This week on the Lectures in History podcast, a lecture about comics in Cold War America.

Gregory Dattis of San Diego State University analyzes the portrayal of war comics

and how they were reflective of Cold War fears and insecurities.

Four years later, look at this poster.

Hedahopper says it'll scare the pants off you. There's women falling out of the skies. That's how bad it is. New York City is going to topple. San Francisco is in flames. Boulder Dam is destroyed. Nowhere is it safe in the United States. Puget Sound attacked with a nuclear strike, mass casualties. This is frightening.

Professor Dattis also analyzes the portrayal of the war in those comics.

San Diego State University in California is home to the Center for Comic Studies.

Welcome. We are on Lesson 7, so we're making good progress.

Today we're going to get into the Red Scare.

Last lesson, obviously, we talked a little bit about the role of comics in kind of building a national identity and what that means.

We'll talk about that in a moment.

Today we're going to talk a little bit about the red scare and how the

comics were contributing to that red scare and also reflecting it. What I want to do today,

as you see here, we'll start with this kind of red menace and what it means and how it is

supposedly a threat to definitions of American freedom and liberty. We're going to have a conversation

on the think piece you did today

by kind of examining is this tomorrow

and getting a sense of whether this threat is internal or external,

what was the most dangerous threat.

And then we're going to take a little bit of a dive

into some of the espionage comics

and see how the Cold War is unfolding in the realm of

...