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| 1 |
ID:
189515
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| Summary/Abstract |
In 1968, a group of sixty-one young South Vietnamese (SVN) students arrived in California, ready to immerse themselves in the academic environments at various West Coast colleges. The students were sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), selected in what was called the “Leadership Scholarship Program”—a joint endeavor between USAID and the SVN government with the aim of training future Vietnamese leaders and public servants in South Vietnam. Unexpected to all parties involved, many of them became vocal activists in the U.S. antiwar movement, thereby risking legal repercussions and losing their scholarships. In time, the students progressed from writing assignments to sit-ins, peace walks, press conferences, and, in one case, even hijacking an airplane. Drawing on primary sources in English and Vietnamese and interviews, this article traces their transformation from being politically aloof to ardent political activists within a few years.1 These student activists are largely absent from today’s discourse and scholarship concerning the Vietnam War, yet their names and actions captured and sustained the attention of the press in both SVN and the United States in the 1970s. Those who came to their defense included Senators, members of Congress, and antiwar icons such as Daniel Ellsberg, Anthony Russo, Jane Fonda, and Tom Hayden. The Vietnamese students’ prominence at the time testifies to their role in the antiwar movement as effective and shrewd political activists.
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| 2 |
ID:
189514
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A single moment in a mother’s life can be the beginning of changing the world. In 1981, a year after a Titan II missile exploded in her home state of Arkansas, Betty Bumpers drove across the United States with her daughter Brooke, a nineteen-year-old college student. As they passed near the construction site for the controversial Clinch River Breeder Reactor in Tennessee, Brooke asked how their family would reunite if they survived a nuclear disaster. Deeply troubled by the question and her daughter’s belief that a nuclear war was likely to happen, Bumpers decided she had to do something. Having earlier led a successful, education-based national drive to immunize children, Bumpers decided to employ a similar strategy to educate Americans, especially women, about the danger of nuclear war, which she decided was “the greatest threat to children’s health.” Earlier she had trusted that her husband, Senator Dale Bumpers (D-AR), and other men would take care of national security issues. Now, amid ominously rising tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, she resolved that she would not continue to defer to men on questions of war and peace.
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| 3 |
ID:
189513
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The famous Pioneer camp ‘Artek’ was used by the Soviet Union to showcase socialism to upcoming generations. It was an iconic space where each summer 5,000 children from over 60 nations met to promote transnational cooperation and Soviet-led world peace. The article reconstructs American children’s experiences who dared to break through the iron curtain to participate. It will examine how, and with what success, the participants’ encounters challenged and shaped their perceptions of East and West, and how their actions fed into the upsurgence of citizen diplomacy that played a crucial role in ending the Cold War.
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| 4 |
ID:
189510
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| Summary/Abstract |
In a New York Times editorial in the fall of 2021, the political scientist Anne-Marie Slaughter entreated the U.S. presidential administration of Joe Biden to develop a new approach to international relations that puts “people first, to see the world first as a planet of eight billion people rather than as an artificially constructed system of 195 countries and to measure all state actions in terms of their impact on people.”1 Biden’s foreign policy approach, she charged, was stuck in a twentieth-century mindset that privileged diplomacy and defense as the purview of international relations, while “people” issues were relegated to the realm of human rights and development. Historians of twentieth-century international relations, including the authors of the articles in this forum, might take issue with that characterization. They provide ample evidence of how deeply “people”—meaning citizens outside the realm of high-power politics—were entangled in international relations and how their actions were both supported by, and in turn shaped, state-level diplomacy.
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| 5 |
ID:
189512
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| Summary/Abstract |
In March 1956, an Indian woman who had recently visited the Soviet Union sent a letter of thanks to her hosts at the Committee of Soviet Women (Komitet Sovetskikh Zhenshchin; KSZh). In it, she interspersed recollections of her trip with the one that Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had made in the summer of 1955. Since her visit, she wrote, whenever she saw newsreel footage of Nehru in Moscow, she expected to catch a glimpse of the face of her new acquaintance “Nina” in the crowd.1 She thereby intimated that now she too had a personal connection with the Soviet people. She also remarked that many Indians were interested in the Soviet Union, and that she hoped that the earlier exchange visits between Nehru and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who travelled to India in the fall of 1955, would bring their countries closer together. Imbuing her own trip with comparable import, she declared that exchanging culture and opinions between countries would strengthen the movement for peace.
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| 6 |
ID:
189511
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Althea Grossman addressed her letter to no one in particular, just “a Friend, Russia.” “I am a citizen of the USA, just as you are a citizen of the USSR,” she began. “I am writing to you because I should like to assure you that I have a friendly feeling for you and that, though we come from different cultures and customs, I think that we are really much more alike than un-alike.” Confident their lives were similar, the sixty-six-year-old Missourian covered sheets of blue stationery with personal details about her daughters, her heart trouble, even the quirks of her twin-in-a-door beds. “Tell me of your life and ask me any questions,” she concluded.
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| 7 |
ID:
189516
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What can the history of the U.S. foreign policy think tank tell us about women’s intellectual history? Historical scholarship has conventionally emphasized women’s marginalization in these locations, and not taken them seriously as potential pathways for women’s international thought. Peter Grose, the official historian of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the United States’ most venerable foreign policy think tank, has explained women’s exclusion from Council membership until the 1960s by pointing to the gender conventions of its founding years. Grose argues that “the prospect of a woman ‘qualified’ for the Council’s fellowship was simply too remote from the experience of the founding members even to be raised.” Robert Schulzinger, author of another authoritative study, has similarly described how opponents to women’s CFR membership invoked stereotypically feminine character traits such as indiscretion and intellectual unreliability, arguments that were also used to bar women from diplomatic posts.1 However, such observations do not take into account that, first, the CFR was unusual in its ring-fencing of an exclusively male discursive space and, second, that women contributed in significant ways to foreign policy thinking even within the CFR. Recent research on other U.S. foreign policy think tanks provides a more nuanced analysis of the think tank as a location, while scholarship on women’s international thought in the academy and wider public culture reveals that women were thinking, speaking, and writing prolifically on international affairs throughout the interwar years.2 In 1929, seven out of nine staff of the Research Department of the Foreign Policy Association (FPA) were women.3 And in 1936, the FPA’s president could joke that he would “serve” as a mere “interlocutor” during a radio program in which four “lady authorities” held forth on international politics.4 The history of the foreign policy think tank can tell us much about women foreign policy intellectuals in a period marked by U.S. ascendancy.
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| 8 |
ID:
189517
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In a 1997 retrospective reviewing the legacy of local Christian radio pioneer George Otis, the Los Angeles Times described him as “a bit like Indiana Jones, but instead of a bullwhip, [he] carries a Bible.”1 Otis, who had built a globe-circling shortwave radio organization, High Adventure Ministries, was likely delighted by the description.2 In the wake of the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars, Otis joined a movement of Christian Zionist evangelicals who believed that these conflicts foretold the coming of the Apocalypse and Christ’s return to earth. Especially after the Israeli victory in the 1967 Six-Day war, many evangelicals felt certain that the realization of Biblical prophecy was underway.
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| 9 |
ID:
189509
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| Summary/Abstract |
The first decade of the twentieth century was a busy one in U.S. foreign relations. In the Philippines, Americans attempted to stamp out resistance and enforce colonial governance; in Washington, D.C., they planned major reforms of the consular system; across the globe, they searched for new markets and embraced new forms of international aid. And at home, Americans debated the value of Christian foreign missions. For nearly a century, missionaries had extended the United States’ global reach. Missionary activities had intersected with all aspects of U.S. foreign relations: the many shapes of U.S. imperialism, diplomacy, economics, and humanitarianism. As the new century dawned, the former U.S. Minister to Siam explained, “the American papers have been full of discussions about the missionaries and their work.”1 And those discussions were not, for the most part, positive.
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