The article explores how the global Cold War conflict was made sense of and situated in local political, cultural and physical landscapes and communities during the 1980s in Britain and Denmark. Using civil defence as a prism, the article employs a comparative approach to explore variations within and between countries of how local authorities prepared or resisted the prospect of nuclear war. The article

Even as policymakers in both the United States and Britain agreed that decolonization should be gradual, the principles and institutions that the Americans advocated undermined the very prospect of the sort of gradual change they claimed to prefer. At the heart of the matter was the notion of political accountability to an international organization. While American policymakers assumed that such accountability

This article sheds new light on the relationship between internationalism, decolonisation and ideas about development through a reassessment of an overlooked period in the life of Joseph Murumbi (1911–90), cultural collector and Kenya’s second vice-president. It follows Murumbi’s engagement with three internationalist spaces during the 1950s: in the Afro-Asian worlds of India and Egypt he honed his

George L. Mosse belongs to the extremely productive generation of scholars to whom we owe fundamental insights into general and German-Jewish contemporary history. They fled Hitler in childhood and adolescence and received their academic training not in the country and language of their birth, but in exile. In the context of this generational experience, this essay explores the very real and symbolic

Despite the issue of Italian prisoners of war during the Second World War receiving some significant attention, the fate of those prisoners held by the Yugoslav state has not yet been thoroughly examined. This is largely a consequence of the lack of sources, which is also why this issue has been treated superficially in the literature. The present article aims to fill this gap, focusing in particular

Setting the stage for the special forum, this introduction points to the centrality of science diplomacy activities within many current foreign policy concepts around the world. It also points to the lack of historical perspective within many current academic debates about science diplomacy. Suggesting the value of such a perspective, the introduction then draws attention to a number of fruitful contributions

Earthquake sciences, such as seismology and earthquake engineering, were important for Japanese science diplomacy throughout the twentieth century and remain relevant for Japan’s science diplomacy initiatives today. This article traces how the earthquake sciences were constructed as a ‘Japanese science’, giving Japan authority in science diplomacy, what science diplomacy practices scientists engaged

The introduction to this special section discusses the state of the art in recent historiography on peace movements during the 1970s and 1980s, and recent attempts to conceptualise Southern Europe as a geographical or political space.

This article examines the policies employed by United Nations (UN) peacekeeping leadership and mid-level staff to silence West Papuan anti-Indonesian activists and dismiss the population’s political opinions as immaterial to their territory’s sovereign future. The UN brokered the New York Agreement, legitimising Indonesia’s claims to the region following a decade of international discussions and military

The essay aims to explore the European context of the Cold War, considering insights and intuitions intrinsic to Mosse’s historical, political, and cultural analysis. The article is structured in three sections. The first one deals with Mosse’s conception of the role of the historian and intellectual in a modern mass society. To Mosse, he or she can never remain alien to politics but, on the contrary

From 1919, the International Labour Organization sought to improve protections for workers globally. Concurrently, the organization was dominated by colonial powers whose economies relied on the exploitation of colonized workers. This article explores how the International Labour Organization navigated this contradictory situation during the interwar period, focussing on its approach to child labour

Today, nobody would consider George L. Mosse as a historian of Christianity. He is well known primarily for his works on the history of fascism, nationalism and racism. However, not only in the first phase of his career, as a scholar of early modern Europe, he was precisely a historian of Christianity, but his contribution to the understanding of Christian experiences and movements in the last centuries

This essay explores the reception of ‘nuclear winter’ at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This response is paradigmatic of how scientific predictions can work as stimuli for science diplomacy activities, and either inflate or deflate these forecasts’ public resonance. Those who elaborated the theory in the early 1980s predicted that the environmental consequences of a future nuclear conflict

The Second World War saw extraordinary movements of people, before, during and afterwards. Civilian internees are rarely considered part of this, and especially not those in South and Southeast Asia. Between December 1941 and May 1946, nearly 2700 Japanese civilians and colonial subjects from across Japan’s empire were interned in camps in British India. Mainly residents of Singapore and Malaya, these

During the Second World War, approximately 28,500 Soviet women fought in the ranks of the partisans on Soviet territory temporarily occupied by the Wehrmacht. Although Soviet propaganda destined for the home front often spoke about their contributions, they eschewed direct appeals for others to follow in their footsteps. In contrast, partisan leaflets distributed across occupied territory overtly called

This essay examines the role and agency of British archaeologists in the discussions surrounding Egypt’s construction of the Aswan High Dam beginning in the late 1950s. The dam was conceived as a grand engineering project that would create new farmland and make Egypt self-sufficient in terms of its energy needs, but flooding caused by the dam threatened to destroy numerous archaeological sites along

The article proposes an analysis of atomic culture in the United States and Western Europe, during the first 20 years of the Cold War, in the light of George L. Mosse’s work and approach. It shows how ‘habits of mind’ and the ‘general mood’ concerning the atomic bomb and risk of nuclear war were profoundly intertwined with deep-seated representations of the nation. It also exemplifies how the romantic

The bombardment of civilians from the air was a regular feature of the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939. It is estimated some 15,000 Spaniards died as a result of air bombings during the Civil War, most civilians, and 11,000 were victims of bombing from the Francoist side that rebelled against the Republican government, supported by German and Italian aviation that joined the rebellion against the

This article examines the history of ancestral tourism and its development as a form of cultural diplomacy between 1945 and 1966. The phenomenon often referred to as ‘roots tourism’ has during the last decades increased in popularity, especially in Old World countries that historically have sent large numbers of people to North America. While previous scholarship has focused on its existential dimensions

Raul Hilberg’s landmark study of the Holocaust, The Destruction of the European Jews, was published in 1961. This article tells the story of the early response to Hilberg’s book. For the first time, journalists, scholars, intellectuals and representatives of Jewish communities engaged in a debate about the history and political significance of the Holocaust. This debate preceded the controversy surrounding

George L. Mosse took a ‘cultural turn’ in the latter part of his career, but still early enough to make a pioneering contribution to the study of political culture and in particular what he called political ‘liturgy’, including marches, processions, and practices of commemoration. He adapted to the study of nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the approach to the history of ritual

This article investigates the contribution of the Italian physicist Edoardo Amaldi to the anti-nuclear peace movement at national and international level. Amaldi (1908–89) was one of the leading nuclear physicists of the twentieth century. He grew up in the extraordinary environment of the ‘Via Panisperna Boys’, a group of young physicists active in Rome during the late 1920s and 1930s, under Enrico

The July 1974 invasion of Cyprus by Turkey caught the Greek Colonels (1967–74) off guard, as they proved entirely incapable of responding to the casus belli, partly provoked by their own actions. Greece remained technically in the state of military mobilisation for about four months and with the democratic transition well underway. This article catalogues the ways in which this conflict mobilised Greek

This article addresses the protest culture of the Spanish anti-NATO movement during the first half of the 1980s. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, it focuses on the collective practice of painting murals and graffiti (pintadas) on walls in the outskirts of Spanish cities. This was done by neighbourhood associations, together with local artists, in order to display and disseminate the widespread

Why did the French government delay its endorsement of the Hoover Moratorium in the summer of 1931? Key policymakers were fully aware that their stance would exacerbate the German financial crisis, which ultimately dragged the European economy into the abyss. Most historical accounts identify the plan for an Austro-German customs union, which became known publicly in March 1931, as a major cause for

After white landowners evicted black sharecroppers in late 1960 for registering to vote, activists in Fayette and Haywood Counties organized ‘Tent Cities' in a bid to focus national media attention on their plight. Over the decade, it developed into a wide-reaching campaign for desegregation in public accommodations and education, welfare reform, voting rights, and sustained community improvement measures

The effects of the Great Depression on the important cocoa plantation sector of the archipelago of Sao Tome e Principe – a Portuguese colonial laboratory for social change in plantation agriculture...

This article examines The Gambia’s campaign from 1977-83 for a new international mechanism to protect human rights in the Commonwealth of Nations. President Dawda Jawara’s crusade for a Commonwealt...

In the aftermath of civil war, Spain witnessed a period known as the ‘Years of Hunger’, which would extend throughout the postwar years (1939–52). The dictatorship would lay the blame on external f...

This article explores the twin phenomena of anti-fascism and transnational war volunteering through a case study of the International Group of the Durruti Column in the Spanish Civil War. This anar...

This article unravels the complexities revealed in the act of traveling to and photographing Fascist Italy in order to consider the intricacies of a particularly German-Jewish engagement with conte...

Strange and unhealthy visions of the past gained popular currency during Britain’s 2016 referendum on membership of the European Union and were elaborated upon by commentators in its acrimonious aftermath. These stories were infused with nostalgia – particularly for the Second World War – and proclaimed the specialness of the British state and its people and their supposed indefatigability in the face

There has been an explosion of academic interest in humanitarianism in recent years. Salvatici’s monograph adds to this dynamic field of research that has lately seen the proliferation of detailed thematic and case-study analyses of individual organisations, aspects of the humanitarian endeavour and humanitarian crises. The variety of these contributions have gradually begun to fill in the gaps in

The rise of the ‘shock city’ in Britain and America in the mid-nineteenth century catapulted the state of the urban environment into the public eye. The emergence of shock cities – ‘new industrial and mercantile giants’ (p. 2) – heralded the emergence of a new economic, social, and political age, but also shaped a discourse that framed urban centres as places of filth, deprivation, and vice. Manchester

Jimmy Reid is a totemic figure of twentieth century labour history. His political life is of interest to scholars of Scottish labour history and beyond, perhaps most obviously through his leadership of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders’ (UCS) successful 1971 work-in. Knox and McKinlay’s new biography provides a valuable resource for revisiting the life of a celebrated, charismatic and sometimes controversial

What makes a monument? How did the practice of monument preservation intersect with global political changes during the twentieth century? These questions sit at the heart of this book, which convincingly and elegantly traces the rise of monument preservation as inextricable from the oftentimes-destructive global political convulsions of the twentieth century. Emphasizing how destruction in fact wrought

This book will be indispensable for researchers of the British Mandate in Palestine. For starters, the amount of research put into this volume is truly outstanding. While most official sources have long been in the hands of historians, Hughes makes extensive use of previously untapped British regimental archives and the private correspondence and oral testimonies of rank and file officials, policemen

While in the last few decades the historiography of the Haitian Revolution has thrived, becoming increasingly central to the histories of the Atlantic World, Trinidadian intellectual C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins, first published in 1938 with a second edition published in 1963, remains the classic exploration of the Haitian Revolution. The book’s narrative sweep, elegant prose, and revolutionary

Based on Raul Hilberg’s work, Holocaust research traditionally divides the members of societies affected by the genocide into three categories: victims, perpetrators, and bystanders, the last of which was the least studied until the ‘bystander boom’ at the turn of the millennium. The present volume of 16 ground-breaking studies published in 2019 by editors Christina Morina and Krijn Thijs is a contribution

Jack Omer-Jackaman’s analysis of Anglo-Jewish identity between 1948 and 1982 constitutes a worthy addition to a literature the contours of which have been shaped by figures such as Geoffrey Alderman, W.D. Rubinstein and V.D. Lipman. In its specific concerns about the role played by Israel and Zionism in defining that identity, it builds upon the scholarship of Stephan Wendehorst, Natan Aridan, Rory

Energy resources have always been a fundamental actor in human development, and have had an important influence on our technologies, cultures and societies. However, it is only with industrialization and the rise of fossil fuel consumption that energy systems have come to the fore of world governance. Without playing a ‘chicken or egg’ game of causation, Burning Up moves from the necessary question

Natasha Goldman's book offers an engaging account into early and lesser researched memorials dedicated to the Holocaust in pre-and post-unification Germany and in the United States. The focus is on the 1960s to mid-2000s, a period which Goldman argues witnessed the coming of age of the Holocaust Memorial, both as an aesthetic genre, and as a central marker of a developing culture of Holocaust remembrance

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite set out to understand how political change impacted ideas about class. She wound up explaining how changing ideas about class facilitated political change. That subtle evolution followed from two attributes of this impressive book: a formidable source base, including the revisiting of social surveys undertaken between 1968 and 2000; and an attentiveness to findings that

The visit of the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to the ‘New Town’ of Milton Keynes in September 1979 offers the starting point of Guy Ortolano’s new book about changing views of how to build a city, from the social democratic perspective of postwar Britain to the market liberal approach of Thatcherism and New Labour.

example, that was far from liberal for queer citizens. Ultimately, Russian Homophobia is a powerful and poignant argument for writing history as a political act. Through his case studies, Healey shows us the value of history and the danger of its suppression, both in Russia and elsewhere. As Healey points out, ‘the Trump presidency has transformed Putin-style populism from a marginal disorder in the

Book review of Gemma Romain, Race, sexuality and identity in Britain and Jamaica: The biography of Patrick Nelson, 1916-1963, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017; x + 264 pp.; £31.30 hbk; ISBN 9781472588654

the education of young citizens. In Britain, such a narrative is traditionally associated with the publication of the Albemarle Report in 1960, but Hulme demonstrates that the provision of less overtly ‘moralistic’ activities by voluntary associations in the interwar period shows an ‘implicit recognition that youths were different from before the War’ (p. 159). Such a focus on the organisations that

affection which sustained their friendship for several decades. The lack of representation of colonial troops within mainstream histories of the Second World War has been raised in public discourse. In the fourth and fifth chapters Romain records Nelson’s experiences as a soldier and a POW. His time with the Pioneer Corps and his unsuccessful evacuation from Dunkirk are recounted through official war

Reid’s position on self-determination in Scotland, and eventual support for the Scottish National Party, is reflected on in several key moments of the book, indicating a fluid and flexible political positioning (p. 233). In my view, the book’s main strength is the ability to balance the contributions of Reid with those partnerships, solidarities and wider influences that shaped the activisms noted

link theories on trauma with the interpretation of memorials’ negative spaces as they take shape differently in early and later memorial projects. The motivation for focusing on Germany and on United States is reasonable especially since Germany’s national memorial is designed by American Jews. However, a focus on, for example, Israel, could have been just as reasonable, given that Israeli artists

This article analyzes the public diplomacy of the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) in the Netherlands during the Marshall Plan era. It shows that the impact of the ECA’s public diplomacy w...

This article explores how the Mexican state gathered, archived and destroyed information. It focuses on the US–Mexico campaign against foot-and-mouth disease between 1947 and 1952, whose paper archive Mexican officials burned near the successful conclusion of the campaign. This article argues that several factors shaped the context for this documentary bonfire and made the 1940s a key point of inflection

In the study of the twentieth century, the subject of intercommunal violence has risen to prominence since the early 2000s, specifically various forms of anti-Jewish violence in multiethnic Eastern Europe. Most saliently, Jan T. Gross’s Neighbors (2001) narrated the brutal murder of Jews by their Christian neighbours in Jedwabne, south-eastern Poland, on 10 July 1941. Gross’s account generated extensive

emerges here and there, the book is basically an institutional history of governmental energy policies (most primary sources stem from Government or Parliament). Intellectual debates are relegated mostly to the background. There are exceptions to this rule, such as the intriguing description of the ‘Akins vs. Adelman controversy’ about how to deal with price increases (pp. 139–44), or references to

esting comparative. However, such suggestions do not detract from what is already a unique and impressively constructed study. The contemporary migrant crisis has seen Britain, once again, pursued as site for sanctuary. Restrictive immigration measures and anti-migrant rhetoric has largely dictated policy, with detention centres most often the destination for those seeking asylum. Bailkin’s important

and highlights differences between differing imperial approaches and those of the indigenous populations, allowing for an incredibly nuanced presentation of shared ideas and practices applied to commodities across empires, concluding with their legacies. Environmental historians too will find much of interest in Ross’s approach to explaining how the latter stages of empire helped influence future environmental

This is an important contribution to the history of science, of NATO and of international scientific cooperation. Simone Turchetti has engaged in extensive, multi-archival research in several countries, in state as well as private archives. He has discussed a broad chronological period, from the early 1950s until today; and aptly points to NATO’s ‘green’ (as opposed to the ‘khaki’) dimensions. Science

However, despite its newness and its extreme artifice, the town has come to be seen as the home of a normative British everyman and woman, a place whose preferences and prejudices are the raw material of British politics and should be courted by anyone who seeks power. The most important lesson from Milton Keynes in British Culture is about the unexpected ways that certain landscapes become imbued

suffer from this difficulty, the importance of interconnection outlined in the introduction does rather draw the reader’s attention to the lack of connection between chapters. As far as the genre can take us, however, the introduction does a good job of setting out the more cohesive historiographical agenda. Overall, this volume is a welcome and thoughtful contribution to the field. Individual chapters

This article provides the first in-depth historical case study of Honda’s assembly plant in Lincoln, Alabama. Established in 1999, the plant became one of the biggest auto factories in the US, empl...