| Summary/Abstract |
Not very far from where I live in St. John’s there is a place called Placentia Bay. It is in this bay on August 1941 that the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt met. Although the United States was still formally neutral (and the Soviet Union was not represented, although along with other Allied powers it later agreed to the principles), it was on the rendezvousing warships that the two leaders and their aides came up with a set of Allied war aims that would come to be known as the Atlantic Charter. While historians still debate the Charter’s role in the development of Allied war aims, its symbolic role in post-war reconstruction underscore the importance of the ‘trans-war’ period of the 1930s and 1940s for the development of the modern world.
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