Driving Question: How did fear shape the politics, culture, and beliefs of the Cold War world — and how does its influence still shape us today?
After finishing the last project and handing in our animated explainers, I couldn’t stop thinking about what came after the bomb. Not the explosions, not the destruction, but the silence. The quiet dread. The way fear and trauma settled into people’s bones and never really left. That is where my interests lie and what I want to focus on in this project. I want to explore how fear did not just haunt the Cold War, it built it. It crept into living rooms through TV screens, echoed in classroom drills, and hid between the lines of government speeches. The Cold War was not just a political conflict, it was a psychological one where invisible tension dictated how people lived, trusted, and dreamed.
This time, my end product will be a newspaper, not a film. Each article will show how fear shaped lives, choices, and beliefs. I want readers to sense the tension behind every headline, the unease behind every smiling photo, and the heaviness that came from not knowing what might happen next. My project, titled Fallout², connects back to my Manhattan Project film by showing how that first burst of nuclear fear grew into a constant fear, a worldwide paranoia that turned trauma into a way of life. Just as the Manhattan Project revealed the power of creation and destruction, this project will reveal how the aftermath of that power reshaped minds and societies.
My goal is to look deeper than dates and events, to understand what fear does to people. It is not just about history, it is about psychology. Fear can make people build, hide, accuse, or even forget. It bends logic and reshapes culture, sometimes in ways we do not recognize until years later. I want to capture that feeling and make it visible, to show how ordinary people carried extraordinary dread in their daily routines. That goal matters to me because fear is still everywhere today, disguised in headlines and online outrage, shaping how we think and react without us even realizing it.
To reach that goal, I will dive into Cold War propaganda, interviews, and artwork, searching for the emotional tone beneath the surface. I will study the language people used to talk about danger and safety, and I will experiment with headlines, visuals, and page design to make my newspaper feel both authentic and unsettling. I will ask peers for feedback, not just on the information, but on the feeling it gives them, and refine it until that tension feels real. In the end, I do not just want to explain fear, I want readers to experience it. I want them to see how deeply the Cold War lived in the human mind and how, in many ways, it still does.