin America.
Studies that utilize a comparative and transnational approach to studying consumerism, consumption, and advertising have the potential to reveal these nuanced incongruences. Studies that also utilize an intersectional approach as articulated by other feminist scholars can also be quiet revealing in how race, gender, sex align in interesting ways in the world of advertising and marketing.
By bringing together stories of corporate America, patterns of consumerism and consumption, and histories of women in industry and in the marketplace, this paper touches on issues of policy, society, culture and law. In addition, it engages with questions of American empire and foreign relations within the Western Hemisphere. Lastly, it brings the State of New York front and center to these larger issues of state, corporation, and society throughout much of the twentieth century.

The Alliance for Progress (AFP) was a revolutionary effort made during the 1960s as a part of a New Frontier effort to rebuild the western hemisphere in the midst of the global Cold War. The Alliance for Progress has been viewed as a failure by most scholars due to its failures in macroeconomics and creating democracy in Latin America. An unexplored area are the theoretical underpinnings of the alliance that were based on the modernization of education across the hemisphere. This article looks at the intersection of education theory, modernization theory, and US-Latin American relations.

Arguably, one of the most intense periods of insecurity and instability in the modern era was the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. This story is well-known; at the eleventh-hour, President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev negotiated an end to the most perilous chapter of the Cold War. What is less well-known, however, is the personal correspondence between the leaders following the crisis and until Kennedy’s death thirteen months later. Despite ideological differences, two confrontations over Cuba, and pressure from in-house hard-liners, Kennedy and Khrushchev developed a personal bond. In this paper, I argue that the thaw in the relationship between the two men began opening doors for the possibility of a thaw in the larger Cold War. In many ways, a proto-détente began to emerge in the early 1960s, as opposed to the later Nixon/Brezhnev years. Through the study of their correspondence, with special emphasis on the October 1962-November 1963 period, historians can examine foreign relations between the superpowers outside of the traditional nation-state framework. This age of international anxiety, nuclear threats, regional insecurity, and fragile bipolar stability can therefore be reexamined in both global and personal ways. Lastly, one of the most exciting periods of the Cold War, with one of the most popular presidents in the public memory (and his adversary) can be reimagined as attempting to save the world from future instability and potential disaster.

I looked at a political psychology theory from the 1970s called "Integrative Complexity" which uses contextual analysis of written or spoken words by specific people to understand how complex they think. Then, I applied this theory in a comparative analysis of two Cold War Secretaries of Defense (McNamara and Brown) to see how they handled their respective crises (The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Iranian Hostage Crisis). I argue that McNamara's high integrative complexity allowed him to provide President Kennedy with multiple flexible options to handle the 'missiles of October,' whereas Brown's comparable low complexity did not allow him to provide President Carter with such flexibility.

In 1961 newly inaugurated president John F. Kennedy launched "Operation Bumpy Road," an invasion of mainland Cuba using hired Cuban mercenaries to unseat Fidel Castro. Better known as the disaster at the Bay of Pigs, the question of responsibility and blame has been hotly contested for decades. among scholars, Kennedy administration officials, and Pentagon/CIA officials. This paper suggests ways to understand how the incoming Kennedy administration could have approved such a terrible invasion by arguing that a combined bureaucratic and groupthink syndrome approach is most efficient in answering that question. In the end, the paper finds that the bureaucratic interplay between the CIA, Pentagon, and the White House led to the approval of an invasion plan that could not survive on its own without overt American support.

John F. Kennedy, as a man and as a president, is particularly interesting with regards to mid-century Latin America. In no area of the world was the Kennedy administration so regularly challenged, defeated, or victorious. Despite his disastrous invasion at the Bay of Pigs, use of Operation Mongoose, and political intervention in British Guyana, President Kennedy remained illustriously popular with the people of Latin America. The question, of course, is: why? Why were cries of “Yankee imperialism” drowned out by his status as a celebrated statesman? Why did he have celebrity status when his policies drove the world to the brink of nuclear war? Why did Latin Americans cheer so loudly during his visits and weep so openly in his death?

Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress echoed, in some regards, Kubitschek’s own “Operation Pan America” and Betancourt’s domestic reforms – something undervalued by North American historians. In this paper I argue that that Kennedy and his Latin American task-force which helped develop the Alliance for Progress selectively borrowed from South American leaders in similar ways that Latin Americans selected pieces from the Alliance’s proposals. In this way, Latin Americans, by and large, likely saw the American presence not in an imperial manner, but rather in more of a partnership for modernity. This, in turn, may explain his popularity despite his hemispheric missteps.