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.
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