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A recent coinage within international relations, “nation branding” designates the process of highlighting a country’s positive characteristics for promotional purposes, using techniques similar to those employed in marketing and public relations. Nation Branding in Modern History takes an innovative approach to illuminating this contested concept, drawing on fascinating case studies in the United States, China, Poland, Suriname, and many other countries, from the nineteenth century to the present. It supplements these empirical contributions with a series of historiographical essays and analyses of key primary documents, making for a rich and multivalent investigation into the nexus of cultural marketing, self-representation, and political power.
"By examining a broad range of individuals and institutions engaged in international cooperation in the Alps in the 1920s and 1930s, this book explains how internationalists constructed and used emotions to attain their goals. It undertakes a journey through the most diverse terrains and venues, from the international art exhibitions and congresses organized by the Union Internationale des Associations d'Alpinisme (also known as UIAA, or the International Mountaineering and Climbing Federation), to the summer camps and schools run by transnational bodies such as the League for Open-Air Education, to the international sanatoria for students, workers, and soldiers healing from tuberculosis in ...
From the Napoleonic Wars to the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, via the great world conflicts of the 20th century, Music and Postwar Transitions in the 19th and 20th Centuries is the first book to highlight the significance of ‘postwar transitions’ in the field of music and to demonstrate the influence that musicians, composers, critics, institutions, and publics have had on the period that follows conflict. Leading historians, political scientists, psychologists and musicologists explore the roles of music and culture in demobilization, reconstruction, memory, reconciliation, revenge, and nationalist backlash. Moving beyond the popular conception of music as an agent of peace, this study reveals music’s more complex and ambivalent role in the process of transition from war to peace.
This open access book explores the organization and evolution of Finlands Cold War cultural diplomacy (1945-1975) as the basis for a reflection on the countrys foreign relations, the link between culture and politics, small states autonomy during the Cold War, and the porosity of the East-West divide. The book offers a historical survey of the development of Finlands cultural diplomacy as part of the Finnish states foreign activities. In its empirical parts, it focuses on archives drawn from the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Education in order to explain Finlands cultural diplomacy as the result of the countrys foreign policy orientations, interactions between domes...
Bringing together scholars from the fields of musicology and international history, this book investigates the significance of music to foreign relations, and how it affected the interaction of nations since the late 19th century. For more than a century, both state and non-state actors have sought to employ sound and harmony to influence allies and enemies, resolve conflicts, and export their own culture around the world. This book asks how we can understand music as an instrument of power and influence, and how the cultural encounters fostered by music changes our ideas about international history.
More than 30 years after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic, its cinema continues to attract scholarly attention. Documenting Socialism moves beyond the traditionally analyzed "feature film production" and places East Germany's documentary cinema at the center of history behind the Iron Curtain. Between questions of gender, race and sexuality and the complexities of diversity under the political and cultural environments of socialism, the specialist contributions in this volume cohere into an introductory milestone on documentary film production in the GDR.
In this absorbing account of the origins of the Asia-Pacific War, historian John Gripentrog argues that competing ideologies of world order—chiefly the rift between liberal internationalism and Pan-Asian regionalism—lay at the heart of the conflict. Drawing from a rich diversity of primary and secondary sources, the author also examines the Japanese government’s vigorous cultural diplomacy in the U.S., which sought to win over American hearts and minds and soft-pedal its imperialist ambitions in Asia. The result is a book that both challenges and amplifies standard interpretations of US-Japan relations in the interwar era, while weaving diplomatic, political, intellectual, and cultural history. Moreover, the author’s wide-angle lens offers readers insights into a fascinating assemblage of historical actors—from Japanese and American diplomats, politicians, and military leaders, to cosmopolitan art enthusiasts and major league baseball players.
"Confronted with the roiling changes of the post-WWI world--from growing stateless populations to the resurgence of right-wing movements--the League of Nations aimed to counteract dangerous conflicts between national interests and generate instead a transnational, cosmopolitan dialogue on truth and justice. Amid widespread anxiety over truth and falsehood, an army of League personnel produced streams of documents in the pursuit of "shaping global public opinion." Combining the tools of global intellectual history and cultural history, A Violent Peace explores the power and the vulnerability of information systems while laying bare "the anatomy of fascism" in the interwar period. Carolyn Biltoft reopens the archives of the League to show how its attempt to operationalize information science in support of the post-WWI order proved ultimately pyrrhic as informational power struggles devolved into violence. A meditation on instability in information systems, the allure of fascism, and the contradictions at the heart of a global and violent modernity, A Violent Peace paints a rich portrait of the emergence of the age of information--and all its attendant problems"--
Since the birth of their nation, Americans have acted on the belief that theirs was a land of youth, a place destined to offer a fresh start to an aging world. No Country for Old Age tells this story from the founding period to our present moment, but not without exposing its darker side: rejuvenation has often bred grand expectations that end in division and despair. Mischa Honeck reveals how Americans of diverse backgrounds have sought not only to feel and look younger but also to breathe new life into their communities. Whether marching under the banners of science, public health, sexual liberation, physical fitness, nation-building, or world peace, these youth seekers have tended to pain...