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A US historian who redefined the question of how the Space Race should be measured
“If we define the ‘space race’ as spaceflight capability, the Soviets won it hands down.”
Jennifer Frost is a historian of US women’s, political, and cultural history who teaches at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Through work on the civil rights movement, the New Left, Hollywood politics, and history education, she has treated social movements and popular culture as central evidence for US history. In a 2019 reflection on the fiftieth anniversary of the Space Race, she distinguished the single benchmark of a lunar landing from overall spaceflight capability, arguing that Soviet firsts and the US Moon landing must be assessed together. This comparison frames the competition as a historical process shaped by military purposes, later cooperation, and social costs, not only as a national victory tally.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 2001Published An Interracial Movement of the Poor
- 2011Published Hedda Hopper's Hollywood
- 2018Associate Professor of History, University of Auckland
- 2019Published an essay reassessing the Space Race by the breadth of spaceflight capability
- 현재Researches and teaches US history at the University of Auckland
Related historical events
Youth Suffrage and the Twenty-Sixth Amendment
A second major strand of Frost's research concerns youth voting rights in the United States. Her book "Let Us Vote!": Youth Voting Rights and the 26th Amendment (NYU Press, 2021) tells the story of the multifaceted, roughly thirty-year endeavor, beginning in 1942 during World War II and ending in 1971, to lower the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen. She shows that this was achieved through a bipartisan coalition of Americans old and young, Democrat and Republican, in politics and culture, and she concludes that the 26th Amendment was the last time the United States significantly expanded voting rights.
Frost analyzes this as a process of political change in which "top-down" initiatives and "bottom-up" mobilization converged, coalitions were built, and tactics were adjusted flexibly. On her account, the youth suffrage campaign of the 1960s built upon the social justice initiatives of the decade and was deeply indebted to the fight for African American civil and voting rights. The study examines how the gains of a social movement are translated into constitutional reform, connecting to her earlier work on the civil rights movement and the New Left.