Abstract

Airplanes offered a new form of perception that was not just looking down to the earth from high above the clouds or in orbit, but also standing on the ground, looking up. Airplanes taught observers a new way of learning, absorbing information, and being in the world. In the early decades of aviation, civilian, military, and government programs organized and trained children and adults for the requirements (real and imagined) of the coming air age. These organizations, from the local to the national level—the Boy Scouts, the Civil Aviation Administration, the Ninety-Nines, the Army Air Forces, and the Navy—created communities that supported and developed aviation infrastructure. This dissertation focuses on the age-specific and gendered social labour to imagine, map, and defend the sky and airspace, highlighting how aviation impacted conceptions of scale, from Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic to the end of the World War II.
The first chapter traces the Boy Scouts’ changing ideal of the pilot and the role of boyhood in aviation from Charles Lindbergh through WWII. It looks at how the sky was both imagined as a new frontier for exploration and domesticated and tamed for youth consumption. The second chapter focuses on the development of both commercial and private aviation infrastructure in the interwar period, and the efforts of the women aviators in the Ninety-Nines to build air markers. At stake were two ideas of transportation, and the implications that had for the freedom of the sky. The third chapter examines the Air Warning Service, the Army Air Forces’ domestic defense effort, which asked civilians to watch the skies and track flights across the United States. Both a technical and a social network, the program balanced gendered efforts to bring military values into the home and provide homeland protection. The last chapter examines the multiple ways air recognition was taught during World War II to both civilians and enlisted personnel, focusing on the flash recognition program developed for the military. These efforts reshaped perception to reflect the needs of an increasingly interfaced sky, for a technologically militarized world.