CLASSROOM 15

Julia was managing editor and a co-author of Classroom 15: How the Hoover FBI Censored the Dreams of Innocent Oregon Fourth-Graders, published 2021 by Anthem Press.

THE COLD WAR’S REACH INTO A RURAL OREGON CLASSROOM

featured in The New York Times
& on C-SPAN Book TV

PROMOTIONAL REPORTING

“Eisenhower, Hoover, the Soviet Union and grade schoolers,” by Julia Mueller & Zack Demars for The Oregon Quarterly.

We dug through archives and through decades for new leads and neglected government files. We strung our distinct stories into a narrative that explored what exactly happened in that rural Oregon classroom in the throes of the Red Scare. We examined how the incident might resonate now that the Iron Curtain has fallen but new walls—from figurative political tensions to a literal US border wall—have risen.

“Research on Oregon’s Cold War past results in a book,” by Julia Mueller for The Clark Honors College.

The central story is a small one: a young girl, a small classroom, a small town, and a fleeting Warholian fifteen minutes in the national spotlight. But the scope of the book is much bigger. It draws throughlines from the Cold War to our contemporary sociopolitics. And it reveals, through the close examination of one specific historical instance, the paranoia that has plagued the American ethos and snaked down from the marble halls of government to the timber mills of small towns like Roseburg.

“A small town sets the stage for a big story,” by Julia Mueller for The Roseburg News Review.

On long summer afternoons, Hall and her two sisters would ride bikes around the neighborhood, gathering up pop bottles to turn in for enough change to buy a day’s entrance to the city pool downtown. One of a few Roseburg houses Hall lived in was across from the drive-in theater on Alameda Avenue, facing the backside of the silver screen, and “once in a while, when someone was being generous,” the audio would turn up loud enough for the neighborhood kids to sit and listen to the film they couldn’t see.