How elite media helped make Silent Spring a cultural icon

What is it about?

Rachel Carson's 1962 book, Silent Spring, is generally understood to have launched the modern environmental movement, but it's not that simple. The book came amid a broader cultural awakening to the limits of unreflective science and technology's ability to solve problems. This study shows how coverage of Silent Spring in The New York Times and Washington Post over five decades helped cement the book as an iconic stand-in for a convergence of social forces that manifested over many years to pave the way for the environmental awareness and protection policies of the 1970s.

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Why is it important?

This study helps us understand how media help shape collective cultural memory by simplifying characterizations of important people, events, and artifacts over time until these discrete individuals are assigned sole credit for complex and gradual social and cultural changes. The study is a reminder that explanations for historical events are often more complicated than we assume and that we should exercise care in attributing major disruptions to single causes.