With a life-sized cardboard cutout of Captain America looking on, College senior Jesse Salazar led an intellectual discussion about the hero's role in American propaganda in a pre-World War II society.
Salazar spoke to more than 60 students and faculty members about a topic that sprung from his childhood love of comic books as part of the Emerging Scholar Talks.
Salazar thanked his parents, who were on hand, for having the foresight to save all of his old comic books.
Complete with illustrations from the actual comic, Salazar detailed the influence of Captain America from the debut comic in the fall of 1940 to the American entry into World War II.
"Captain America sold over a million copies every month," Salazar said, "and to put that in a bit of perspective, Time magazine was only selling 700,000 copies per month."
Salazar spoke about the influences of the creators' personal experiences on the comic.
"The creators of Captain America were both Jews who both were very dismayed by the passivity of American foreign policy," Salazar said.
He added that they were both alarmed by the horrors of the stories coming out of Germany at the time.
However, in December 1940, there was a lot of discussion of whether or not the United States should intervene in the affairs of an overseas empire.
"Captain America was actually created as a response to the evil supervillain of Adolf Hitler," Salazar said.
Captain America also had an influence on the children of America.
"Captain America and its success helped mobilize children for war, and it did this through very clear-cut representations of what is good and what is evil," Salazar said, "and in Captain America's America there wasn't a lot of debate."
Salazar presentation was the culmination of a year and a half of preparation and research.
The Communication Within the Curriculum Emerging Scholar Talks honor students with both strong research projects and superior speaking abilities by providing those students with a public forum in which to talk about their academic work.
College senior Colin Shay was impressed with Salazar's research.
"As Jesse pointed out, a lot of times in scholarly historical research there isn't a significance placed on popular culture that should probably be," Shay said, "and he did a good job of showing the importance of those historical aspects that are often overlooked."
